Thinking together, thinking alone: Introverts and the discussion-based classroom

Is discussion-based teaching, or "Harkness" pedagogy bad for introverts? What do we do, at a school like Phillips Exeter Academy which uses that method in every class, with that student who just does not want to participate? In her 2012 TED Talk, “The Power of Introverts,” author Susan Cain bemoans how schools are increasingly being redesigned to favor extroverts.

“When I was going to school,” she said, “we sat in rows of desks … and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks—four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers report believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.”

Our society so values extroverts over introverts that introverts frequently try to fit in by making “self-negating choices” and forcing themselves to act like extroverts, she says, citing personal experience.

All this emphasis on extroversion and society’s embrace of a “new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place” is not just bad for introverts, it’s also bad for humanity in general, she argues.

According to “insights of contemporary psychology,” Cain says, “We can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things, like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.” History proves that she is right to be worried about this sort of groupthink (more on that later).

So does all of this mean that the move toward discussion-based teaching is misguided?

I don’t think so. Even Cain acknowledges that there is value in teaching kids to work in groups. She just thinks that they should also be encouraged to spend time thinking as individuals apart from those groups. A discussion-based pedagogy does not prevent that from happening. In fact it encourages it. We still require our students—both the introverts and the extroverts—to sit quietly and read. You really can’t have a Harkness discussion with students who haven’t read something. At Exeter, for every 50 minutes of class discussion, we ask students to read and study for 75 minutes on their own. So essentially we are having them do exactly what Cain recommends: “to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.” And after that, we have them go off on their own again to write, drawing on what they’ve read and thought independently about the subject, revised by whatever they got out of the group discussion.

And it is worth mentioning, too, that the whole idea for developing a “conference method” of teaching actually came from concerns about the quiet kid in the class.  Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to Exeter in the 1930s for the purchase of conference tables and so the school could hire enough teachers to shrink class size to 12 so “the diffident boy” could be included.

But still, I take Cain’s concerns about the dangers of “groupthink” quite seriously. In his path-breaking analysis of group dynamics among policy-makers, Irving Janis identified problematic social dynamics (much like what Cain describes) that led to very bad policy decisions, notably the Kennedy administration’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

“I use the term ‘groupthink,’” he wrote, “to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action” (9).

No doubt the same sort of dynamic could take hold in a group of teenagers discussing the Bay of Pigs invasion. And that’s where the teacher’s role becomes key—to foster what Cain refers to as a “well-managed environment” in which the softer voices can be heard and dissenting voices are welcomed and not squelched (and students aren’t encouraged to ape the teacher’s views).

Fortunately for life on Earth, immediately after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy set up a commission of inquiry to look into what went wrong in the decision-making process and to set up a “well-managed environment” for making decisions during future crises. The commission recommended and Kennedy accepted a series of “sweeping changes in the decision-making process” in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which an early consensus for aggressive confrontation was replaced with a more measured, conciliatory approach that avoided World War III. The major changes which Kennedy had put in place included 

• encouraging skepticism about any and all ideas expressed; 
• explicitly welcoming “frank and freewheeling” discussion; 
• encouraging new visitors to the group, who tended to remain silent, to add their voice to the deliberations; 
• occasionally breaking the advisors into subgroups; and 
• giving advisors time and encouragement to meet at times without the boss (Kennedy) present. 

The new committee that was formed with these instructions became known as the Ex-Comm, and later evolved into the group that now meets in the White House “Situation Room” for deliberations involving geopolitical crises.

The new guidelines, Janus argues, made it possible for the Ex-Comm to “obtain the morale gains of high cohesiveness without the losses caused by groupthink” (140-142).

Like the president, teachers in the discussion-based classroom should encourage group cohesiveness while avoiding groupthink, and might consider adapting some of the Ex-Comm’s rules of engagement to their classroom environment. For now, though, I would like to offer a few suggestions for what teachers can do to help introverts and other reticent students to get involved in class discussions.

Making classrooms introvert-friendly

1. Don’t assume a quiet student is an introvert. Shyness and slow processing may also inhibit student contribution and getting shy or slow-thinking extroverts into the conversation may require different approaches than those that work for introverts. In the start of school questionnaire teachers might ask  students to tell them which of these categories fits them best.

