Educating for Intellectual Virtue

I want to have a favorable impact
on my students’ relationship to learning.
—Jason Baehr

I learned this week of a news story that probably didn’t catch a lot of people’s attention. Given the general large-scale chaos happening right now—from the Ebola outbreak in central Africa to the tit-for-tat over the Strait of Hormuz—it is hardly surprising that this story might fly under the proverbial radar of many an individual’s attention (even those of us who actively seek to remain accurately informed citizens). But apparently there has been an on-going battle, led by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, over the accreditation process for colleges and universities in Florida and five other states in the traditionally Deep South. Specifically, a battle over accreditation agencies—i.e. who gets to legally certify the academic credentials of institutions of higher ed.

I will spare readers the full details (references available below), but it is essentially the latest skirmish in the culture wars over the so-called (and alleged) liberal bias in today’s academia. DeSantis and others claim that they want to break “the ideological stronghold” of the existing accreditation process, “ensuring higher education prioritizes student achievement without ideological capture” by making sure that colleges and universities can prove that there are an “appropriate number” of conservative scholars teaching on their campuses. In other words, they want to replace what they perceive as one type of dogmatism with their own.

I share this story because having introduced Jason Baehr’s notion of intellectual virtue in my most recent essay, I am struck by how many of what he would call the intellectual vices—“laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice” (p. 31)—are at work in the efforts of DeSantis and his fellow collaborators. Rather than allow what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” with its “liberal science” (a “set of rules for social behavior, rules for settling conflict” [p. 30]) to determine what is best taught through the testing of fallible hypotheses, DeSantis, et al simply believe they should be able to dictate a curriculum that conforms to the ideology of their liking.

That is why I so fundamentally agree with Baehr that it is so critical to teach the intellectual virtues overtly: to combat the attempts of Ron DeSantis and his like-minded crowd (i.e. the Charlie Kirks of this world) to undermine these same virtues. Therefore, let us explore how Baehr thinks we should go about doing so in our schools and classrooms.

He starts by pointing out that “in teaching for intellectual virtues, we aim to facilitate in our students a kind of personal reorientation, a reconfiguring of some of their fundamental beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about think and learning” and that therefore, “those of us who are seeking to nurture the intellectual character of our students must adopt the long view. We must be prepared to engage in thoughtful and patient planting, watering, fertilizing, and tending” (p. 55). Put bluntly, this is not a one-and-done task; therefore, we need as educators to be prepared to make the necessary investments.

However, to make these, we need first, Baehr argues, to recall that we are all intellectually virtuous only to degrees, with “a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser [extent]” (p. 31). Hence, before we start teaching for intellectual virtue, we need to complete an honest inventory of the strengths and weaknesses of our own intellectual character. We need “an informed and accurate understanding of who we are as thinkers and learners” because otherwise, “we can’t know how to negotiate the landscape of thinking and learning [with our students]” (p. 111). Or in the immortal words of the Temple at Delphi, “know thyself.”

Once known and once invested, though, we need to recognize the limits which the cognitive developmental stage of our specific student population may place on what we can accomplish if we are to nurture their intellectual character successfully. Baehr believes this is especially true for what he calls the three dimensions or structures of the intellectual virtues: skill, judgment, and motivation. For example, the quality of questions I can elicit from a child (a skill for the virtue of curiosity) is going to differ—sometimes dramatically—depending on whether I teach kindergarten or graduate students. Likewise, helping students identify which questions are worthy of asking (the judgment dimension of curiosity) will again vary—potentially by quite a lot—given the developmental stage of my particular charges. Hence, identifying what skills and judgments are age-appropriate for my classes will be critical, according to Baehr, for the necessary lesson planning.

