Thinking in School
01-19-2015“It is this duality of myself with myself that makes thinking a true activity, in which I am both the one who asks and the one who answers.”
-- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
How can teachers encourage thinking in school?
Arendt’s The Life of the Mind influences my answer. As an educator, my job is to prompt students to think—to have them become two-in-one (in Socratic terms) or to have soundless dialogues within themselves (in the Platonic sense). One way to accomplish that is to structure courses as a conversation between philosophers. In my American political thought course, for instance, I teach lessons on the liberal John Rawls and the conservative Leo Strauss. An integral part of that particular unit is for students to enact a conversation between those two figures in their own minds.
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Plato's Symposium - Anselm Feuerbach, 1873 (Source: Wikipedia)[/caption]
Ideally, when students leave my courses, they will be able to hear different viewpoints speak up in their heads whenever they themselves consider, say, America’s role in the world or the just distribution of resources in a society. My goal is not to indoctrinate but to render students more thoughtful, to become more broad-minded, which means, again, being able to look at political things from multiple angles. To address the most pressing problems of our day—including environmental catastrophe—we need our upcoming generations to become more thoughtful.
The Current Situation
This brings me to a raging debate in American politics about the purpose of education. Let me describe the position that I oppose. The Common Core State Standards Initiative aims to prepare all American children for success in college and careers in the twenty-first century. For too long, children in poverty or remote locations have not had access to a strong curriculum. The Common Core seeks to offset that trend by setting a bar in literacy and numeracy, one which states, schools, and teachers can aim to reach in different ways.
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Common Core State Standards Initiative (Source: cuacc.org)[/caption]
Among other things, the Common Core creates a unique standard by emphasizing the skill of close reading. What follows now is a definition of that skill, as provided by PARCC, a consortium responsible for Common Core assessment:
Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details.
The purpose of the Common Core is to teach students to answer questions using evidence from texts, a useful skill for education at all levels as well as at nearly any job. According to polls, people tend to approve of the Common Core when introduced to it at this level of generality.
Problems become apparent, however, in the program’s actual implementation. Common Core assignments and tests require student to read a passage and then submit answers using exact words from the text, a pedagogy that facilitates computer grading. Students under Common Core do poorly if they answer questions using material that is not in the assigned passages. Put in Kantian terms, schools now train determinate judgment—the placing of round pegs in round holes—rather than reflective judgment, the crafting of singular responses to complex problems.
From an Arendtian perspective, the Common Core is a misguided response to the crisis in education. Students across the country now read so-called informational texts written by anonymous scribes at educational corporations such as Pearson or McGraw-Hill. As I have documented in several essays (see here and here), the Common Core pressures schools to use a banal curriculum and pedagogy. Should students know how to use evidence to answer a question? Of course. Should that be the almost exclusive focus of the curriculum? No, not if we want schools to encourage students to connect ideas across texts or to confront pressing problems in the world.
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Students taking standardized tests (Source: MinnPost)[/caption]
Arendtian Responses
Arendt’s concept of natality may give us two clues as to how we can get out of this situation. One is to value the power of educators and citizens to choose, or create, educational possibilities. Throughout her work, Arendt criticizes the thoughtless exercise of technocratic power. She goes on to call on people to act together on matters of public concern. Fortunately, America has a tradition of locally controlled schools, so an Arendtian might argue that school boards, for instance, should remain a site of political debate and decision.
Furthermore, an Arendtian might argue that schools should encourage children to think for themselves and practice disclosing themselves with one another. In her essay “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt contests the child-centered focus of progressive education. Though she is correct that schools have the responsibility of conserving the achievements of the past and passing them on to the next generation, I think that she misinterprets John Dewey’s philosophy of education. Dewey’s thesis in Democracy and Education is that schools should make material interesting, not easy or fun, but rather tap into a student’s care for the world. An Arendtian would appreciate this impulse, particularly when the present alternative is a monotonous routine of finding key words in short texts.
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"Teach Me About Soil" (Source: EcoWalkTheTalk.com)[/caption]
Schools should provide the soil in which a child’s propensity to think can grow and blossom. In this particular moment, that principle requires political actors to fight the Common Core and envision educational alternatives.
(Featured Image: "Teaching Children How To Think In School Instead Of What To Think"; Source: Waking Times)