Your View Affects Your Thinking

About ten years ago, the city of Raleigh started kicking around a strange idea - banning the sale of residential garbage disposals.  Yes, we are talking about that thing in your sink that grids up food scraps.  Why would anyone want to ban them?  The idea was that they encouraged food waste and that not having them would prevent that.  Ignorant of the fact that there must be food particles in the reservoir for current water cleaning treatments to work, these politicians appealed to the idea that this was environmentally healthy.  While it never ended up happening, the discussions about it on social media were revealing bout one thing.  The side of the issue people came down on was only about whether or not the individual commenting used the one in their house.  "I'm fine with this because nobody uses them anyway" was a frequent comment.  

This attitude that what I do is obviously the norm comes up a lot in our everyday lives.  Several years ago, my students told me that "No one is on Facebook."  At the time, Facebook had more users than Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat combined, but because they weren't on it, the assumption was that no one was. I have a family member, who spends much of his day watching Fox News, and often states kind of fringy ideas as though they are majority opinions.  (You may have the same with a family member who only gets their news from CNN or NPR.)  During a discussion of a potential appearance at the Oscars last week, a man on Twitter said to me, "No one watches them or cares about them anymore."  Granted, their ratings have dropped in the past few years, but they had 11 million in last year's audience, so it isn't true that "no one watches" them.  And given the reaction to The Slap, it is apparently also not true that "no one cares about" them.  I don't watch the Super Bowl, but I'm not naive enough to believe that no one else does.  

I am not saying that the truth of anything is in the middle of the spectrum (although that is true more often than we would like to think).  You may very well be absolutely right, but you have no way to know that if you don't challenge your view by at least listening to the others.  If your worldview can't withstand challenge, then you don't have much belief in it at all.  Listening to other views will often strengthen your own because you have had to defend it.  More information will confirm our thinking if we are correct and change our thinking if we are not.  

Anyone who has travelled comes home with their thinking changed.  Most of the Apollo astronauts came back to become artists, ministers, and/or environmentalists.  This happened because their view of the world had changed.  The primary reason for sending kids on "mission trips" is not necessarily evangelism or missions; it is to give them a view of poverty in order to change their perspective on need.  Chanigng your view need not require the expense of travel.  Reading books written by people from other cultures can do it as well.  I have often referenced the book The Lightless Sky as a book that "will not let me go" because I can never think about refugees in the same way.  It is one thing to have an opinion formed from my own experience, but reading from the perspective of another changed my opinion because I was viewing it from a different angle.  

If we don't allow for the idea our view is limited, we will be likely to assume anyone who thinks differently from us is not just wrong, but evil.  (It's how conspiracy theories get traction.)  We assume that they are lying rather than describing things from a view we cannot see.  This comic represents the idea well.  

This isn't just a rant.  It's about teaching.  Our students (by virtue of their age) have a limited view of the world, and it is our job to open up their view.  When they make a blanket statement that we know comes from their limited view, we should confront them.  It doesn't mean being rude or haughty or mean; it can be as simple as "Have you heard of this?" because you know they probably haven't.  It is our job to help them to become more mature humans, and we don't do that by being afraid to challenge their thinking.  We should also model that by telling them how our perspective on something has changed.  My favorite example is my changed outlook on Wikipedia, but there are others.  If we are afraid to tell them when we have changed our view because of something we have learned, we can't expect them to do it either.  It isn't age that opens our view; it is learning.  Let's give them a view of different cultures, thoughts, ideas, life experiences, etc. through our conversations with them.