2. Avoid, if at all possible, penalizing quiet students with a bad grade. See my post on grading discussion, in which I quote an expert on discussion-based teaching, who says: “If the teacher is the catalyst for discussion, isn’t the participation grade really the teacher’s self-evaluation as well?” Perhaps you have not created an environment that is welcoming to every type of learner.

3. Arrange one-on-one meetings with quiet students where you can ask them why they aren’t speaking, offer suggestions for how to prepare for class and get into the discussion, and ask them how you might help them (Ask: "Would you mind if I called on you?").

4. Use writing assignments in class. This is especially helpful for the slow processors, some of whom are also introverts. You can ask students to write a paragraph for homework and then call on the quiet students to read theirs at the start of class (see my History 420 syllabus for an example of how I’ve done this). You can begin class by asking students to write quietly for a few minutes to warm them up and gather their thoughts. You can stop a discussion in the middle of class and have them write about something, then share a bit of their writing or the ideas they came up with while writing. (My use of writing in class discussions has been influence by participation in Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking summer seminars for teachers, which I recommend highly).

5. Use small group break-out sessions. Reticent students are more likely to participate in a smaller group and if you really need to grade class participation you can listen in and give them credit for the work they do in those settings.

6. Appoint quiet students as scribes. When small groups report back to the full class, have the quiet student deliver the report. Or ask them to take notes on a whole-class discussion and summarize at the end.

7. When setting up groups, put introverts together. I used to try to engineer small groups so that they each had an equal number of strong and weak, talkative and quiet students, especially when those groups would be competing against each other in a debate or some kind of role-playing exercise. The problem with that, of course, is that one or more of the dominant students ends up doing all the talking. This spring in my law course I tried grouping students of similar abilities and learning styles together and the “weaker” groups did surprisingly well in the oral argument enactments they performed. The quiet students weren’t weak after all, they had just been overshadowed by less reticent students.

8. Most importantly, establish an inclusive, collaborative, low stress environment in your classroom. Use METICs to get student input on the class dynamics (that is, get meta about the discussion from time to-time so students can tell you things that they noticed but you missed about the classroom dynamic). Consider setting up a suggestion box where students can drop you notes about how the class is going. Introverts would be more likely to make use of this.

I’m hoping that readers of this blog will respond in the comments section with their own suggestions about how to help introverts, shy students, and slow-processors to feel more at home at the Harkness table.

References:

Susan Cain, “The Power of Introverts,” TED Talk, February, 2012. She also wrote a book: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (Broadway Books, 2013). https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts/up-next

Irving Janus, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2d ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1982)

See also, two pages on my course website: Helping Quieter Students and Finding Your Voice.

The Improvisational Teacher

At this year’s EHI conferences, East and West, the teachers, most of whom were new to Harkness and assigned to lead discussion-based classes for the first time, put tons of effort and lots of good thought into preparing for the classes: reading carefully the documents we had given them and coming up with creative ways to launch discussions. They formulated thoughtful questions and sometimes quite elaborate preliminary exercises, often dividing the participants into pairs or small groups at the start of the 45-minute sessions or having them do something up at the chalk (or white) board. By midweek, though, I noticed that mostly they did not intervene much after these fine beginnings. In a couple of instances they didn’t intervene at all. If I could use a nautical analogy—they gave the Harkness boat a good firm push out into the lake of discussion, but then stayed on the shore and waved good-bye.

This got me thinking. What does it mean to lead a Harkness discussion? What is the teacher doing in a student-centered class beyond just sitting and listening? Where most teaching can be scripted, like those opening exercises, the Harkness class is improvisational. Preparation is useful, but it’s not enough. So I wrote the following note to the teachers at EHI-West, in La Jolla, Calif.