Yet what about the motivational element of the virtues? “Suppose I succeed at teaching my students how to switch perspectives or how to formulate thoughtful and insightful questions. They may or may not use this skill once they leave my classroom” (pp. 155-156) because they may or may not have had only an extrinsic reason—such as to earn a high grade—for employing it around me. Truly virtuous motivation, Baehr insists, is by definition intrinsic. Thus, how do we get our students to truly value what they are learning? How do we get them “to care about and seek the truth even if the truth should prove inconvenient” (p. 156; original emphasis)?

Baehr’s answer is modeling. Only as students can observe our own passion for what we teach (curiosity), our willingness to publicly acknowledge when we do not have an answer (humility), or our revelations about how our own understanding has changed over time (open-mindedness) …only as our students can watch us wrestle with shaping and growing our own intellectual character can we draw out in them the internalized motivation to do the same. They must see us practicing our own intellectual virtue.

And one of the best ways to do this, Baehr argues, is to have our students witness us teaching for deeper learning in our classes, not simply for the acquisition of a body of information. As he puts it, “intellectual virtues aim at understanding. [It] is the kind or variety of knowledge that intellectually virtuous people prize and pursue” because “when I have a complex understanding of something, I can explain what I understand to others [and] I can apply my knowledge to new situations, problems, and questions and make reliable predictions on the basis of this knowledge” (p. 124; original emphasis). Therefore, if my students can see me teaching for a deep, rich understanding of whatever material I am covering, they are—almost by definition—observing my own intrinsically motivated intellectual character in action.

But if there is a subtle theme that runs throughout my entire body of work, it is that this kind of teaching is never easy, always demanding. As Baehr reminds us, it “requires intentionally engineering opportunities for our students to think freely, ask challenging questions, and wrestle with ambiguity” (p. 59), and those kinds of opportunities are simply complex to generate and messy to manage. Anyone who takes this profession seriously knows that “teaching aimed at facilitating deep learning and personal growth [is just hard]” (p. 65) and that it takes every bit of one’s own flawed, fallible character—intellectual and otherwise—to evoke it in children.

Perhaps, though, that’s the point. As Baehr quotes math teacher, Cari Noble of the Intellectual Virtues Academy charter school in Long Beach, California:

The best exemplar for students is one who shows growth. Sure, a completely formed very virtuous teacher would be an awesome role model but they would not be good at modeling how to improve. Only a teacher with flaws they are working on can authentically model how to make a virtue goal and work towards it (pp. 160-161).

Thus, in the end, educating for intellectual virtue isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey. And I think what Baehr wisely reminds all of us involved with young people is that the quality of that journey matters—for our students and for ourselves.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Montoya, O. (July 10, 2026) Some Republican States Push for New College Accreditation Agency. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5869546/some-republican-states-push-for-new-college-accreditation-agency.

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

Spitalniak, L. (July 7, 2026) Florida Loses Appeal Over College Accreditation. Higher Ed DIVE. https://www.highereddive.com/news/florida-loses-appeal-over-college-accreditation/824644/.

State of Florida (June 26, 2025) Governor Ron DeSantis Announces First-of-Its-Kind Alternative University Accreditor. Executive Office of the Governor. https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-first-its-kind-alternative-university-accreditor.

Intellectual Virtue

You want the inside of your head
to be an interesting place
to spend the rest of your life.
—Judith Shapiro

Recently, while making some claims about the role of character development in education, I was also reading a book by philosopher, Jason Baehr, who makes a claim of his own about the nature of individual character that I had not previously considered. He suggests that character is multidimensional in its qualities—with “intellectual character as a separate dimension of character, alongside its interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions” (p. 20)—and he argues that one of our chief goals as educators should be the maturation of this intellectual character in our students. As he presents it:

What will stay with our students isn’t the laundry list of names, dates, computations, and procedures we have covered. What endures are the dispositions and habits of character we have been able to nurture. What stays with us, what sticks from our education, are the patterns of behavior and thinking that have been engrained and enculturated over time. These are the residuals of education. These are the foundations of intellectual character (p. 19).

