The Death of Science?

There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn

They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada

If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one. First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around). Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services! Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.

“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask. Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country. H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive. “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple: there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields.

Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world. If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore. As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”

Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers. Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation. Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption. And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country. And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.

Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries. All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”

And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible: that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.

Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991. As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20^th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.

Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support. The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise. But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month. Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”

But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must. We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country. Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can. In labs and research centers. In classrooms and homes. In legislatures and city halls. In movies and museums. Even in the kitchen!¹ Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”² It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity. But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.

Coda

During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland. Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed!

However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:

The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory. Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer. Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again. It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).

For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5. Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:

Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?

¹For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

²To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.

References

Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.

Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.

Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science. Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.

Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.

Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).

Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2^nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.

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.

The Dangers of Safetyism

Education should not be intended
to make people comfortable;
it is meant to make them think.
—Hanna Holborn Gray

In the early 1980s, a Canadian historian, James Stokesbury, wrote two, one-volume histories of World War I and World War II. They remain, in my opinion, among the best abbreviated examinations of these calamitous events, and I revisit my copies of both books when I am feeling the need for some perspective about the world they helped create and in which I have grown up and lived. Each time I do, I find myself discovering some new theme which I had not seen on previous reads, and when I recently revisited them this past month, what struck me this time was the almost rabid isolationism of the United States at the start of both wars and its impact on their outcomes. I was reminded yet again that we are a highly reactionary society, not an anticipatory one, and that what that can cost can literally be tens of millions of human lives.

I share this bit of personal background because in my other recent readings I have found what I think is a new form of isolationism, and I believe we may be looking at a new reactionary response rather than an anticipatory one. And no, I do not mean the isolationism within the MAGA movement and their cult leader, Donald Trump, which are impacting the current election. This is an isolationism at a larger scale, one that is permeating our entire society, and it is something which First Amendment attorney, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, call “safetyism.”

What is “safetyism?” Lukianoff and Haidt define it as “a culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger” and does so to such a degeree that it “encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy” (Coddling, p. 29). Examples include:

helicopter-parenting that schedules every minute of a child’s day to ensure that said child is never without some form of adult supervision;
school districts such as the one my niece and nephew attended where district policy would not allow them to enter their elementary school unless dropped off by car—even though said school was a five-minute walk from their house;
“the head teacher of an elementary school in East London [issuing] a rule that children must not even touch recently fallen snow, because touching could lead to snowballs” (Coddling, p. 236; original emphasis)
universities cancelling controversial speakers simply because some members of the campus might find them disagreeable;

Hence, at its extreme, safetyism is the notion that even ideas are physically dangerous and must therefore be regulated to prevent exposure to them. In other words, we must find a way to isolate each and every one of us from anything that might cause pain.

Sounds crazy right? Yet Lukianoff and Haidt point out that to some degree it makes a certain twisted logic because as “we adapt to our new and improved circumstances, [we] then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk” (Coddling, pp. 13-14). Modern industrial society with its medicine, abundance of food, sanitation systems, etc. has so removed us from the environment we evolved in that “coddled” isn’t even an adequate word to describe our lives today. Yet that same modern industrial society bombards our paleolithic brains with news of inflation, school shootings, and climate change, and so our heightened feelings of fear for our safety can drive us to the crazy isolation of safetyism.

Creating some very unintended and negative consequences in the process. As the subtitle to Coddling suggests, we have now raised an entire generation incapable of adulting; put the production of new knowledge at risk—since “to advance knowledge, we must sometimes suffer” (Kindly, p. 19); and even endangered our form of governing because “citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday” without many preceding years of free play and self-negotiated conflict (Coddling, p. 191). Just as the isolationism of the 1910s and 1930s did, safetyism has put us at grave risk as a nation, and I think it is worth quoting Lukianoff and Haidt at length here:

After all, if focusing on big threats [car seats, reducing exposure to second hand smoke, etc.] produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible? A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems. For example, efforts to prevent financial instability by bailing out companies can lead to larger and more destructive crashes later on; efforts to protect forests by putting out small fires can allow dead wood to build up, eventually leading to catastrophic fires far worse than the sum of the smaller fires that were prevented. Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences. Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all…efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment (Coddling, p. 169).

How, though, did we get here? What has allowed safetyism to arise and to thrive? One answer Lukianoff and Haidt provide is what they call the three great “Untruths” that have taken hold in our society: the Untruth of Fragility (“what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (“always trust your feelings”), and the Untruth of Us vs. Them (“life is a battle between Good people and Evil people”). Together, Lukianoff and Haidt argue (and document), these three ideas have permeated much of the modern parenting literature, school policies pre-K thru PhD, and social media, and the consequence are large numbers of children and young adults who are not resilient, who are experiencing poor mental health, and who are permanently trapped in their own biases.

Added to that, Jonathan Rauch argues (and also documents), has been the rise over the past thirty years of what he calls the fundamentalist and humanitarian threats to research institutions of all manner. Namely (from the first) that all knowledge of any kind is absolutely relative and therefore equal in truth value and (from the second) that since “one person’s knowledge is another’s repression” (Kindly, p. 116), we must “set up authorities empowered to weed out hurtful ideas and speech (Kindly, p. 131). Objective truth withers and dies; new knowledge becomes impossible; and thoughtful, critically reflective individuals who might be able to challenge Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s three great Untruths become a thing of the past.

There is, of course, also the reality of the rise of social media and the consequent tribalism it has empowered that generates affirmation for the belief in the need to be safe against the “Other.” As Lukianoff and Haidt point out:

The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belong to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict (Coddling, p. 58).

And when social media simultaneously provides both the intragroup identity and the intergroup conflict, you have the perfect recipe for safetyism. In fact, Lukianoff and Haidt go so far in recognizing this reality that they actually have a term for the subgroup of Gen Z where we see this the most: iGen, the group who grew up after Steve Jobs unleashed the iPhone on the world.

So now what? This group of individuals bathed in safetyism since birth has only grown larger over time, and a strong case could be made that the whole reason for the general tenor of the last decade of election cycles is that we are losing the number of actual adults in the room. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daneil Ziblatt have written, “[political] parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe” that must be protected against at all costs (Codling, p. 131).

However, there are still a few of us around adulting our way through life, and a large number of us work in education, where the task has been, remains, and will always be—as the old folk wisdom puts it—preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child. Not that schools shouldn’t be places of safety, but as former University of Chicago president, Hanna Holborn Gray reminds us in the epigram at the start of this essay—and ALL the brain research affirms—a certain degree of discomfort is necessary for learning to take place. Critical thinking is simply the ability to connect one’s claims to reliable evidence properly, but developing the capacity to do it involves falling and skinning one’s mental knees over and over again until you can skate logic’s constraints with ease. Learning hurts, and there will never be any way around that.

And while it is true that we can pave a bit of a child’s road for them, it has always been utterly self-defeating to think any of us could do more than that. Food, clothing, shelter…love, caring, empathy…medicine, education, athletics…generational wealth…we can smooth some of a child’s road for them. But we cannot prepare them for that call in the night that a loved one has died or the diagnosis of cancer or the failure of a marriage. Each person’s road is unique, and so we can only truly help prepare them to travel it.