At every moment in a Harkness discussion you will be confronted with decision points. A series of questions will run through your head. Should I intervene or not? If I intervene, what should I say? Should I push the students toward my pre-determined plan? Should I let go of my plan and let the students follow a thread they have stumbled onto? Have they exhausted this topic? Should I transition them to a new one? What do I do about those quiet students? How can I draw them in? Can I get that Harkness warrior to stop talking without hurting his feelings? What am I missing in the group dynamic? Is anyone feeling left out? Did everyone hear the great point that kid made? Should I ask her to repeat it? Should I ask her to read more of the quote? Will that interrupt the flow of the discussion? How can I steer the conversation without interrupting the momentum that seems to be building? Did Johnny do the reading? Why isn’t his text marked up? Should I call him out on that? Were Pat’s feelings just hurt by what Alex said? Should I do something? They don’t seem to understand a key concept; should I just step in and explaining it or wait and see if they figure it out on their own? Or can I just let go of that? Will they need to know that to understand the next reading assignment? Am I talking too much? Is Bobbie talking too much? Should I steer them away from that tangent? Was that introduction of outside information relevant? Should I help them to make a connection that brings them back to the main point, or should I tell them to ignore it as irrelevant? Should I let go of the content we haven’t discussed yet? How important is it? What about the document they didn’t discuss? Should I return them to that important point that came up a while back that was insufficiently developed? Have they failed to discuss any ideas that will be relevant to the next paper they are going to be writing? Is there enough time left to get to a satisfying conclusion? When and how do I move the class toward a good end point? Or do I just let it go? They just seem to be digging into what’s most important but the bell is about to ring. Should I cut it off now or wait for the bell? How should I end the class? Should I sum up? Remind them of a few important points that came out? Give them instructions for the next day?

After reading a draft of this, my colleague, Meg Foley, wrote back to say: “I think your point, Bill, is to say that sometimes as we reflect on those questions the answer is ‘Yes, I will intervene because of this.’ We don't just sit silently on those questions.”

Right! I think that our EHI leaders had a tendency to answer “No” in too many cases, and that our discussions would have been even better if they had sometimes (though certainly not always) answered “Yes,” and steered the conversation more.

If we pick up on the boat metaphor, after you launch the vessel out onto Harkness Lake, you need to jump in, and grab the tiller so that boat does not float aimlessly in circles or run aground as the students all pull the oars in different directions. And, by the way, if you've spent a lot of time on those preliminary boat-launching exercises, which give teachers a reassuring sense of control as well as some respite from the stress of improvisational teaching, you might not have left enough time for the boat to make much progress toward an interesting destination.

Students don’t regard intervention during the class as preventing a student-centered discussion, but as an essential element to make it successful.  Meg asked a representative sampling of Exeter students to comment on what the teachers did in class and wrote about the results in her excellent “Teaching Around the Oval” blog. “By and large, the students did not mention ‘activities’ or ‘strategies’ in the way you might imagine,” she wrote. “They essentially said: teachers are effective in teaching us Harkness by letting us go at it and then nudging and questioning us, when we need it.”

In the same blog post, Meg writes that student comments about their teachers also focused on the “general manner of the teacher,” as also being more important than the sorts of activities or strategies that teachers used to a more scripted class plan are likely to favor.

In my mind, that means patience; a willingness to take a back seat; attentiveness and engagement; open-mindedness, humility, and a willingness to express uncertainty and admit to not knowing some things—perhaps even self-deprecation; sometimes saying the words “I could be wrong”; a sense of humor; inquisitiveness; a respect for and eagerness to learn about opposing views (being, as New York Times editor Bill Keller put it in complimenting a reporter, “voraciously open to contrary argument”); enthusiasm for intellectual work and for the subject matter at hand; being a unifying presence, a builder of community. Above all it means having an attitude of trust in your students and faith in their intellectual capacities—as the title of a book on teaching at the Harkness table by Exeter teachers in the 1980s put it, “Respecting the Pupil."

As Emerson said, in a passage quoted in the frontispiece of that book, “Respect the child, respect him to the end. … Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue.”

Fantasy Automatic Email Reply

Dear sender: I have set up my email account to automatically delete every incoming message.  I apologize for any inconvenience.

The Fragility of Modern Families

Girlhood

December 29, 2017

It’s all of 7:30 a.m. and the sun still hasn’t made an appearance. The outside temperature is 3 degrees below zero. I’ve been sitting here watching my photos scroll past on the laptop. It’s a slideshow that picks photos from my hard drive at random—the kids when they were tweens; the kids when they were toddlers; the trip to Wyoming, Christmas 2010. . . . . They are all good times and almost all family times. You don’t take pictures when the car breaks down, and you rarely take them at work, even if you spend more of your time and energy there. Also, raising a family is difficult—sometimes there is stress. Sometimes there is shouting. Sometimes you can’t believe what you’ve gotten yourself into. None of that makes its way into the photos.