Baehr then goes on suggest that just as we use the language of “virtues” and “vices” when discussing the other components or properties of a given person’s character, we can employ these concepts as well when examining intellectual character, writing that:

Intellectual virtues are strengths, or excellences, of intellectual character [that] dispose people to act, think, and feel well or excellently in the context of inquiring, learning, and reasoning; [while] intellectual vices, by contrast, are defects or weaknesses of intellectual character, such as intellectual apathy, laziness, arrogance, dogmatism, and cowardice. They dispose people to act, think, and feel poorly or defectively in a learning context (p. 31; original emphasis).

Now traditionaly, I suspect most of us have tended to associate the notions of virtue and vice almost exclusively with what Baehr identifies as the interpersonal dimension of character (see my essays, Our Moral Nature and The Good Teacher). But after encountering Baehr’s basic thesis, I realized that the kind of intrapersonal character which Adam Grant studies could have potential virtues associated with it, too (e.g. self-discipline and determination), and that, therefore, Baehr’s talk of intellectual virtues might have value for those of us in education. So allow me to elaborate on what he thinks the nine of them are.

The first Baehr identifies is curiosity. But he is quick to point out that he is not speaking of the hard-wired kind built into our hippocampus to pay attention to and identify interesting stimuli. Instead, “we can think of [this] natural curiosity as the psychological soil out of which virtuous curiosity grows. The emergence of the latter is not guaranteed. For natural curiosity to blossom into the virtue of curiosity, it must be nurtured, shaped, and cultivated [by our learning]” (p. 36). In other words, rich, complex, deep questions don’t just happen; we have to develop the capacity to generate them.

Next on the list is autonomy, and what Baehr means by this is the capacity to think for oneself. He argues that intellectually autonomous individuals “form their own judgments and draw their own conclusions. They aren’t overly reliant on the assistance of others. Nor are they overly influenced by what other people think or say” (p. 36). And Baehr contrasts this with intellectually heteronomous thinkers “whose judgments and ways of seeing the world are dictated by other people and sources” and whose conclusions “tend to vary from situation to situation” (p. 37) depending on whoever is doing the preaching at the time—which is why heteronomists tend to be conformist; autonomists, not so much.

However, the danger of thinking for oneself is that all of us make cognitive mistakes and errors, and sometimes, we are just flat out wrong! Thus, autonomy’s partner in the intellectual virtues is humility, and those who possess it “are appropriately aware of and attentive to their intellectual limitations. They don’t try to conceal these limitations; nor do they respond defensively when their limitations are brought to light. Rather, they are accepting of their limitations and take appropriate responsibility for them” (p. 38). In other words, humble thinkers own their warts and scars.

Together, though, curiosity, autonomy, and humility, Baehr argues, only “[get] the learning process started and headed in the right direction,” which is why we need the next three virtues—attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness—”to keep the learning process on the right track” (p. 39). The first of these, being attentive, may seem self-explanatory, but what Baehr means by this virtue is something closer to what Buddhists call “mindfulness” in which the thinker has achieved sensory clarity and a concentrated focus on the matter at hand. Hence, we are not talking what a student’s body language or eye contact might suggest about how engrossed they are; we are talking about how carefully they are actually attending to the learning process in which they are engaged.

Likewise, the virtues of intellectual carefulness and thoroughness might seem self-evident or even duplicative. However, what Baehr means by the former is “an awareness of, and a disposition to adhere to, the rules of accuracy specific to a given domain” (p. 41; original emphasis); while what he means by the latter is the depth of understanding being sought. Thus, for example, a careful learner might know every word of the Gettysburg address but have no ability to explain its significance within the context of the American Civil War which a thorough learner of the speech could do. Which is why “thoroughness complements carefulness by resisting a kind of superficiality or conservatism to which careful thinkers can be drawn” (p. 44), and it is why Baehr distinguishes these two concepts as separate virtues.

