Science & Safetyism

Wrong opinions and practices
gradually yield to fact and argument:
but facts and arguments,
to produce any effect on the mind,
must be brought before it.
—John Stuart Mill

As an educator, one of the challenges of the safetyism I discussed last time is the reality that my students today are not as adept at critical thinking as my students earlier in my career.  They are simply less able to connect their claims to reliable evidence properly, and no, that is not just “old fogey-ism” on my part.  I can document the extra supports and other interventions that I have needed to steadily and increasingly add over the decades to help my current students achieve what their “elders” before them once achieved semi-autonomously (because a good teacher meets their students where they’re at; not where the teacher might wish they were). 

Digital technology, of course, has played an enormous role in this new reality for me as a teacher, but in exploring Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s concept of safetyism, I have begun to realize how much my students are arriving in my classroom having never really confronted the disagreeable ideas and opinions so necessary to the development of critical thinking as an intellectual skill.  In some instances, they have never even encountered them at all! Hence, I now see that the rise of safetyism in our society has been impeding the development of my students’ critical thinking as much as their lives as digital natives has.  In both instances, they have been able to systematically avoid cognitive unpleasantries such as boredom, dissonance, and inconvenient truths and so avoid learning how to deal with such things.

How, then, do I address this reality, and why—as I implied at the end of my last posting—do I think my particular discipline has some built in advantages for doing so?  I have written before about the kind of general pedagogy I believe can promote and improve critical thinking skills (it is a major focus of this project). But today I want to address why I think that my teaching science specifically—rather than other possible academic disciplines—gives me an extra edge when it comes to defeating the educational challenges of safetyism.

 And I want to do so by turning first to someone who I am starting to think of as an intellectual kindred spirit, Jonathan Rauch.  I visited his concept of “liberal science” earlier in my writing when exploring his “constitution of knowledge.” But in reading some of his other work recently, I found that he has gotten me to “thinking about science as a set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” (p. 30) rather than simply a way of understanding the world.  He reminded me that disagreements are practically baked into a social species such as ours and that methods for resolving those conflicts inherently involve evoking claims about the truth in a particular situation.  Yet while anyone can make “three new [claims] every day before breakfast, the trouble is, they will almost always be bad [claims].  The hard part is figuring out who has a good [one]” (p. 64, original emphasis).  Hence, as Rauch reminded me, one of the most fundamental problems any society must cope with to survive is the epistemic one: the nature and limits of human knowledge.  Or as he puts it, “when is it legitimate for me to say ‘I’m right and you’re wrong!’ and to act accordingly?” (p. 35).

His own answer, of course, is only if such a claim has survived the crucible of liberal science.  Any proposition must endure repeated testing against the empirical realities of life and must have persisted repeatedly before said potential error can make any claim to a degree of truth.  For Rauch, that is the innovation and genius of the scientific process of truth determination:  not in doing away with human bias and ignorance but in channeling them.  As he argues, “the point of liberal science is not to be unprejudiced (which is impossible); the point is to recognize that your own bias might be wrong and to submit it to public checking by people who believe differently” (p. 67).  Science in Rauch’s outlook is the intellectual equivalent of natural selection, “[mimicking] the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life” (p. 57).

And it is that last metaphor that has caused me to ponder whether the discipline I teach has some built-in advantages when it comes to resisting safetyism.  Because in learning science, a student in my class is inherently in conflict.  Conflict with preconceived notions.  Conflict with what the data you just collected tells you.  Conflict with the required skepticism that you could always be wrong…. 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that you cannot learn science and somehow evade the very thing safetyism seeks to prevent and avoid—conflict.  It’s not that other disciplines can’t have conflict built into them, too (and responsible, thoughtful teachers of those disciplines deliberately do so).  But having taught history, I know that one can offer a version of it where the conflict has been white washed from it, and I can imagine an English or Foreign Language class where what is read is very safe and unchallenging.  Science, however, literally cannot be taught without disrupting how a child looks at and experiences their world.

Not that science doesn’t still lose some of the battles.  As I was outlining this essay, a student was removed from one of my classes by a family upset with the demands of the course, declaring that my teaching was making their child feel emotionally uncomfortable and overwhelmed.  Ironically, this course is an elective; so the student had chosen to enroll, and I am extremely candid and forthright at the beginning of the year—with both students and parents alike—that a fundamental goal of this particular class is to create learning situation where children will intellectually fall down and that with my help, they will learn how to stand back up in the similar situations that they will encounter next year in college.  The metaphor I sometimes use is that of an academic drill sergeant but one who loves and cares, and the rationale I provide is summed up so nicely by Rauch that I may use his very words next fall:

The social system does not and never can exist which allows no harm to come to anybody.  Conflict of impulse and desire is an inescapable fact of human existence, and where there is conflict there will always be losers and wounds…The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse (p. 122).

I want all of my students prepared for adulthood and the necessary adulting that comes with that, and I know that if you never fall down, you can never learn to get back up.  My sadness for my now former student is that she was allowed to remain on the ground.

References

Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.  New York: Penguin Books.

Rauch, J. (2013) Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Expanded Edition).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.