As I watch our family history flash by, I'm grateful the kids are all home this holiday, but feeling a little wistful that in about a month, our oldest will turn 24; our youngest will be off at college, half a day’s drive away. When we dropped the twins off at their dorms this summer it felt like the end of something—was it the end our modern family?

Well, no, of course not. We've had a lovely holiday, with lots of time together. My friend Tom’s only daughter had just two days off, so she flew in from Chicago for just a brief visit. Our girls are here for a number of weeks. So we’re lucky, but I do wonder how our family will evolve down the road. I’m hoping that we end up more like one of the many families you see on TV.

In "Modern Family," for instance, everyone ended up living close by, just a few minutes’ drive away from each other. In that show, cousins are like siblings. Aunts and uncles and grandparents babysit. They’re always popping in on each other and they get together in every episode. Most sitcoms are like that. Somehow, extended families stick together. I wonder how they managed to work that out. Frankly, it doesn’t seem all that modern.

I’ve been lucky. My siblings and I all live within an hour or so of each other. But we don’t live in the same town and that hour drive means there’s not much “popping in” or babysitting. Still, we’re way better off than most of my cosmopolitan acquaintances, like Tom, who have to get on a plane to see members of their extended family.

Working class folks have a better shot, it seems, at ending up close by. If you work in the factory, you might get your son or daughter a job there. But then all the factories are closing. If you send them off to college in some distant state, as in the recent film, Lady Bird, chances are, they aren’t going to come back to live in your town. College educated professionals have to go where the jobs are for the most part. Maybe that’s why the mother in that film freaks out when she drops her college-bound daughter off at the airport. The mother in Boyhood also has the realization that her family life, as she’s known it, is coming to an abrupt end on the day her son, Mason, leaves for college. “This is the worst day of my life,” she sobs. “I just thought there would be more.”

What are the odds that Mason or Lady Bird will end up living nearby, within a short drive? And in what sense are you any kind of a family if you see each other just two or three, or even five or six times a year. How many plane tickets can you afford? Is electronic communication enough?

The tenuousness of family life, it seems to me, is one of the things included in what Richard Hofstadter called the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament” (42). The loss of profound family “communion across generations”—and the feelings of social and psychological security that come with it—leaves us with a deep sense of anomie, what Mark S. Weiner refers to as a persistent “ache for everything that is lost” in the transition from traditional clan-based societies to modern individualistic societies (167-8). I’ve been reading Weiner’s book, The Rule of the Clan and Hofstadter’s book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, over the holidays.

Hofstadter shows, in part, that intellectuals are seen as responsible for imposing modernism on everyone else, and so have attracted the hatred of all.

Through most of our history, Weiner argues, humans have lived in big extended families, tied to a particular geographical area. Those societies are characterized by “communal warmth,” intense social bonds, solidarity and security. For modern liberal societies to form, “it is necessary to ‘cut the ties of kinship’—to create a cultural identity that, while not replacing family bonds, trumps their significance, and that displaces the authority of the extended family with the revolutionary, individuating power of the nuclear family.”

It’s a complicated story, but when you think about it, there are an awful lot of obstacles to the maintenance of family ties beyond (and even within) the nuclear family. Weiner argues that at the center of our modern societies is an ethos of individualism that is at odds with the ethos of solidarity at the heart of traditional clan-based societies that keeps families together. The individualistic ethos was on full display in Lady Bird. When asked if Lady Bird is her given name, the title character answers yes, “I gave it to myself, it was given to me by me.” Weiner argues that the ache for solidarity is always with us, though, and the film ends with Lady Bird in her dorm room in New York City recalling her hometown with fondness and introducing herself to new acquaintances as “Christine,” the name her parents gave her.

Liberal societies will fail if we do not find decent substitutes for the solidarity of traditional clans, Weiner argues. We need unions, clubs, bowling leagues, organizations of various kinds, and above all, nation states to fulfill the functions of clans, to hold us together, and to reduce the sense of anomie that arises in the absence of strong extended families and traditional culture.

Other books I’m reading also address this problem in different ways. In More than Just Race, William Julius Wilson considers the relative importance of culture and social structure in causing poverty. Conservatives like J. D. Vance would have us believe that poverty could be solved if individuals would just act differently—according to more appropriate cultural norms. But Wilson references extensive social science research that shows structural factors (economics, demographics, public policy) have a much greater impact and in fact cause the dysfunctional cultural practices that Vance puts at the root of poverty. Wilson calls for the kinds of collectivist or state-sponsored structural adjustments that Weiner might say are necessary to preserve liberal modernity against that ache of individualism.

