When I taught at the college level I enjoyed provoking students, even making them mad. Challenging their assertions and beliefs brightened my day.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. My apologies (not really).
My intention in working on a Ph.D. (which, for complicated reasons, I didn’t complete) was to be a university teacher. Early on I would have taught English literature and writing. I know that had I finished my dissertation and found a university position I would, at least initially, have gained a reputation for in-your-faceness.
After leaving the Ph.D. program I did teach writing and literature courses in various community colleges. I was known for grading papers with Jackson Pollock annotations, corrections and cross-outs. But while that was both a slog and very enjoyable, it paled in comparison to direct challenges in the classroom.
At the beginning of every course term I made it a point to give fair warning. I knew that most of the students in the room were at best nascent writers, so I’d promise to be very hard on their writing, but not just to be a nasty judge. The point was to give their writing intention and focus and, if we were fortunate, the hope of becoming competent and maybe even very good writers.
More than any of that, though, was setting the expectation that I’d question their very thinking. It would happen directly, in the classroom, in discussion. It would happen in the reading assignments. We would be reading and talking openly about controversial topics and ideas, and very little was out of bounds. The idea of “triggering” had not yet appeared. Had it been a thing at that time, I’d have told my students that we weren’t in the business of causing emotional harm. We were quite intentionally causing thought harm. Why? Because they hadn’t yet learned to think adeptly, to see and understand all sides of a question, to evaluate what they were seeing and hearing; and they most likely could not articulate their understanding coherently and with aplomb.
You might say it this point (or maybe I just want to talk about it) that a class might have mature adults in it and the rules would be different. Put that aside. The most exciting classes I taught were comprised entirely of adults. Their thinking, while rather more solidified, was often hazy, in need of repair, or just plain disorganized. I reassured them (as I did with all classes) that the course had a method to it; that it was graded on progress, not on static cumulative test achievements; and that nothing was immune from argument: bring it up and it’s public and challengeable.
It’s an old principle that college, community college, and any learning institution beyond secondary school are places to learn or to hone critical thinking. One starts to grow up in those places, or one subjects one’s adultness to refinement, sometimes substantial refinement. Had I stinted on my responsibility to cause the learning or failed to energetically employ a powerful hone, I’d have been utterly irresponsible. If I’d assigned an essay, a book, a poem, an article to read and not shown how to read it with eagle eyes, I’d have failed my students. Did I care that the readings might have troubling (however that word applied to each individual) content, material that students might not encounter otherwise? Not a whit. Often that was the point.
Now, how would that go over today? Would I be subject to the scrutiny of a school’s arbiters of appropriateness? Very likely. I’ve read of too many university teachers being fired for posing legitimate and serious questions about very touchy issues: perceived antisemitism, politics, even plain old bad thinking that comes from one ideological pole or the other. I look on those and wonder if I’d have been the victim of a university worried about its donors or its government grants or angry parents; or if one or another administrative judge might have heard from my students that I’d rudely “triggered” them and made them uncomfortable, and called in as a result to defend myself.
I did not personally see how those dismissed professors broached their controversial topics. If their intent was to push students beyond parroting formulaic tropes on certain topics and to get them to perceive nuances and distinctions, that’s what they were, one hopes, hired to do. Was there to be a hypothesis that slavery drove the development of American capitalism and that the slave trade was an integral part of that development? Fine. Even better that such a discussion would shift and enrich our understanding of our history. Critical thinking in its broadest sense demands such enlightenment.
Would I, then, intentionally “trigger” students? Of course not. I would, however, make sure to say at the beginning of a course that topics troubling to some sensibilities could potentially arise. The point of admitting such subjects for examination and discussion would be, as one might surmise, to examine and discuss them as thinking persons. If a student’s level of maturity or emotional economy would not allow exposure to ideas, events, writings, images, videos, or other content that might be jarring, I’d advise that student from the start to find another course to take or to seek counseling.
Would I purposely include discussion of religious, political, social, gender, or other things that might have a direct impact on the intricacies and methods of thinking? Absolutely. But the point would never be to try to come to resolution on those topics. It would, instead, be to pare away untested assumptions and presumed “givens.” It would also be important to, for example, bring historical and other information to bear on a topic. When, by whom and for what purposes was the Bible compiled? What, actually, is patriarchy and how is it represented in literature? Why do we love the stories we love, including our stories about ourselves? What is missing from our historical narratives and why? What do the movies of a particular era tell us about the hopes and fears of that era? Do we misread the past because we view it through our current sensibilities?
At the end of it all I would hope to have helped every student to have a developing nonsense detector, never mind having the means and the desire to deeply engross themselves in knowledge and the broader culture. If the process of learning how to truly think critically dissolved long held beliefs, so be it. If, by the same token, it provided a way to deepen belief and commitment to an idea in supportable ways, that would also be a good result.
Not to conjure Dr Pangloss from Candide, but it would be the best of all possible worlds if students learned and practiced proper logic, particularly with an understanding of what constitutes false logic in its many manifestations. Such an understanding provides a critical method of discernment in parsing such things as political speech or how a play, novel or movie work. An illogic firewall could be an important means of protection against exploitation (never mind against the worst artifacts of our current political world)..
By now, reader, you will have yourself learned, I fervently hope, why actual critical thinking is essential not only to personal success, but to the survival of our democracy and society. So is incessantly and vociferously calling out illogic, language manipulation, lying, misrepresentation and false history. Critical thinkers are equipped to do that. So do it!
Again channeling Dr Pangloss:
Any questions?