What’s more, if “it [has been] foolish to think one could clear the road for one’s child [in the past], before the internet, now it’s delusional” (Codling, p. 237). As I commented in Chapter 9, I have confronted the paradox these past 15+ years that even as my digital native students have arrived in my classroom more and more unprepared for critical thinking, I have been steadily more successful at enabling them to do so. That I can do so, I think, is because of the subject I teach, and the how and why of that is what I will explore next time.

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.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stokesbury, J. (1980) A Short History of World War II. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Updates

Regular readers know that I have three areas of interest that frequently occupy my attention: the impact of the pandemic on education, the ever evolving role of AI and technology on teaching and learning, and the strong current of anti-intellectualism in our society. Well, this summer has been a busy one for all three of these topics; so it’s time for some updates. We’ll start with the pandemic.

Early on, when COVID was actively disrupting all of our lives, I made some sober predictions about the cost of this disease to our children, and it saddens me to report that it turns out that things are even worse than I had prognosticated. Teachers are now reporting that many of our littlest ones are arriving at school barely able to speak, that they are unable to remain still for brief periods, and that some do not even to know how to play with others. Rudimentary pre-school skills such as how to hold a pencil or identify simple shapes (think circle, triangle, etc.) are missing, and caregivers of all kinds are reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression in children as young as four or five.

However, the situation appears even grimmer in our older children. The gap in national test scores between recent and pre-pandemic scores has actually grown wider than anticipated, and “the gaps are so large that the average eighth-grade would need about nine months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-covid levels in math and about the same extra time to catch up in reading.” The realities of human development simply do not allow for nine extra months, and so we are confronting an entire cohort of children who will be put at some degree of permanent disadvantage moving forward. At least the little ones “only” need “2.2 more months of school to make up the reading gaps and 1.3 months for math.”

On the AI and technology front, the status of things is a little less “doom & gloom,” with interesting research about why paper remains better than screens. The data about the advantages of handwriting versus typing when notetaking has been known for some time, but it turns out that even the simple act of reading something that is on paper versus reading the exact same thing on a screen produces better brain engagement and comprehension. Scientists around the world have been analyzing the brains of early elementary age children with EEG and fMRI, and it turns out that “when children read on paper, there was more power in the high-frequency brainwaves” associated with higher-order cognitive function. Why the brain acts differently between paper and screens remains a mystery, but that it does is now documented by multiple studies.

Of course, the creep factor of AI remains, with a company in China now offering to make avatars of dead loved-ones so that you can continue to “communicate” with the deceased. But that’s a different issue for another day. For now, “pencil & paper” are clearly winning, and those of us working with children simply need to pay attention accordingly.

Finally, it demoralizes me to have to report that the ACT has now made the science section of their exam optional and have even reduced their core exam by 44 questions, with shorter reading passages. While I am not a fan of standardized tests, with their well-documented biases and other problematic features, I am also not a fan of dumbing things down even further in our general society than we already have. The ACT rationalizes their decision by arguing that with this new flexibility—students can now sign up for four different varients of the exam (two of which do still include science)—that students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible light while avoiding the fatigue of the longer, original exam. But I am confident that the proverbial “bottom line” (pun intended) is simply that fewer students were signing up for the test, and that this was the organization’s way of trying to keep the dollars flowing—all at the expense of actually demanding that our children actually know something.

Well, that’s it for now. For those of us in the classroom, important reminders of the challenges facing us as we adapt to the children in front of us (not the ones we might wish were in front of us), and for those not in the classroom, important reminders of matters impacting the society in which we all live.

Until next time.

References

Archie, A. (July 19, 2024) The Science Section of the ACT Exam Will Now Be Optional. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/nx-s1-5045587/act-exam-test-science-optional.

Barshay, J. (June 24, 2024) This Is Your Brain. This is Your Brain on Screens. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-neuroscience-paper-v-screens-reading/.

Feng, E. (July 11, 2024) Chinese Companies Offer to “Resurrect” Dead Loved Ones. It Raises Questions. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-5001751/chinese-companies-offer-to-resurrect-dead-loved-ones-it-raises-questions.

Meckler, L. & Lumpkin, L. (July 23, 2024) Four Years After COVID, Many Students Still Losing Ground. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/07/23/covid-test-scores-learning-loss-absenteeism/.

Miller, C.C. & Mervosh, S. (July 1, 2024) The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/01/upshot/pandemic-children-school-performance.html.

“Prognostic Myopia”

Corporate executives are under immense pressure
to deliver quarterly earnings,
not to save science, democracy, or the planet.
—Jennifer Jacquet

Evolution is still deciding what to make
of the human capacity for causal reasoning.
—Justin Gregg

For most of my career, when I have taught my unit on the brain to my advanced biology courses, I have challenged my students to recognize that the “evolutionary jury” of natural selection is still out when it comes to the value of our large prefrontal cortex. I point out that every other species of the genus Homo has gone extinct (and in the case of our closest cousins, neanderthalensis, directly because of we sapiens), and that, therefore, the ultimate survival value of our proportionally bigger brains amongst the animals is still very much up for grabs.

Recently, though, I came across a book by animal behaviorist, Justin Gregg, that systematically makes the case that the uniquely human cognitive capacities that set our brains apart from those of the other animals actually puts us at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the process of natural selection. Gregg does not mince words when he challenges that the human mind puts us at greater risk of extinction as a species, and as he puts it, “what if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions evolutionarily speaking?” (p. 16).

The case he makes is quite compelling, and he starts with the relative value of our capacity for causal thinking. As he puts it, we are “ ‘why?’ specialists,” who can determine how the world works in ways no other animal can, and yet the world is full of animals making successful decisions all the time without needing to know the “why?” of things. Moreover, the paleontological data shows that for the first roughly 200,000 of our quarter of a million year heritage, we got by just find as well without answering questions of cause and effect. Hence, causal thinking doesn’t seem to add much survival value for animals in general (including us), and in fact, a strong argument can be made that as we humans have employed this unique capacity of ours more and more in the past 50,000 years, we have steadily decimated the environments in which we live because “with an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it” (p. 15).

Compounding our brain’s ability to do deliberate damage and harm, Gregg argues, is the fact that the human mind has taken the animal capacity for deception to whole new levels. “Lying” is nothing new in the animal kingdom; from unintentional mimicry to deliberately “playing dead” to the tactical deceptions of male mourning cuttlefish (check it out!), animals of all kinds engage in generating a variety of falsehoods for purposes of survival and reproduction. However, as Gregg puts it, “our species has taken it to absurd lengths” (p. 59) because of our capacity for language and the theory of mind. We can lie about any thought we have, and we don’t just lie to protect ourselves; we lie to try and change other people’s thoughts and beliefs. Furthermore, because we are a social species, we are hard-wired for credulity—to believe what other people tell us to maintain our bonds—and therefore, “we cannot remove the human capacity to both produce and believe lies anymore than we can remove our capacity for walking upright. It’s who we are” (p. 88).

Yet in a world of social media, 24/7 news cycles, and the world-wide web, the scale of human lying now has the capacity to threaten our very survival. Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda…we live emersed in lies, and we can employ all of it to justify whatever harm our causal thinking has enabled us to do—from climate change to genocide. What’s more, our capacity for lying has started to attack the very tools we use to generate actual truth—science, scholarship, public institutions—and therefore, as Gregg puts it, “the question is: can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from the planet?” (p. 89).

Interestingly enough, I think Gregg’s response to his own rhetorical question would be a qualified “maybe.” He is not a cynic; he simply takes a non-blindered approach to examining our uniquely human cognitive capacities through the lens of evolution and finds no grounds at all for our self-declared exceptionalism as a species within the animal kingdom.

Moreover, where he finds this delusion of exceptionalism most problematic is our cognitive tendancy for what he calls “prognostic myopia.” Basically, he argues that “because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions [i.e. burning fossil fuels, modern food production methods, etc.]. It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking” (p. 195), and it is compounded by the reality revealed through modern neuroscience that we make nearly all our daily decisions at the subconscious level. Those parts of our brains involved in this process, he points out, evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deal with the needs of the immediate present for survival; there is no “future” for these mental elements. Therefore, “our capacity to understand the future and even envision ourselves in it is competing with decision-making systems whose component parts do not truly understand what they are being asked to do” (p. 207).

Or to put it another way:

urgent survival needs mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors. And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives (p. 212).

Basically, our brains did not evolve to live in the world those same brains have now created, and Gregg’s ultimate point is that “depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened” (p. 256) from an evolutionary perspective.

And an excellent “case study” of this potential truth is the behavior of modern corporations. In another book to cross my path recently, New York University professor, Jennifer Jacquet, has written a scathing satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which she “advises” corporate leaders on how to prevent costly safety and product regulations to maximize profits by attacking the researchers and science that support these regulations. Some highlights of her “advice” to corporations include:

There are few communication products that money cannot buy. Does the Corporation need a scientific journal sympathetic to its research? Fund an editor. Does the proper journal not exist? Create it. Establish a popular magazine. Build a website. Host a scientific gathering. Put together a group of people who appear to be grassroots activists. The digital media landscape in particular offers limitless options for shaping public perception (p. 71).
Another way to make the problem go away is to change the language. The tobacco industry referred to ‘cancer’ as ‘biological activity.’ A consultant to the fossil fuel industry found that ‘climate change’ sounded less frightening to a focus group than ‘global warming’ and recommended the switch in 2002 (and the switch succeeded). The chemical manufacturers insisted on the term ‘biosolids’ instead of ‘toxic sludge’ (p. 96).
The policy might not just hurt people, it could kill them, or already has. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which generated hysteria that led to the banning of DDT, and as a result millions have died of malaria. In addition, many of the world’s poor died of hunger because the benefits of pesticides were not realized (ignore the unsavory problem of unequal food distribution) (p. 144).
We cannot fix a problem because we’re not hardwired to fix the problem. (Never mind that we were also not hardwired to read or to scuba dive or to drink milk) (p. 153).

There is much more like this in Jacquet’s book, but as an example of Gregg’s “prognostic myopia,” I can think of nothing better than the headlong pursuit for immediate corporate profit at the expense of the long-term consequences of corporate actions. And at the scale of corporations, this use of human intelligence is not only stupid, but I would argue that it is stupidity at its worst because in normalizes and even rewards being shortsighted at a societal scale. As Jacquet concludes in her appendix to her book:

in the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government. In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world. The stakes could not get higher (p. 174).

Of course, not only are the stakes as high as Jacquet states them, they are as high as Gregg states them: the potential extinction of our species. And the problem for all of us is that we are all, in fact, trapped in our own “prognostic myopia.” My entire retirement portfolio, for example, depends on corporate profits; Gregg writes about raising his daughter and taking her to school each day, knowing that “even though that’s what awaits my family in the future [i.e. ecological collapse from climate change], here I am, driving my Subaru around like everything is fine” (p. 220). We have no choice but to live in the now, even when that “now” may be preventing “someday” from being possible

Which brings me to teaching, to what I do for a living and whether it is even possible to have any positive impact in the classroom anymore. Because what actually triggered all this epistolary activity and my reflecting on Gregg’s and Jacquet’s work was some recent stories in the news.

The first, heard on NPR, was about how love songs are in trouble and what this tells us about how younger generations are viewing relationships. Apparently, the top term searched for in music by Gen Z listeners is the word “sad,” and BYU researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells has found that 86% of love songs in the recent Billboard Top 100 profess an insecure attachment style, have replaced emotional longing with overt sexuality, and leave the listener assuming that their romantic relationships are supposed to be toxic. As one of the people being interviewed put it, “one of the songs in the top 100 right now is from a tremendously gifted and talented and beautiful artist named SZA, and she has a song called ‘Saturn.’ In the first verse, she says, I hate this place.”

And if people raised on toxic love songs aren’t bad enough, the other story that caught my attention in the NYT was about a group of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania using TikTok to create an organized and systematic on-line attack of their teachers, creating fake accounts in the teachers’ names and then posting ugly falsehoods about those same teachers as if the teachers had generated the content themselves. I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, but what disturbed me the most was the fact that when caught and confronted with the evidence, the overwhelming response of the students was that their teachers couldn’t take a joke—as if accusations of pedophilia and spousal infidelity are somehow “joking” matters.

Taken together—the prognostic myopia of our species, the corporate greed that takes that myopia to world destroying levels, media of all types that empower dysfunctional and destructive relating—it has me pondering if we’ve reached the point as a society where what we do as educators in the classroom is irrelevant. And what disturbs me most about that thought is that I know I have had a positive impact for most of my career. I have been blessed to mentor former students into the profession, to attend their dissertation defenses and weddings, and to hold their children in my arms. I know the good I have helped send out into the world.

But between my own struggles this past year with my 9^th graders, reading Gregg and Jacquet, and seeing many of my concerns about social media come to pass over the last few months, I find myself compelled to ask whether any of us in education, myself included, can still do that anymore. Can teachers still have a positive impact? Or are the children now arriving in our classrooms already too damaged by the world we’ve created for them? Right now, I do not have an answer. I wish I did, but I don’t.

However, what I do know is that I have is an almost congenital compulsion to try, and that itself may have to be my only answer for now.

References

Gregg, J. (2022) If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Jacquet, J. (2022) The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World. New York: Penguin Books.

Martin, M. (July 3, 2024) Love Songs Are Changing. What Today’s Love Songs Say About Us. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/03/nx-s1-4983933/love-songs-are-changing-what-todays-love-songs-say-about-us.

Singer, N. (July 6, 2024) Students Target Teachers in Group TikTok Attack, Shaking Their School. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/technology/tiktok-fake-teachers-pennsylvania.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5U0.kN8_.kvXU-e-H7SD-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Catechism and AI Revisited

This is the nature of the razor-thin path of scientific reality:
there are a limited number of ways to be right,
but an infinite number of ways to be wrong.
Stay on it, and you see the world for what it is.
Step off, and all kinds of unreality become equally plausible.
—Phil Plait

Two stories about artificial intelligence recently caught my attention. The first, out of the University of California, Irvine’s Digital Learning Lab, examined how successful ChatGPT could be at grading English and history essays when compared to an actual teacher. The second, an editorial about the AI revolution in general, exposited on the very practical and financial boundaries all AI technologies are rapidly finding themselves running up against. Together, I found these stories causing me to revisit some themes from my very first posting about AI, and as I reflected more on all of these items, some shared threads between the two stories rapidly became apparent that I want to discuss here today.