Thus far, then, we have covered the three virtues which Baehr thinks get us started learning and the three that keep the process going in the right direction. His finally three are “for overcoming familiar obstacles that arise during the learning process” (p. 45), and they are open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity. Open-mindedness, of course, is the compliment of the intellectual virtue of humility and is about what The Mill Institute calls being “less certain, more curious.” It is the classic “look at a situation from all sides.” Meanwhile, courage compliments both curiosity and autonomy, with tenacity having a similar relationship to carefulness and thoroughness, and indeed, of the nine virtues, these three are the ones Baehr presents as more self-evident, spending less time defining what they are and more time defining what they aren’t. For example, about courage, he writes:

An absence of intellectually virtuous activity does not entail the existence of an intellectual vice. Many students who struggle with anxiety, for instance, are paralyzed by fear in a classroom setting. Although this fear may impede their intellectual growth, these students are not intellectual cowards (p. 47).

And about tenacity, he writes:

Intellectual tenacity is not mindless. When tenacious learners fail, they don’t simply try again, using the same strategy as before. Students who repeatedly retake an exam or rewrite a paper but do little to adjust their approach from one attempt to another aren’t manifesting the virtue of tenacity. The persistence of tenacious learners is intelligent (p. 49).

In fact, part of the power of Baehr’s exposition is that he clearly recognizes that “intellectual virtues and vices are possessed in degrees. People are more or less—not categorically—open-minded, closed-minded, intellectually careful, careless, and so forth” and that “relatedly, the intellectual character of most people is a mixed bag, a combination of virtues and vices, each quality possessed to a greater or lesser degree” (p. 31). In addition, he is clear that the absence of something does not imply its opposite, using the example of ADHD and attentiveness, arguing that “we need to distinguish an absence of attentiveness from the vice of inattentiveness, that is, a willful or voluntary tendency to check out or be mentally absent from the learning process” (p. 41; original emphasis).

Hence, in short, he openly acknowledges and treats us as the imperfect works-in-progress that we are, and that is precisely why he believes:

We can treat the intellectual character growth of our students as a worthwhile educational goal and allow this goal to inform and guide what we do in our classroom even if we know that the vast majority of our students won’t leave our classes having been transformed into paragons of intellectual virtue (p. 21).

I will save how he thinks we can teach in support of this goal for next time.

References

Baehr, J. (2021) Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

“It Takes a (Moral) Village…”

By oneself is wrong done,
By oneself is one defiled.
By oneself wrong is not done,
By oneself, surely, is one cleansed.
One cannot purify another;
Purity and impurity are in oneself.
—The Dhammapada

On July 15, 1979, then President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to the nation that history would come to call the “Crisis of Confidence” speech. In it, President Carter laid out the case that our society was suffering from a malaise of self-indulgence where “too many of us now worship consumption” and “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” He argued that as a country, we had adopted the mistaken understanding of freedom as “the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” and he astutely observed that “that path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

Well, here we are, nearly 50 years later, and as Ron Lieber of the New York Times recently pointed out, we are well on our way to that failure. He is worth quoting extensively here:

Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half…

Research by Tim Kasser and Jean Twenge showed that materialism among 12th graders increased over time, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Generation X, and then stayed at those historically high levels among millennials. “There was a trend underway at the time Carter was making this speech, and it basically just amplifies in the next 10 years rather than being suppressed,” said Mr. Kasser, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College, [who] watched these developments with a sense of foreboding, because his research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability…

And finally:

We will be tested again. Next time it may be a climate-related catastrophe, driven in part by the very patterns of consumption that Mr. Carter warned against in his speech. He called for turning down the thermostat in the winter and for 20 percent of the nation’s energy to come from solar power by 2000 — all these years later, we’ve done neither.

Which turns out to be truer than even I would have thought when I recently learned from a story in the local press of a couple paying nearly $900 for their heating bill this past month. This for a row house in the urban heat island that is the city even in winter. This for a place less exposed than my own three walls (I’m a duplex) and with fewer square feet. $900. What temperature, I thought, do you keep your house at??? For perspective, my largest heating bill ever was a little over $200.

