Mouse on Education

A few years ago, when the Mouse was a senior in high school, a teacher of his, a lady (of the genuine sort) named Miss Ruth Lipscomb, taught him and his peers American History. The text and the course outline seems upon reflection to have been designed to make good citizens of the lot of us. Columbus discovered America and that was a good thing, no mention being made of the genocidal effects of that discovery on the Arawak people of the Bahamas. The Triangle Trade was presented as a more-or-less benign affair. The guns and ammunition the Europeans sold to the slave traders of West Africa might just as well have been sold as collectibles for all we learned of the uses to which they were put. And the slaves and rum that closed the triangle?… mere commodities, things of value people were willing to take in trade for other things. The Revolution had no purpose but “freedom,” and had nothing to do with the debts of southern planters held by English banks, and certainly nothing to do with the desire of New England manufactories to be protected from their competitors abroad. We southern brattlings were supposed to swallow all this without a whimper, and for the most part we did.

That is, we did until we were brought face-to-face with the Civil War. There, things got a bit hairy.

You see, Miss Lipscomb was a renegade teacher. Oh, she gave us the usual run of the thing – the firing on Fort Sumter, Bull Run I & II, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Appomattox, but of course, no Andersonville. We heard, about Dred Scott, but did not appreciate that, by declaring slaves to be property as protected in the Constitution, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – a Presidential decree – was made an unconstitutional act. We heard about John Brown’s final battle at Harper's Ferry, but nothing of Virginia Governor Pierpont’s order to the Virginia Militia, immediately after secession, telling it to raid the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry to take by force the munitions stored there, an act of war before Virginia was even at war. We heard lots of neat stuff about good old Marse Bobby Lee, and were really, really impressed by the fact that he showed up at Appomattox with shined boots, whereas Grant’s were muddy. (A few of us did sense that the mud bespoke of Grant’s hard-nosed victory.) We got the Civil War just about the way it is perhaps still being taught. But as I have implied, we also got more than we might have expected. We got Miss Lipscomb’s curriculum, too, the one she had fairly well kept to herself before the Monday morning after our “understanding” of the Civil War was formally completed. Miss Lipscomb – the renegade – decided to teach us how to think.

Without so much as a preamble to warn us of what was to come, our history teacher asked us two questions:

Why did some people think slavery was a good thing?

... And ...

Why did some other people think it was a bad thing?

Those of you who wish to comment can answer those questions as you wish. But that’s not what I’m up to here. I’m remembering the next five days of Miss Lipscomb’s class, how it was that a bunch of ordinary southern kids were caused to think about thinking. Oh, we started out trying to make the point, anachronistically, that everyone “knows” slavery is bad, but our teacher would have none of it. She quickly put that notion to rest simply by asking us to consider that many thousands of soldiers on the southern side had died to defend the right to keep slaves. “Were they consciously fighting to defend something they thought was wrong?”

That follow-on question left us squarely in our minds. From its consideration to a deeper “epistemological” question was only a short hop. (We didn’t know that long word, but we didn’t need to; the problem was apparent even if we had no name for it.) How is it that people come to believe what they believe?

We struggled – or better, muddled – our way through that problem for the better part of the first day. Maybe we never settled the question, but we did for sure confront it, and recognize it, as a more fundamental question than “how many died in this or that battle?” We were learning to think.

I will not claim that the five days of that discussion produced solutions to any of the world’s day-to-day problems. After all, we were dealing with questions that underlie all problems, and we were being taught – whether we knew it or not – that perhaps wrong answers to those fundamental questions underlie many of the world’s “real” problems. We were being taught that unless citizens know how to think, the phrase “good citizen” is an oxymoron. (We didn’t know that big word either, and again, didn’t need to.)

I have mentioned this educational experience to several of my friends, and have heard the same reply on almost every occasion: “Miss Lipscomb would never get away with that today.” And maybe that’s true. I hear about the schools being forced to achieve their objectives within what is called Standards of Learning, SOLs, and that suggests to me that children are being taught to develop proficiencies that can be measured. Now I realize that it sort of sounds like it makes good sense to administer the school system in such a way as to let the taxpayers know they’re getting their money’s worth, but it also makes a sort of good sense to realize that that objective is not necessarily the same as producing good citizens in the non-oxymoronic sense. Kids can pass tests, and thus make their schools look good, without having mastered the ability to think.

That much is common knowledge. I don’t expect any of you to argue with it. (Even mice can dream.) What’s not so obvious is that it may be the case that in mastering the skills needed to pass tests the students are learning to think. To decide that issue, one way or the other, requires thought. Is it possible that the mental skills involved in learning the sorts of facts needed to pass tests are no different from the mental skills needed to engage in critical thinking? Is it possible that even the most indicative of tests – those that measure reading comprehension – measure something other than the ability to reason? It may be the case that in trying to decide what this or that complex paragraph “means,” the student may actually be unconsciously weighing one interpretation against another, and finally choosing the one that “feels good”? And isn’t it possible that that’s what goes on in critical thinking?

May be. But if the epistemological process turns upon something like unconscious emotional responses – and let’s say that it might – it does not follow that reading comprehension tests, or any other form of skills measurement, prepares the pupil for conflicted situations where the alternative that looks legitimately reasonable is the one that feels the worst. Such circumstances might never arise if all learning took place within the box of formal education. Kids would (presumably) learn nothing that would contradict the reasonable case. But it is probably provable that just as many of our “facts” are taught to us outside the box of formal education (and here I treat such things as moral and ethical principles as facts). As a consequence of that fact, the tests that determine whether the SOLs are being met, do not measure the extent to which students are capable of dealing with uncomfortable facts … and need I say it, the world is full of those.

Now, I am not suggesting that schools ought to be teaching ethical and moral facts. God forbid. I am suggesting that the schools might be doing the world a favor if they taught in such a way that the graduates of their system matriculate as good citizens, able to reason the whys and wherefores of their beliefs. I suggest that that objective cannot be reached if all we teach are those facts that tend to make our children “good citizens.” Children who have been properly educated ought (though I dislike that word, here it is), they ought to know how to defend their principles when they can think of no reason why those principles are false, and to know why they are surrendering to superior principles when their reason demands.

But unless they know how to deal with the difference between reasoned facts and believed "facts,” they will have been set loose in a world they are practically – but perhaps not wholly – unable to deal with. We muddled through Miss Lipscomb’s challenge. We were not by that experience made into philosophers, but we did realize we had encountered a different sort of learning. We had learned a little of what’s involved in dealing with contradictory “facts.” We had learned that the truth is not always the first thing that comes to mind, that in fact, it is the tension created between what we think we know and what we suspect we do not know, that drives the ineluctable desire to know. Armed with the lesson Miss Lipscomb had taught us, we finally came to understand that we come into the world equipped with the ability to think, yet knowing nothing. That fact – and countless others – had been opened up to us as possibilities by a teacher who desired to produce good citizens and not mere jingoistic robots.

[No brag, Thierry, just fact.]