But first, a quick synopsis of each article.

In the story about grading, researcher Tamara Tate and her team sought to compare ChatGPT’s ability to score 1,800 middle school and high school English and history essays against the ability of human writing experts to do so. Their motive was to see if ChatGPT could help improve writing instruction by allowing teachers to assign more of it without increasing their own cognitive load. If, for example, teachers could use AI “to grade any essay instantly with minimal expense and effort,” then more drafts could be assigned, thereby enabling the quality of student writing skills to improve.

What they found was a lot of variability, with ChatGPT’s scores matching the human scores between 76% and 89% of the time, which Tate summarized as meaning that ChatGPT was “roughly speaking, probably as good as an average busy teacher [and] certainly as good as an overburdened below-average teacher. [But that] ChatGPT isn’t yet accurate enough to be used on a high-stakes test or on an essay that would affect a final grade in a class.” Furthermore, she cautioned that “writing instruction could ultimately suffer if teachers delegate too much grading to ChatGPT [because] seeing students’ incremental progress and common mistakes remain important for deciding what to teach next.” Bottom line, as the title of the article states, the idea “needs more work.”

In the editorial about the AI revolution, technology columnist, Christopher Mims makes the strong case that the pace of AI development is hitting three walls: a rapidly slowing pace of development, mounting prohibitive costs, and what I will call the productivity boundary. In terms of development, Mims points out that AI works:

by digesting huge volumes of [data], and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.

As for costs, training expenses are in the tens of billions of dollars while revenues from AI are, at best, in the billions of dollars—not a sustainable economic model. Finally, the evidence is mounting that AI does not quite boost productivity the way its evangelists have touted because “while these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them.” Someone still has to check for AI hallucinations, and “this means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll.” Or to put it another way, “self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.”

Which brings me back to why I think these two articles share common threads of thought and what made me revisit my original posting about AI. Both articles obviously point to AI’s limitations, and the grading one is simply a specific example of the “productivity boundary” Mims discusses. Both articles have a cautionary tone about AI being the be-all-end-all solution to “all life’s problems” the way its many proselytizers want to claim it can be, and the grading one even brings up the economics of AI as it warns about schools jumping on the proverbial bandwagon and purchasing AI grading systems too quickly.

But it was the analogy of the truck driver that caused all the metaphorical gears in my head to click into place. English and history teachers don’t just teach writing, and when they grade the writing, it is not just the quality of the writing they are grading. They are not “just driving the truck.” I am confident that ChatGPT could be a marvelous tool for catching run-on and incoherent sentences or for catching disorganized paragraphs and poor thesis statements, and if using it for that would enable an already overburdened teacher the chance to get a few additional drafts for an essay accomplished in their class, I’m on board. The only way you get better at writing is to write.

However, what ChatGPT cannot catch (and here is where I suspect at least some of those discrepancies in the percentages found in the grading research come from) is the quality, the originality! of thought and ideas that a given piece of writing expresses. Only the human teacher can do that because only the human teacher has actual intelligence as defined by biology: the capacity to use existing knowledge to solve an original, unique, and novel problem. No AI can solve a problem it hasn’t already seen—which is part of what Mims hints at with his remark about “10 more internets;” only a human mind could create them—and that is why we will still need the human teacher to do the final grading.

Which brings me back to some of the themes I first addressed in Catechism and AI. In looking back at that essay (where I first wrote about this misuse of the word “intelligence” in computer science), I realized that what the technological breakthroughs since then have made possible is the deepening of the illusion of intelligence. Once something like ChatGPT could be trained on the entire internet, pretty much every prior human answer to a problem was now part of the algorithm, and so when you present it with a problem that is novel to you, it appears like it can solve it on its own. It appears intelligent. And since problems truly novel to everyone who has ever lived grow exponentially fewer each day, AI can appear intelligent quite a bit of the time.

However, present it with a problem that is novel to both you and the AI and suddenly you get one of those hallucinations Mims points out you need an actual human to fix. That remains the limitation of AI: it cannot handle the truly novel, the genuinely unique. Nor can it create it. As I’ve written before, AI may be capable of producing a mimic of a Taylor Swift song, but it cannot produce an actual Taylor Swift song. The challenge is in remembering that the mimic isn’t really Taylor Swift.

Again, here is where the technological breakthroughs since I first wrote about AI have deepened the illusion. The content generated by AIs such as ChatGPT may look novel because that particular arrangement of words, images, etc. happens to look novel to you. But somewhere, at some time, some human mind already put those same words, images, etc. together; some human mind created. And you are just now on the receiving end of a tool that we can now train on what every human mind has created to date for the past 10,000 years. The ultimate catechism! And a lot of prior human creativity with which to fool someone. We see a parallel in the development of the performance of magic shows: one hundred years ago, we only had the technology to create the illusion of a woman sawn in half; forty years ago, David Copperfield has the tools to make the Statue of Liberty appear to disappear. None of it is any less illusory; it just gets harder to tell.

And where that fact may grow increasingly problematic is in the realm of another theme from my earlier writing: interpersonal relationships. When I first wrote about AI five years ago, Her was only a movie; now it’s a reality. For a monthly subscription, I can have the AI companion of my choice (romantic, platonic, and/or therapeutic), and have “someone” in my life who will never push back on me. Add DoorDash, Amazon, and Netflix, and I could spend the rest of my life once I retire (or get a work-from-home internet job) in my own solipsistic bubble without any need for any direct human contact ever again. Not gonna happen as they say, but the fact that I can write those words should be sobering (and shuddering) to anyone reading them. Because if we are ultimately successful at reducing our most basic humanity to an illusion, climate change and the next pandemic are going to be the least of our concerns.

Yet if Christopher Mims is correct, then AI may rapidly be approaching its illusory limits, and if Tate and her crew are correct, then watchful use of AI may help teachers give their students more practice improving their writing skills—and therefore their thinking skills—while not adding to their grading loads. So perhaps there is cause for optimism. The key, I think, is always to remember that the “I” in AI is—at least for now—a biological falsehood, and what I now realize was missing from my earlier work on AI is the necessary emphasis on novelty being at the core, the essence of what it means to be intelligent. That doesn’t mean the CS folks may not eventually pull off an algorithm that truly can create. But for now, we do not live in that world, and we just need to keep reminding ourselves regularly of the reality of that fact.

References

Barshay, J. (May 20, 2024) AI Essay Grading Could Help Overburdened Teachers, But Researchers Say It Needs More Work. KQED/Mind Shift https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/63809/ai-essay-grading-could-help-overburdened-teachers-but-researchers-say-it-needs-more-work.

Mims, C. (May 31, 2024) The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-revolution-is-already-losing-steam-a93478b1?mod=wsjhp_columnists_pos1.

