News of the education world

There was an AP story on Yahoo! yesterday headlined "Conservative Students Target Liberal Profs." Now, I know I'm a bit biased here on the liberal-conservative scale, and I'm also a bit biased on the teacher-student scale. Still, I'll try to set these things aside to look objectively at this story. The main issues here are biases in grading and biases in selection of materials.

With the first of these, I have some sympathy with the students. Some. It's simply not right to grade someone down because of their beliefs or taking a contrary position to the professor. If a student is not free to think, then the student is unlikely to learn or grow. Professors are people too, and some of them may actually be so petty as to lower students' grades because of ideological disagreements. When this is the case, the professor is clearly in the wrong.

I never experienced anything of the sort at Kenyon College. For my part, I thought professors were generally pretty good about concealing their own views and letting us think. Certainly, there were professors who let you know what they thought, but even those weren't bad professors. One nigh-legendary professor, who was quite good, did let his own opinions about literature show in classes. And some students felt like disagreeing with this professor in a paper was suicide for your grade, but I never found this to be true, despite sometimes writing against the professor's ideas. He would even say in comments that he disagreed with me. And yet, I earned A grades more often than not, because I argued my positions well. It may very well be that it was easier to get an A by agreeing, but I think this professor--and all good professors--try to be fair. Just because a portion of a professor's comments are criticizing the logic of your argument doesn't mean that you're being downgraded for your beliefs. I think that as often as not, students are being downgraded for their deficiencies, but it's easier to complain that it's because the professor is biased than it is for the student to admit that he or she needs to improve--and perhaps it's a difficulty of understanding precisely what's wrong. Or maybe both. So while we should be wary of profs who can't keep their biases out of grading, I suspect that this is less of a problem than some would have us believe.

The other issue is the content of the course. "For example, at the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sued over a reading assignment that they said offended their Christian beliefs." This is just stupid. Even if you as a believer read something arguing that Christianity was stupid and wrong, can a reading assignment really be offensive? Is that really a reason not to read it? If you disagree with it, you analyze why it's wrong, what mistakes the writer made in his or her argument--or fallacious invective. Anything you read that disagrees with your beliefs is good, and I'll tell you why. If you find that it challenges your beliefs and you can no longer defend what you believed, then you've learned something and found beliefs that are more defensible, more true (that is, presuming you have the intellectual integrity to change indefensible beliefs). If you can defend your beliefs against the assault, then you've made your beliefs stronger because you've found out how defend them from one sort of attack. Especially in college, you should welcome all challenges to everything you believe. You've had almost 18 years to absorb beliefs from around you, you've been indoctrinated by your parents, you schools, your friends, and everyone else around you. Now that you're in college, it's the perfect time to start questioning those things: you're old enough, you're on your own, and your main job isn't making money, it's making yourself educated. The former president of Kenyon College described a liberal arts education--which is the model at more and more schools, even the ones that aren't actually liberal arts schools--as "a beginning at thinking about what it means to live a good life." This means thinking and questioning what you think you know. If you don't question everything, you leave yourself open to living by inconsistent beliefs that conflict with one another.

So yeah, I disagree with the conservatives (I know: big surprise). But here's the thing: I think that all students need to be challenged. I'll consider my own beliefs and my own students as an example. If I had a student who agreed completely with everything that I believe, I hope that I would still challenge him to defend those beliefs. I say--and I'm pretty sure I believe it--that I prefer principled disagreement to thoughtless agreement. The world is complicated enough to allow for disagreement; at the same time, it's so complicated that we shouldn't rely on unthinking agreement, or we'll never come close to understanding it.

On a side note, I'm also more than a little troubled by the methodology, distinguishing between "conservative" and "liberal" on the basis of who votes Democrat and who votes Republican as the article does. As though both of those labels don't cover a wide range of beliefs! Particularly since the issues cited (religious belief and support for various Bush policies) aren't necessarily "conservative vs. liberal" issues. Okay, sure, support for Bush mostly is, but it's not inconceivable that a democrat can agree or a republican can disagree. In fact, they are (see immigration policy). This is even more true of religious beliefs, as many "liberals" are still very religious, very committed believers, while conservatives (particularly when we're speaking of economic conservatives) can be as indifferent to religion as anyone.

tags: political  serious  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit