Losing Our Minds

This post is going to start out with the appearance of political meddling or cultural observation, but if you will stick with me, I'll bring it around to education at the end.

This week, I was teaching my 8th graders about kinetic theory, which states that all matter is made of small, indivisible particles that are in constant motion.  It is an important concept in understanding the physical properties of each state of matter and explains why a golf ball keeps its shape as you move it from one location to another while water takes on the shape of its container.  What is interesting is that it was first proposed by an ancient Greek philosopher, and no one asked him to prove it.  Why?  Because proving things simply didn't exist yet.  Imagine going your whole life and never hearing anyone say, "Can you prove that?"  It wasn't an expectation.  If you followed Aristotle, you were Aristotelian and, I presume, agreed with his musings.  Maybe if you disagreed, you become Pythagorean.  I don't know.  

My students always find this strange (rightly so), but they usually indicate that we would never do that today.  Since they are in the 8th grade, they still get to possess this level of naivete, but soon they will find that we absolutely still do this.  People pick their party, their candidate, their guy - and that's the end of their thinking.  Whatever he says, it's totally fine.  I'm not just picking on one side here.  I've seen people defend Trump for things they would have been horrified if Obama had done.  I've seen people bend over backward to excuse Biden for things that they would set their hair on fire to criticize Trump for.  They've picked their side, and then they didn't need their minds anymore.  I am trying desperately to fight this trend, but it can be hard.  I used to describe myself as conservative, but now you'd have to ask me about a specific issue for me to know.  I am still mostly conservative on many issues (life, taxes, small and local government - although I'm not sure most people who call themselves conservative still believe in small government), but there are issues on which I am a raging liberal (voting right and immigration should both be as easy to do as possible).  I have also come to realize that there are some issues on which I will never be qualified to have an opinion (large-scale economic issues, most of foreign policy) because it is just too complex.  While I never cast a straight-party ballot, I did think voting was relatively simple until a few years ago.  I now find it to be a complex mix of economic issues, social issues, support for different causes and people, and all of the other things that might reveal a candidate's moral character.  This requires more research than I have ever done before and more thought than I think most people wish to engage in.

There's something I have learned from all of the reading I do into cognitive science research.  Thinking is hard, and our brains try to avoid it.  Daniel Willingham discusses this both in Why Don't Students Like School and Outsmart Your Brain.  Thinking is both slow and energy-intensive, so we rely on memory, shortcuts, and a variety of tricks to save time and blood sugar.  That doesn't mean we can't think, but that it isn't our first instinct.  In politics, it is easy to rely on emotional responses rather than thought, but we can be adults if we decide to be (after all, isn't that the rationale for having a voting age of 18?).  In an attempt to think things through more carefully than I used to, I listen to a few different podcasts that try to either present both sides of an issue or forge a middle ground.  One of those podcasts is Truth over Tribe.  Another is the Bulwark.  In a recent episode of the latter, Charlie Sykes said, "We are losing our minds."  He did mean we had literally gone insane, just that we had given ourselves over to not using our minds.  We had given ourselves permission not to use our minds by choosing a party, reacting purely out of emotion, and turning off our brains.

Recently, Pilgrim's Progress was trending on Twitter.  I've seen some strange things trending on that site, but Puritan literature is by far the oddest.  It turns out that the reason it was trending was because people were hassling Karen Swallow Prior.  This is hardly new as women like her and Beth Moore are lightning rods for the obnoxious TheoBros online.  Karen had appeared on an episode of the Russell Moore podcast, and Russell said he found John Bunyun morose and difficult to read.  Karen responded that Pilgrim's Progress was kind of a drag, that her students loved to hate it, and she loved to show them that there is value in things they initially hate.  This is a teacher's answer if ever there was one, but the people attacking her on Twitter left out the context and simply attacked her for saying it was a drag, which it objectively is.  Lots of great things are difficult to enjoy.  Even if Pilgrim's Progress is your favorite book, you would have to admit that it is a slog because Puritans wrote differently than we do.  I would describe Casablanca as slow, in spite of it being one of my favorite movies.  Some really great music is challenging to listen to.  But, in the world we are currently occupying, people don't want to think these thoughts.  They want to spew their emotions into their keyboard without thinking.    

I promised I would bring this back around to education, so here it is.  Teachers, we are the front line of turning this tide.  We MUST teach our students to think.  We can overcome this by modeling thought for our students, asking them for their thoughts, correcting them when they speak emotionally rather than logically, pointing out areas of context they may be missing, and allowing them to hold us accountable for the same.  Teachers are so often accused of having agendas, whether we do or not.  This is one we absolutely must have.  Cultural shifts start in our classrooms, and teaching kids to keep their minds rather than losing them is our most important job.