Finally, in her book, Radical Happiness, Lynne Segal, notes that as policy makers and yoga instructors, retailers and psychologists, HR departments and pharmaceutical companies promote ever more paths toward individual fulfillment and happiness, we see “precipitously rising rates of anxiety and depression” (Kindle version, location 80). The reason, she says, is that we are overemphasizing individual causes of unhappiness and underestimating social causes. We need to shift our focus from private happiness to what Hannah Arendt called “public happiness” (127). Segal's prescription calls for involvement in movements for social change and political activism. For one thing, only social change can address the structural and social causes of our depression and anxiety (which are perhaps a greater source of our misery than our own individual craziness), and at the same time the very act of bonding with others in a political crusade is psychologically therapeutic for the individuals involved.

Are We Powerless?

Some enterprising tech genius will invent a new device sometime in the future, and you will find yourself compelled to purchase one. Who knows, maybe it will look something like the cool machine depicted in the accompanying illustration by Emma and Lindsey.

This inventor will be motivated less to satisfy an actual human need or elevate the condition of human kind than by a compulsion to tinker and a desire to make a buck. See Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel, pages 242-243, on how “invention is the mother of necessity.” At first, lovers of new contraptions will buy them. Eventually a critical mass of people will own one and then the rest of us will begin to feel compelled to join the crowd even if we would rather abstain—even after it becomes clear that this new gizmo does more harm than good to human beings. I sadly find myself in the latter category now in the case of the “smart” phone. Some anthropologists have suggested that agriculture was one such invention that did more harm than good, but which we embraced anyway. James C. Scott’s new book makes this argument, as does Diamond. According to Scott, as recently as 400 years ago the holdouts had the advantage over the adopters.

Some years ago they started inventing telephones you could carry around outside the home. This seemed like a terrible idea to me, then and now. Bad enough you could be constantly interrupted by telemarketers at home, now they could follow you around all day. I resisted buying a cell phone as long as I could until not having one had become eccentric at best and irresponsible at worst. I bought the least expensive version I could find and used it as little as possible. I sometimes forgot to check it and this trained most people to avoid calling me. Around this time, spring of 2015, most other people had upgraded from mere cellphones to the mighty smartphone.

Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 I have felt, like this blogger, like a character in the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which one by one, the people around him are replaced by aliens who look familiar but something is missing. “Every day, another friend, family member, or even stranger, succumbs to the inevitable, and becomes a blank-faced moron, staring into a tiny screen all day long,” he writes.

But it is hard to resist joining the pod people, even as evidence mounts that smart phones and digital technology in general are really bad for us (they are actually engineered to be addictive). In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle argues that smart phones and other modes of electronic communication are eroding our ability to communicate in person and generating feelings of alienation. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris contends that smart phones have destroyed a whole generation of American children.  There’s been a dramatic increase in depression and anxiety among our kids. Some blame the smart phones.   But we parents keep buying them for our kids, so as to spare them the fate of being a social non-conformist.

I’m old enough to know that life was better before email, that gigantic to-do list that anyone in the whole world can add to at any moment. Before email, you could come home sometimes and leave work behind. You could even go on vacation from work. Do we control technology, or does technology control us?  Apple has figured out how to annoy me into upgrading my Ipad’s operating system every other time I turn it on, it seems, even though I ever asked for an upgrade. Somehow, Ralph Waldo Emerson did not own an Apple product or know about artificial intelligence when he wrote “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

It’s not just technology. Every high school math teacher I’ve talked to thinks that the vast majority of students should not take calculus until college. I’m told that the college professors agree. Yet some mysterious force called “college admissions” insists that every ambitious student take calculus before they graduate from high school.

That same force seems to be responsible for degrading childhood in a number of other ways in recent years. From competitive day care admissions to professional college counseling and SAT test prep, childhood has turned into one long exercise in competitive resume building. A parent once told me that summer is the time for school kids to do extraordinary things—internships, global travel, solving the world’s problems—so as to build the narrative that will get them into a “good” college or university. Surely all of this is another source of all the anxiety our children are suffering.