The (Hand)Written Word

Every time you invent a technology,
you also invent a responsibility.
—Aza Raskin, Co-founder
Earth Species Project

As someone who does a lot of thinking, values thinking, and does quite a bit of thinking about thinking, it can be hard sometimes to look at the general state of thinking in our society and not become demoralized. When 20% of voters believe President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion in this country, it can look like the conspiracy theorists have won. When a third of those aged 18-29 are getting 100% of their “news” from TikTok, it is little wonder that half the nation remains convinced that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 50 years (despite being at a near record low). And when we have people forming intimate relationships with AI companions rather than fellow human beings (at great risk to your national security it turns out), it can simply feel like it is time to toss hands in the air and start researching survivalist bunkers on-line.

Furthermore, adding fuel to all this has been one of my classes this academic year in which I have observed almost no collective intellectual growth from last September to today—something I have never witnessed in my now 35-year career. And lest I be accused of subjective bias, I am not alone in this empirical observation; the grade-level dean and others at my school are concerned by what we have failed to see happen over the past 9 months in so many of these students’ courses.

With one exception: math. Math classes have all seen growth—sometimes simply COVID recovery—but growth nonetheless and across the board at all levels.

Why?

My hypothesis is based on an observation. There were, of course, individual exceptions in my class in terms of growth over the year, and when identifying what both the act of learning math and these individual growth exceptions have in common, it is one thing: writing by hand. My students in my biology class that grew intellectually over the year completed all their work by hand—just as they would have had no choice but to do in their math courses; you can’t readily manipulate equations on a screen.

The science behind my hypothesis is pretty solid and grows with each new study. We have known since 2014 from research done at Princeton University that students who take notes by hand do demonstrably better on tests than student who only type their notes on a laptop. But recently, using fMRI to perform brain scans, we are discovering what is actually different in the brain between handwriting and typing and why writing by hand is so central to better learning outcomes. For starters, handwriting produces significantly higher levels of electrical activity across many more interconnected brain regions than typing does—perhaps most significantly in the motor cortex. While typing and handwriting both employ movements in your hands and fingers to generate words, writing by hand demands significantly more communication between the motor cortex and visual cortex, engaging the brain more deeply as it must constantly align each finger’s position with the mental models of the letters and words being written. Put simply, as neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer says, “when you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing an A is entirely different from producing a B.”

The implications for younger children are profound. Those, for example, who learn to trace out the alphabet by hand have significantly better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of words, which when combined with the improvement in memory and recall handwriting produces, leads to better reading skills—the very foundation of all education. As van der Meer puts it, “if young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won’t reach their full potential”—with all the scary possible long-term consequences that can come from that. It is, perhaps, why several states are passing laws to require handwriting lessons again in elementary schools and why California is going so far as to require training in cursive once more.

But it is not just the youngest who benefit from writing by hand. Having laid a foundation of literacy through the handwritten word, older children and adults who continue this practice have a better understanding of whatever material they are studying because the act of writing by hand causes the brain to engage with said material more intensely (their brains are literally working harder at the task). Thus, note taking with pencil, pen, or stylus (it is the physical motion that counts) leads to significantly richer, deeper learning as well as better memory formation and recall, and it is why, though I compose using a keyboard, I still always outline my thoughts for these essays by hand:

It is the only way I can assure that I am presenting my best thinking.

Which brings me back to my class that doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any collective growth this year and a world in which good thinking seems in short supply. I have watched for over a decade now as many individuals—and especially my students—have increasingly off-loaded cognitive tasks to their digital devices (taking a picture of something, for example, rather than trying to remember it), and I am left wondering if we have not reached a critical tipping point in that process. Yadurshana Sivashankar of the University of Waterloo in Ontario reminds us that “if we’re not actively using these areas (those involved in these cognitive tasks), then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills,” and my ah-ha moment with this particular class came when I recently had them correct a quiz in my presence rather than as homework. Instead of looking back at their notes to work out what they had done wrong, nearly all of them simply googled their questions and wrote down verbatim what appeared on their screens. It was not about learning from mistakes (or learning at all, for that matter); it was about completing a task and checking off a “to-do” box.

Well, that is something I can try to change as an educator. Starting next year, no more off-loading. Just a really, really big supply of paper, pencils, and pens, and a lot of higher quality thinking. Together, we’ll all write by hand.

References

Campbell, R.M. (Dec. 2023) “AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security.” Scientific American, pp. 73-74.

Glueck, K. & Corasaniti, N. (May 28, 2024) Eyeing Trump, but on the Fence: How Tuned-Out Voters Could Decide 2024. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-biden-voters.html.

Hu, C. (May 2024) Hand-on: Writing by Hand Comes with Learning Benefits. Scientific American, p. 13.

Lambert, J. (May 11, 2024) Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D. (April 23, 2014) The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614524581.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) “Conspiracy Theories Then and Now” Scientific American, pp. 80-81.

A Letter to the Class of 2024

We are not educated for darkness.
—Constance Fitzgerald

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
—Diane Ackerman

Winners play hurt.
—Vince Lombardi

Dear Members of the Class of 2024,

When essayist and author, Robert Fulghum, was once asked why all his books were so similar, he replied that he returned again and again to just a few common themes because only these were central to his thinking. Hence, he went on to say:

If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it is not a matter of sloppy editing. I’m repeating myself. I’m reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right. And I’m wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again because I’m not finished with them. And may never be. Work-in-progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on (p. 30).

I share these words because I find myself once again authoring this annual letter to all of you, knowing that I still do not yet have it quite right. And while there are only so many ways for those of us who have loved and cared for you to send you on to the next chapter in your narrative—and usually clichéd ways at that!—I, like Fulghum, feel compelled to try.

So here goes: one final set of lessons from the heart for the soul.

To begin with, like Fulghum, I too have found certain common themes arising regularly as I have written this epistle each year, and an especially big, “elephant-in-the-living-room” one is the fact that the world your elders and I are leaving you is one hot mess—both literally and figuratively. I do not need to itemize the details of the disasters; you get enough of that from your daily feeds. However, it can be quite challenging not to give in to despair in the face of such dysfunction, and “too often we either submit and surrender our souls to the social consensus [that originates it], or withdraw in passive narcissism” (Radical, p. 34). Worse, “the temptation in hard times is to become the inferno” and burn it all down in one great Götterdämmerung (Garden, p. 21; my emphasis). Hence, in a world where—as Billy Joel once wrote—“we didn’t start the fire,” how do you find the resilience and inner resources to become an effective agent for positive change?

It starts by attending to, deeply listening to, and embracing the Stranger (what in neuroscience terms is the prefrontal cortex encountering the totally new). Only interaction with the unfamiliar can challenge us to grow and to change, and more importantly, only interaction with the Stranger enables us to realize that “other people are not required to perform roles in one’s internal play, no matter how wise, good, or reasonable the script may seem” (Garden, p. 18). When you gain this perspective, you realize that each of us is caught up in our own narrative and can only revise that narrative when we allow another’s narrative to enter into our own. When that happens, suddenly the “jerk” cutting you off at the traffic light could be the parent frantically heading to the hospital with a seriously injured child, or the distant and seemingly dismissive waiter could be struggling to manage chronic pain that is in no way their fault.