However, putting my (self-righteous?) indignation aside, as we prepare to eulogize and bury President Carter this month, what strikes me most about his words all those years ago and the world we’ve created since is that the “village” has clearly been falling down on the job of “raising its children.” I may agree with the words attributed to the Buddha at the start of this essay that each of us is solely accountable for our individual moral character. Yet as I read these same words again, they remind me, too, that our moral nature is also a social construct. There truly is no such thing as a “oneself” in utter and absolute isolation; it takes indeed a “village” to make a self. What is more, it takes that same “village” to hold that same self individually morally accountable, and the paradox of this great truth is what our culture stumbles so badly over.

Take my discipline, for example. Everyone is rightly concerned about the declines in language and math skills seen since (and attributable to) the pandemic. But the interventions have focused almost exclusively on tutoring and other individualist efforts when the larger cause—absenteeism—has received proportionally little attention. “Chronic absenteeism [however] is not just bad for kids; it is bad for society. Learning is first and foremost a social endeavor, and kids learn to be part of a cohesive community by going to one every day” (Anderson & Winthrop). In other words, unless one is an integral part of the “village,” neither “village” nor “child” can thrive.

Which is the power of ex-President Carter’s example to us following his loss to Ronald Reagn in 1980. He chose to remain part of the “village” to the day of his death, holding both himself and others accountable for their choices and their actions and the impact of these on the larger world. With his hands, heart, and mind, he built literal villages as well as metaphorical ones, and those in turn helped raise tens of thousands out of poverty and into more participatory lives in their communities. He fundamentally embraced the paradox of the moral character of the relationship between “village” and “child,” and the lives he touched both directly and indirectly remain the better for that. His was very much a life worthy of modelling.

Would that the same could be said of all the political leaders in our lives.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Carter, J. (July 15, 1979) Crisis of Confidence. PBS American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/.

Lieber, R. (Dec. 29, 2024) Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism But, Alas, Wrong About Us. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html.

Prudente, T. & Gardner, H. (Jan. 5, 2025) Think Your BGE Bill is High? Rates are Rising. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/bge-rates-maryland-utility-winter-storm-ZT4JQLC3OZCCTMHPWNAVVS2LHY/.

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.

The New Year

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers,
our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
―Carl Sagan

While my experience of the new year traditionally aligns more with that of the Jewish calendar due to its chronological affiliation with the start of school each fall, the simple truth is that, technically, each day any of us wakes up is the start of the next year of our life. In fact, for most of human existence, the chronological documentation of the passage of time was a nebulous process at best, recognizing and adapting to seasonal changes but little more than that (hunter-gatherers don’t have weekends). However, with the rise of agrarian cultures—with their scribes and accounting systems—calendars were born, and we now have atomic clocks that lose only 1 second every 300 billion years. Which means one might argue that each moment of “now” you experience is officially the start of a new year.

Yet, the conscious marking of another year can have value as a means for taking stock of ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a society, and when we do that here at the start of 2024, what confronts us is sobering. Here are just some of the “highlights:”

We face a war of aggression and attrition in the Ukraine, with frightening parallels in our current U.S. response to that of Britain and France to the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938—threatening democracy now as it did then—and we face a war of retaliation and revenge in Gaza that threatens to degenerate into a genocide of the Palestinian people (and these are just the armed conflicts that get all the international press).
We have destabilized the planet’s climate to where once extreme weathers are now annual events—the correction of which would require the complete upheaval of our totally fossil-fuel dependent world economy—and we have generated an international migration “crisis” in response (that shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with basic organism population dynamics) as the animal, Homo sapiens, leaves untenable environments for more tenable ones.
We are currently engaged in a blind, headlong rush to develop AI technologies that threaten everything from jobs (both so-called “white-” as well a “blue-collar” ones) to national security to our very capacity to determine what is true versus what is false (and if we think the tech companies are suddenly going to regulate themselves, we have only to look at the $11 billion dollars they made off of our children in 2022 to dismiss that “magical thinking”).
What’s more, here in this country, we have an avowed authoritarian indicted with 91 felony charges running for President, aided by power seekers willing to “burn the village down to save it,” who is the front-runner for his party’s nomination and who joins all the other authoritarians he so admires, posing the greatest risks to democracy since the Second World War.