I remember a time when sports was a thing you did with your friends after school just for fun. Now, middle class families shuttle their kids to games and practices and summer camps, often in the same sport year-round. Sports, and it seems childhood, has become a job. I don’t know any reasonable person, including the coaches and PE teachers I talk to, who thinks this is a good thing. It would seem, contra Martin Luther King, Jr., that change DOES roll in on the wheels of inevitability. Resistance is futile. We are sheep. As John Stuart Mill put it:

Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. (On Liberty)

Somehow, in the face of all this, I continue to cling to a vague notion that humans aren't just helpless pawns altogether, or that, as Marx put it, “Men [and women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Some years ago I did a directed studies course on utopian thought and utopian living experiments with my friend and student Shannon Hou. In the old days—as recently as the 1960s—a lot of Americans spent a lot of time thinking about how we could perfect or at least dramatically improve our unsatisfactory societies. Novelists, communards, and philosophers put a lot of effort into that project. Utopian thinking seems to be out of style these days, replaced mostly by dystopian imagining—how things will inevitably turn out if current trends continue. Think: Hunger Games, a story about what we are doing to childhood. Dystopianism, however, may be a self-fulfilling prophecy if it breeds a sense of helplessness and nihilism.

As a teacher and a historian I feel an obligation to point to examples of people in the past who were agents of their own salvation, or paved the way for improvements to society—dreamers who imagined and brought about a better world.  King is one example. The long struggle for black equality, along with the labor movement, proves that regular people can take action and succeed spectacularly in making their own history—and our own present.  It's hard to feel a sense of historical agency in the dystopian present.  History needs to be taught in a way that counters the fatalistic narratives that are flooding the public mind and conveys a sense of optimism about what is possible and what good people can achieve when they work together. As James Baldwin put it, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive.” It is up to us who are still living to dream hopeful dreams and fight to make them come true.

James Baldwin on History and Optimism and Agency

"History is not the past. It is the present.  We carry our history with us. We are our history.  To pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. . . . I can't be a pessimist because I am alive.  To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.  So I'm forced to be an optimist.  I'm forced to believe we can survive. . . .  The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.  It is entirely up to the American people . . ."  From the film, I am Not Your Negro.  Photo by Allen Warren.

Exonians: Let’s Depolarize America

This is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Exonian, our school newspaper, and which appeared in the Nov. 16, 2017 print edition.

During Tuesday’s assembly, I moderated a political conversation between Amy Schwartz and Townley Chisholm (Teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy). One complaint I’ve heard from some students is that their views weren’t far enough apart. Students may have been expecting something like the political arguments we see on TV every day, between shouting pundits and party functionaries with diametrically opposing views. The networks have found that these kinds of conversations drive up ratings and bring in ad revenue (I recommend the film “Best of Enemies” to see the origins of this phenomenon).

But that is not how most people talk about politics. Think about it. The networks hire people to represent a particular point of view. Their livelihood depends on being able to stick to the party line. They are not paid to be moderate or change their minds. In real life people have all kinds of doubts and change their minds all the time and we don’t go through life with one rigid, fully formed ideology to guide us. We listen to what others are saying and consider new evidence. Political scientists and psychologists who study how people think about politics have found that when we talk to others with different viewpoints, our political positions become more moderate. When we talk only to like-minded people, our ideas become more extreme.

As Americans increasingly separate themselves into red and blue enclaves, they speak to fewer people with different views and the nation becomes ever more polarized. Consider just one of many headlines on the topic: this one from Vox: “We need political parties. But their rabid partisanship could destroy American democracy. We’re trapped in a frightening ‘doom loop’ of mutual distrust.”

In preparing for Tuesday’s assembly, Mr. Chisholm and Ms. Schwartz and I had a number of conversations over two or three weeks. The views you heard expressed on Tuesday were somewhat different than what I heard them saying at different times earlier in the process. Their opinions converged a bit. Like most thoughtful people, these two do not have opinions that are set in stone. They are open minded, intellectually flexible, and open to new evidence. Most importantly, they know that their own knowledge and perspectives are limited, that on any given question, they could be wrong. That’s something Harkness teaches us every day if we are doing it right.

Maybe we would become less polarized if Americans saw more of these kinds of political conversations and fewer of the politics-as-combat and politics-as-entertainment spectacles that the media and the two-party system offer up every day. Perhaps the home of the Harkness method has something to teach the country about how to conduct those better conversations.