Is the “jerk” at the light probably still actually a jerk? Of course. But once you’ve embraced the Stranger—and there will be lots of opportunities as you leave the familiar for the unknown in the coming years—you can no longer judge another with the righteous certainty you once did. You have a more expansive, compassionate narrative guiding your life, making you a more effective agent in this world. What’s more, since this is a graduation moment and clichés are mandatory, the cliché for this lesson is: learn to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it will make you a better walker.

Granted, all this learning can be discomfiting—especially in the alien and uncharted waters where you are all next headed. As Mary Rose O’Reilley puts it, “to be stretched almost beyond where you can go is acutely painful. One often fails and failure brings pain. One must court doubt and despair in the process of learning anything at all” because as a neuroscientist might put it, “if your brain isn’t uncomfortable, you aren’t learning anything” (Garden, p. xii). Or to put it another way, if you are not heavily invested in the change you wish to see, there will be no change—in you, in others, or in the world. Hence, in a very real way, to learn is to love enough to let whatever you are loving fundamentally alter your narrative, alter who you are.

Ah! But any act of love—even the smallest—leaves us vulnerable to being wounded, opening up the possibility for darkness in our lives, and that brings me to a second theme I have found myself returning to again and again over the years: the reality of Constance Fitzgerald’s words at the start of this letter. Too often, we do not teach about the character of darkness, that is has a purpose and a value in our lives. Instead, we tend to revile it or try to pretend it’s not there because confronting it can be so difficult. Yet, the simple truth is that “darkness interrogates us at the places where our knowledge of reality is most deficient, our illusions most entrenched” (Garden, pp. 70-71). It is what “comes along to tell us we’re worshipping an inadequate object…to loosen us from the bondage of a devotion we’ve offered to an unworthy object, a false god” (Garden, p. 21). Thus, it is only through our encounters with moments of darkness that we truly stretch who we are as a person, truly grow, and I can share from firsthand experience that it is the only path to wisdom.

However, occassionally a time of darkness will take on a life of its own, and that is when you must discover the power of wintering. We all do it at some point in our lives, and no matter how it arrives, it is usually unexpected, isolating, and emotionally raw. Yet, as author Katherine May puts it so eloquently:

It’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless unvarying high season. But life’s not like that…Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we are able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line…[winter will come] (p. 11).

And when it does, you must remember that it is actually the crucible for life, not its ending. There can be no spring without the rejuvenating and healing power of winter, and “since [its] pain will come to us anyway, why not figure out how to deal with it. It’s hard to grasp the connection between suffering and spiritual growth if we think of [living] only as a way to gain peace and tranquility” (Garden, pp. 74-75). The proverbial bottom line is that you have to engage the world as you are at any given moment, and sometimes that means you will “play hurt.” It is not one of the “fun” lessons of adulthood, but it is one of its more vital ones.

What’s more, as you “play”—both hurt and healthy—I hope you will begin to learn the lesson which all of you, my students, have taught me over these many years. Experiencing both aching and healing, alienation and grace, sin and salvation throughout the coming years, you may start to notice the paradox that you actually need all of these to become fully human and that it is only out of that full humanity that you can affect the change you wish to see in the world. The yin and yang of life is like breathing, and it is what you do with the life which this breathing makes possible that matters. Therefore, learn to breathe well and then choose what to do with the life that results in a thoughtful and self-reflective manner.

And, yes, while modern neuroscience may have demonstrated that the agency to do this choosing may simply be a cognitive illusion generated by the brain, that doesn’t mean that the character of the illusion isn’t important. As Mary Rose O’Reilley argues, “it matters what metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves” (pp. 26-27), and as Norman Vincent Peale once wrote, “change your thoughts and you change your world.” Hence, as you now journey forth, I pray for each of you that you choose your individual metaphors and thoughts well. They will define you (however illusory that may be) and, consequently, they will define your impact on this world.

Finally, always remember that “somewhere there is a great mystery that wants to come live in your house and change everything” (Radical, p. 48). Be open to it when it arrives; welcome it. It will have much to teach you; you will have much to learn. Reject it at your peril (spoken from hard-won experience) and always remember that the obvious and predictable are not always the safest road to travel: you can get just as disoriented and lost in the familiar as you can in the unknown. Therefore, consider the road less traveled as you let your next great mystery into your life, and remember that Frost was right when it wrote all those years ago about how it can make all the difference.

Congratulations, then, and may the coming celebrations be joyous ones!

References

Fulghum, R. (1991) Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Side of the Refrigerator Door. New York: Villard Books.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books.

O’Reilley, M. R. (2005) The Garden at Night: Burnout & Breakdown in the Teaching Life. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

O’Reilley, M. R. (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Some Disheartening Developments

If you have raced with men on foot
and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage
in the thickets by the Jordan?
—Jeremiah 12:5

Despite what my title might suggest, today’s essay is not about the educational costs of the pandemic. I have already written extensively about that topic (see the LoC Archives page for anyone interested), and if you want the most recent data, I suggest checking out the NYT’s article available in the references. In fact, the only thing I will lift up about the latest findings is that we now know that all the school closings had nearly zero impact on slowing the spread of the virus; we could have kept them open and avoided nearly all of the learning damage.

No, what I want to focus on today are some recent developments in the world of education that are worth bringing to everyone’s attention because as I ended my last posting pointing out: we are all in this together. So here goes.

The most recent item to cross my attention was an article this past week about the expense of repairing the educational costs of the pandemic, as well as the—yet again—absence of political will to address it. As all Marylanders (and my regular readers) know, our state has recently legislated and initiated a massive 10-year, eventually $3 billion dollars per year education reform movement called the “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.” In it are requirements to expand public Pre-K schooling for all children ages 3-4 and to provide all schools with high-quality and diverse educators (with an emphasis on National Board Certification). In addition, there are requirements for preparing students for college and career readiness, more resources for low-income students, and the necessary governance and accountability programs to oversee the entire effort.

However, in a state already facing a teacher shortage of 2,000 unfilled positions and now facing a projected revenue shortfall of $255 million dollars in the coming fiscal year, teachers and educational leaders are currently being asked to triage their biggest challenges in implementing the Blueprint before the process has even started. Here we are, in one of the richest states in the richest society in the history of humanity, and we are already shorting the necessary investment in our children because no one wants to state the obvious: you get what you pay for, and in this case, that means additional taxation—America’s “third rail” in politics.

Not that Maryland is alone. The same morning that I read the Blueprint article, NPR had a story on the negative impact that losing the $190 billion dollars in pandemic emergency relief funds from the Federal government will have on schools across the nation. As John Gies, a high school principal in rural Ohio put it, “while those pandemic dollars are running out, the problems the pandemic exploded, like missed learning and a student mental health crisis, are still here…we just really need some help from the government.” Help that all interviewed for the story openly acknowledged is not likely to come, leaving reporter Cory Turner musing at the story’s end:

So what happens now? It seems unlikely that Congress will be in the mood to agree on even more funding for schools. Which means in the coming months, districts across the country will face some hard choices about whether they can afford to keep giving students all the help they need.

All the help they need. Need. Not “help-full.” Not “beneficial.” Not “useful.” Need. As in necessary, critical, vital to their well-being. I know I have written before about how fundamentally anti-child our society is, but as both these news items came to my attention this past week, I was reminded once again of a quote of Barbara Kingsolver’s that bears repeating here: “if it takes a village to raise a child, our children are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home…where we seem to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil” (pp. 102 & 100). Until we see our children in a different light than we currently do, then we will reap what we sow, and right now, I fear we are sowing our own dissolution.

And we seem to be doing so in more ways than one when it comes to what’s happening in the world of education. Another recent item in my in-box was Jessica Grose’s op-ed about a middle school in California where students have employed AI technologies to manufacture false pornographic photos and short videos of their female classmates by taking head shots from existing, decidedly non-pornographic on-line photos and combining them with nude photos and videos from other sources. Of course, the students involved then shared these digitally constructed items with others—making them a permanent part of the lives of both the victims and the victimizers (as well as violating numerous laws)—and all because these children don’t yet have pre-frontal cortices developed enough to know how truly stupid, irresponsible, and harmful they have been. Yet legislation at any level can’t seem to get out of even committee to put guardrails on such technology, let alone simply acknowledge the danger it poses—especially the threat to our children’s very capacity to become healthy adults.

Not that all adults in children’s lives are themselves of sound and rational mind. While we might consider as “sins of omission” the failure to adequately fund schools across this land and to protect developing minds from digital technologies that trigger the same neural pathways as cocaine does, the actions of Escambia County in Florida (home to Pensacola) most definitely could be considered “sins of commission.” There, elected officials have taken upon themselves the “obligation” to “protect young minds” from such “dangerous material” as the following: The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary. All of which have now been removed from every school library in the county and placed into storage along with “eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records.”

Fortunately, some sanity still exists in Florida, and two parents in the county—yes, 2! out of a population of 322,390 as of the 2021 census—have joined in a lawsuit against the county school board to return these alleged “hazards” to their schools’ libraries. Hopefully, as Heidi Stevens puts it, “the children of Escambia County [will soon] once again [be] allowed to look upon words.” But even more importantly, they will hopefully be allowed to learn that “definitions are not the enemy. Dictionaries are not the enemy. Thesauruses are not the enemy. Encyclopedias are not the enemy. Knowledge is not the enemy” (my emphasis). What is the enemy is ignorance, “and it should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t: A child is far better served looking up a word—any word—in a dictionary than typing that word into Google, where a world of images, videos and misleading garbage awaits” (Stevens).

Which brings me to my last disheartening development of the past few weeks. This one is strictly anecdotal, but I do not think that makes what happened any less compelling. It was during one of my scheduled meetings with my advisory, and we were playing Pictionary as a way of unwinding right before spring break. It is a favored game of ours, and to make it a little competitive, I divide the group into two teams, with the winning team allowed to decide which confectionary treat I bake for them—which is itself an inside joke because the winning team always chooses my lemon bars—but nevertheless, they can still get quite competitive about it.

Well, on this occasion, the competition was a little more intense than usual, and both teams were trying to pick particularly challenging words for the other to draw. Or more accurately, they were googling on their phones for challenging words to use, and when I saw the terms they were picking, I was stunned. These are 10^th graders, most of who are at least 16 years old, and they were needing an on-line search engine to find words that were part of my basic vocabulary by the time I was in 5^th grade—vocabulary that I was expected to know and assessed for by the time I was 12. I knew my students of the past decade were not developing the same long-term memory storage banks as in the first two decades of my career, and I had seen the practical consequences of this reality in my classroom. But here, that ignorance—and the degree of it!—was staring me existentially in the face in a way it never has before, and the despondency that settled over me for the rest of the day was profound.

However, it was not my final outcome, nor can it ever be. No matter how disheartening the recent developments in schools, none of us in our society can afford to ignore them nor to be ignorant of them. Anyone who has read my project updates since their inception in the spring of 2020 knows that I regularly use these essays in part to process the realities of teaching in the 21^st Century, in part to share these realities to challenge others to action, and in part as an act of hope. The truth is: dispelling the darkness is never easy. But if we do not know the nature of its current character, we cannot know what type of flame to bring to the task. Thus, if any of this essay’s revelations have sparked a response in you, I encourage you to determine how you can fan it into a fire to light your own way forward.

I will keep offering these reflections to keep fanning mine.

Coda

Since I first drafted this essay, two things have happened that bear on it. The first is the tragic collapse of the Key Bridge into the Baltimore harbor. In addition to the pain of the families who lost their loved-ones that morning will come the economic pain that will reverberate in my adopted home for years to come. The region is losing $15 million dollars a day in revenue for every day the port remains closed, and even once re-opened, the impact of rerouting over 10 million cars and trucks annually will be felt for at least a decade (one woman interviewed shared that her commute is now an hour longer, and she will not be alone). The new reality is that in a state already struggling with how to pay for school reforms before this catastrophe, that $255 million shortfall is going to look like a pittance.

Yet, amidst this tragedy, I received an e-mail from a former student of mine from the class of 2010, informing me that her lab team was just selected to build the seismometers going with the astronauts to the Moon on the Artemis III mission in 2026. She was writing to thank me (as well as another friend and former colleague), and in her own words, “you both are the most influential teachers I have had over a *very* long time spent in school, so I wanted you to be the first of my non-space community to know other than my parents. Thank you for getting me here, even if it has been a while. :)”

Now, I do not wish to suggest that these two events are even remotely on the same scale. However, I share them because together they are intimate reminders that life’s journey is fundamentally the paradox of BOTH tragedy AND triumph, and if we spend too much time consumed with one or the other, we lose the necessary balance to navigate our “4,000 weeks” successfully. The same is true of teaching; if I cannot find ways to harmonize the heartening with the disheartening, I lose the ability to engage authentically in the classroom. It is a lesson worth relearning; it is a lesson worth remembering.

I suspect the same could be said of us all.

References

Grose, J. (March 2, 2024) A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/opinion/deepfakes-teenagers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

Haidt, J. (March 13, 2024) End the Phone-Based Childhood Now: The Environment in Which Kids Grow Up Today is Hostile to Human Development. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/.

Kingsolver, B. (1995) Somebody’s Baby. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. New York: HarperCollins.

Mervosh, S.; Miller, C.; & Paris, F. (March 19, 2024) What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/upshot/pandemic-school-closures-data.html.

Price, L. (March 20, 2024) School Leaders Outline Effort: Implementing Blueprint Law is Going to be ‘Herculean’ Task. The Baltimore Sun, pp. 1-2.

Schmitz, R. (March 19, 2024) Standardized Test Scores for Teens in Germany are Down. Teachers aren’t Surprised. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1239388574/standardized-test-scores-for-teens-in-germany-are-down-teachers-arent-surprised.

Stevens, H. (Jan. 21, 2024) Now Dictionaries? Do Better, Grown-Ups. The Baltimore Sun (Life & Travel), p. 6.

