Intellectual Honesty

In my teaching career, I've seen these two scenarios play out more than a dozen times.  

A new teacher is hired.  The students decide she is cool.  They are enraptured, and she can do no wrong.  Mistakes are forgiven.  Best intentions are assumed.  Inappropriate actions are overlooked.  

A new teacher is hired.  Students decide she is horrible.  They put a target on her, and she can do nothing right.  Mistakes are amplified.  Worst intentions are assumed.  Fully appropriate actions are complained about for days. 

A few years ago, during lunch duty, a small group of students walked up to me and said, "Do you think it's okay for a teacher to . . . "  I've been teaching long enough to recognize this ploy.  The students give you only the information you would need to agree with them, and then they can say you are on their side.  (By the way, most of the time, students don't even know this is what they are doing.)  Rather than agree or disagree with the action, I said, "How would you feel about this if Miss Smith (not her name) did it?"  They said, "It's not Miss Smith.  It's Mrs. Jones (also not her name)."  I told them that I knew who they were talking about from the beginning, but that wasn't my question.  My challenge to them was to imagine how they would feel about the very same action if was taken by a teacher they like.  The girls in this group were willing to engage with me, and they said, "I guess we would think Miss Smith was trying to help by giving us practice before a test."  That's exactly what they would have assumed, and they would have been right.  "Is it possible," I said, "that Mrs. Jones is also trying to help you?"  While they never grew to like Mrs. Jones, I hope that this conversation helped them assess their teachers' actions in a more intellectually honest way.

Reading social media for the past five years has felt like the opposite of this conversation.  I am, of course, talking about politics, but it applies more broadly.  If a celebrity you like makes an off-color joke, we claim he was taken out of context or he meant well or was too young to understand the mistakes he was making.  If a celebrity we don't like makes the same joke, we jump on the cancel them hashtag so fast we make it trend.  Teachers on Twitter will excuse horrifying tweets from an Educelebrity they follow, but when someone they don't like says the most innocuous thing about education, they press the caps lock button, find their hand-clap emojis, and light them up.  

The only infallible person is Jesus, and your favorite political leader is not Jesus.  He may do some things right, but he is a fallen human being who does a lot of things wrong.  It's okay to admit that.  It doesn't mean you have abandoned him or that you are disloyal or that you aren't a good member of your political party (which is not something we were ever intended to be loyal to in the first place).  The guy you don't like isn't Satan, and he doesn't do absolutely everything wrong.  Acknowledging one or two positives about him will not weaken your stance on political issues.  If anything, it may strengthen them because you won't come off as a mindless follower.

When the President met with Kim Jong Un in the first year of his term, he came back with a very weak agreement, trading in military exercises on the border for very little in return.  There were people in my timeline that acted like he had created world peace when they would have lost their minds if President Obama had come back with the same deal.  When the President moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, there were people acting as though he had just set off WWIII when they would have cheered Clinton if he had done it.  No one stops to ask themselves how they would feel if someone else had done it or what they even think about the issue itself.  The motto, "If my guy does it, it's great.  If the other guy does it, it's horrible." is not the way adults should operate.  

People are going to have strong opinions on every issue, and I am no exception to that.  I am not asking anyone to abandon their beliefs.  I am asking that we approach each event and issue with a degree of intellectual honesty that we have not been exercising.  Do you agree with what was done, regardless of who did it?  Does the opinion of a person sway you more than your moral compass.  If so, you may be engaging in idolatry.  As adults, we set an example for kids, and right now, we are setting a pretty bad one.