Add in a population so polarized by social media and “cancel culture” (both from the Right and the Left) and we have a society ripe for civil conflict. Indeed, for those of us who know our American history, the last time this country was this divided over its values—unable to compromise and to govern (with actual physical threats being made in our chambers of power)—it was the year 1860. Also, a Presidential election year. And arguably the most important election year in our nation’s history. Until maybe now. Is 2024 our next 1860?

As always, I look at this question through the lens of an educator as well as that of a citizen, and for the past couple of years, through work I have done as a teacher fellow with the Mill Institute (whose mission statement might best be summarized as “less certain, more curious”), I have worked with others in the profession to identify key features of constructive dialogue around contentious issues and to develop methods for nurturing such dialogue in schools. Like others before us, we have recognized that most value disagreements involve well-intentioned positions on both sides and that demonizing the other reduces their story and oversimplifies ones’ own, resulting in the diminishment of everyone. Thus, finding ways to engage students and educators alike in practicing these two tenents has been the focus of our work (and we have developed a number of training resources for anyone interested).

But what has come out of this work for me regarding this essay’s primary topic is the awareness of two dilemmas. The first is that—as former Stanford dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, puts it—“we’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other,” and yet developmentally, “today’s adolescents aren’t making it all the way” to this capacity for “adulting” because the cultural bubble of social media promotes a rigid understanding of right and wrong. The reality is that you never have to listen to the other person anymore, never entertain any truth claim their position might have on you, because you can simply scream your own sense of rightness (and righteousness) on these platforms instead. Hence, dilemma number one for me is whether we have the necessary critical mass of individuals in our society capable of the constructive dialoguing we will need to prevent a repeat of 1860.

The other dilemma for me, though, is that the value’s contest of 1860 forces the acknowledgment that some conflicts in values are beyond dialogue. The impasse over slavery did not allow for a constructive compromise; there is no possible positive spin on slavery. One part of our society held and defended an utterly abhorrent set of values and were prepared to kill and to die for them. When values become that diametrically opposed, the resolution, I fear, boils down to power—as it did for four of the ugliest years of our nation’s history—and I am left wondering whether today’s culture wars have not reached that same equivalent point.

However, I remain committed to paradoxical thinking—to “both/and”—and if the young person who wrote about his generation’s developmental conundrum was capable of the necessary self-diagnosis to change his own personal growth path, I have optimism for others to do likewise (especially if exposed to the training available through the Mill Institute as well a similar organizations committed to constructive change). Moreover, if the people of Poland can use their demographic power to peacefully overturn the illiberal values of their country’s authoritarian leadership—interestingly enough for our own 2024 election, mainly over laws outlawing abortion—then perhaps our society can successfully resist the illiberalism threatening our own historical ideals.

The choice in the New Year is ours.

References

Bensinger, K. (Dec. 21, 2023) Troll Army for Trump Spins Online. The Baltimore Sun. https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=b0dd69b9-e81e-4555-beba-da94f444f1f2.

Gottlieb, Z. (Dec. 10, 2023) Listen Up. The Closing of the Teenage Mind is Almost Complete. The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-10/los-angeles-high-school-cancel-culture-free-speech.

Harvard School of Public Health (Dec. 27, 2023) Social Media Platforms Generate Billions in Annual Ad Revenue from U.S. Youth. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/.

Schmitz, R. (Dec. 11, 2023) Poland Elects New Prime Minister, Ending Right-wing Party’s Rule. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/11/1218635775/poland-elects-new-prime-minister-ending-right-wing-partys-rule.