It is sometimes said that the most important thing to teach children is critical thinking. However, if you are trying to teach and your students question each utterance you make, as much as a game or mockery as inquiry, it can slow down the teaching too much. A class of highly intelligent and skeptical students can be difficult to work with.
Today, the educational system, the society at large and both the mass media and the social media emphasize the need to question, to be on your toes to detect scam, falsity and trickery. Further, modern critical scholarship and science steadily undermine old certainties with new evidence or new interpretations, so that someone who was held to be heroic is revealed, or purported to be, as a criminal, a moral counterexample or a poor guide to good behavior in some way. The air is filled with charges, countercharges, and expressions of outrage.
The book “Too Big to Know” by David Weinberger adds in another factor, two factors maybe. In this country, we like to say that we treasure the value of each human being, that we recognize everyone as having basic rights that must not be interfered with or abridged. But, until recently, the average Joe had little opportunity to talk with fancy experts. The average Joe can underestimate the background of a fancy expert while the advanced expert may return the favor. Couple this opportunity to speak truth to power in an I’m-as-good-as-anybody-else mode with the masculine desire to mild combat, and an aim to stand out as a heroic David against a giant of expertise and you have an ongoing invitation to growl, ridicule, disparage and pooh-pooh.
The University of Wisconsin in Madison is famous for its protests by students and citizens against anything and everything. A professor from there once said that on that campus he could raise a demonstration to “free the Indianapolis 500 [a famous automobile race, not a group of 500 prisoners]” by shouting the slogan. Immediately, students in his picture would gather around and add to the shouting.
The point is that these days, it is reasonably easy for controversy, objection and rigorous demonstration against anything to emerge, whether they make sense or not. If you suddenly find yourself, the target of massive demonstrations, don’t be too shocked or stunned. It can happen on any subject, with anybody and with any rationale.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