Turner, C. (March 20, 2024) The $190 billion in Emergency Funds Given to Schools During the Pandemic is Ending. NPR Morning Edition.https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239609135/the-190-billion-in-emergency-funds-given-to-schools-during-the-pandemic-is-endin.

The Good Teacher

We have committed what to the republican founders was the cardinal sin:
we have put our own good as individuals ahead of the common good.
—Robert Bellah

We can defend whatever image of man we choose to defend.
—Norris K. Smith

In their book, The Good Society, Robert Bellah and his team followed up their ground-breaking research about the negative impacts of unrestrained individualism in our society with a presentation of a case for how we as Americans might once again live more in accordance with the republican values argued for by our Founders—values in which the benefits of personal freedom are not found at the expense of the common good. They, like Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue, make similar arguments that what has gone missing from our society today is a shared understanding of the purpose of communal life and an absence of the internalized personal qualities needed to achieve this purpose. Bellah, et al do not use the actual language of “telos” and “virtue” as McIntyre does, but a teleological understanding of what it means to be a good society and the character needed to achieve it inform their entire case.

I share all this because as I have thought about how I want to make my case from last time that we humans have some common—even transcendent—conceptions of what living a good life entails, I have come see that I may need to follow a similar path in my arguing. I inherit the language of “virtues” and “purpose” and “ends” from thousands of years of human thought, and while it jerks this Kantian’s chain to do so, I find myself needing to employ some pseudo-Aristotelian elements in my argument. Just didn’t want any of my readers with formal training in philosophy to suddenly go “Hey! Didn’t he say he’s an anti-Aristotelian??” and simply dismiss me as a hypocrite.

Okay. Enough digressing. What I want to do today is to explore the nature of the “good,” starting with a narrow lens and working my way out from there, and therefore, I want to start with something I am intimately familiar with and to examine: what makes the good teacher? I’ve clearly written plenty about what I think constitutes good teaching, but what about the character of the individual doing it? In the language of Aristotle, what virtues must one possess to achieve the end, the telos, of being a good teacher? I want to identify three (though I think there are more), and I will explore them individually to try to make my case. They are: integrity, courage, and compassion; so let’s start with integrity.

First, when I use the term “integrity,” I am employing it in its fullest meaning—not just the notion of accurate, honest, and truthful but the concept of having a fully integrated self—and I employ it that way because one of the fundamental tasks teachers have to do nearly every second of every moment in the classroom is to judge other human beings. From grading to classroom management to disciplining, teachers are judging those in their care nearly nonstop, and if a teacher does not have the self-reflective capacity that comes with a fully integrated sense of self, they cannot recognize those moments when they have mis-judged.

Which is, second, why I claim integrity is one of the virtues of the good teacher. Not only do all those judgements need to be made as accurately, honestly, and truthfully as possible, the reality is that when they are not (or are made poorly), that fact needs to be recognized immediately and the necessary steps taken right away to repair a now broken relationship. Because all the research shows that the quality of the teacher-student relationship directly determines the quality of the learning occurring; hence, without integrity, a teacher cannot provide the best environment for student success.

The next virtue I am suggesting is “courage,” and again, I mean it in the fullest sense of the word—everything from bravery to resilience to resolve. Effective teaching involves determination, caring, vulnerability, and appropriately intimate rapport, and as a co-learner, it involves risking and making mistakes, not always knowing an answer to a question, and other similar moments of exposure to the judgement of others. Furthermore, on a pragmatic note, the profession also involves long hours for subpar renumeration compared to similar levels of training, as well as these day enduring the proverbial “slings & arrows” of education’s stakeholders (we do not get a lot of respect from society at large). Yet again, though, it is all about the quality of the teacher-student relationship, and if an educator cannot find the courage to put their best self into that relationship, learning suffers. It is with much reason that renowned educator, Parker Palmer, titled his magnum opus, The Courage to Teach.

Finally, I want to argue that the good teacher has the virtue of compassion—also meant in the fullest sense of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. I believe that they must have this virtue because to know others truly as we ourselves are known requires love. Without love, the trust children need to risk willingly withers, and without willful risks, growth and change are simply not possible. Hence, the good teacher loves their students and seeks constantly to draw out in their students the power and strength to create the meanings that will surpass the teacher’s, and it is therefore in this gift of loving that the strongest teacher-student relationship can arise and the very best learning can occur. Without compassion, fully effective education just doesn’t happen.

However, the same can be said of a lot of human activity, and that is my ultimate point. Place the word “good” in front of almost any descriptor of a human—good coach, good waiter, good person—and the qualities of integrity, courage, and compassion are central to our understanding of their goodness. Indeed, I suggest that what all those millennia of crowd-sourcing I referenced in my last essay have determined to be true is that integrity, courage, and compassion are intrinsic a priori to any human understanding of the “good.”

Take compassion. Variants of the Golden Rule are found in every religion, culture, and philosophical tradition on the planet. Or integrity. A social species may or may not be able to survive without it (though probably not for long without it), but as countless civilizations that have risen and fallen have empirically demonstrated, such a species will never thrive without it. Courage, of course, is the tough one on my list because synonyms of the word have regularly been associated heavily with militaristic roles and behaviors. Yet even there, I would suggest that the historical moments of nonviolent resistance have demonstrated what true courage actually is and have even regularly evoked the virtue of compassion in others (images such as those from the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday helped make the success of the Civil Rights movement possible).

Which brings me back to where I left off the last time I wrote. I made the claim that humans have determined that to live a good life is our telos, and that certain qualities of what that means—a life of integrity, courage, and compassion—are transcendent. You can decide for yourself if I’ve now made good (no pun intended) on the second claim; therefore, I want to conclude by turning my attention to the first one, that the good life is our telos.

But to do that I first need to remind us that the original Greek word as understood by Aristotle was that anything and everything has an ultimate end or purpose and that you cannot understand an object or a structure without discerning what this end or purpose is. A hoe, for instance, has the ultimate purpose of cutting soil in a particular fashion, and the difference between Aristotelian teleological thinking and modern teleology is that Aristotle thought that this telos was inherent to the hoe itself, baked in to the very essence of its structure. A hoe could literally not be a hoe without its telos.

Well, humans can literally not be humans without making meaning. Our brains are genetically hardwired to take our sensory input and add narrative to it. And as I argued last time, billions of minds over millennia of millenniums have regularly, consistently, and continually constructed the narrative—made meaning—that the ultimate purpose of being human is to live a good life. Thus, if something innate to our very nature keeps doing the same thing, I want to suggest that maybe we’re on to something after all.

Why then, though, has our society seemingly either abandoned this telos entirely or reduced it to the isolated “my good life?” This is where the critiques of Bellah, et al and MacIntyre hold up a powerful mirror for us to learn from, and we fail to pay attention to them at our peril. All virtues, of course, are aspirational, never fully achievable. But if we stop aspiring—as the minute by minute news barrage would seem to indicate too many of us have already done—then we are in real danger. As Bellah and his team put it in The Good Society:

We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295).

I plan to hold up my end of the proverbial bargain and keep striving to be a good teacher who seeks to help their students learn how to be human well, and I am confident that many of my fellow educators will continue to do likewise as well. But we are going to need some allies.

Any takers?

References

Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.