The catalyst

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a class called Modern American Literature.

To say I was a lackluster English lit student is something of an understatement.  I did well enough in science and math, but English and history were pretty much non-starters.  I took the class because I was forced to choose -- one thing my high school had going for it was that each student developed his/her English program from a smorgasbord of semester-long classes, which ranged from Mythology to Sports Literature to Literature in Film to Syntax & Semantics -- but that semester I kind of just closed my eyes and pointed.

So Modern American Literature it was.

One of the assignments was to choose one from a list of novels to read and analyze.  I found that I didn't have a very good basis to make my decision, because although I'd heard some of the titles and recognized a few of the authors' names, I didn't really know much about any of them.  So once again taking my "what the hell does it matter?" approach, I picked one.

It was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Over the next two weeks, I read it, and I can say without any exaggeration that I've never seen things the same way since.

The story is set in 1714 in Peru, and opens with an accident.  Five people are walking on a rope bridge across a chasm when, without any warning, the ropes come loose and all five fall to their deaths in the river below.  A Franciscan friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses the disaster -- in fact, he'd been about to cross the bridge himself -- and this starts him wondering why God chose those five, and no others, to die that day.  

So Brother Juniper embarks on a quest to try to parse the mind of God.  There had to be some discernible commonality, some factor that united all five victims.  God, Brother Juniper believed, never acts at random.  There's always a reason for everything that happens.  So surely the devout, with enough prayer and study, should be able to figure out why this had occurred.

He searches out people who knew the victims, finds out who they were -- good, bad, or middling, young or old, devout or doubting.  What circumstances led each of them to decide to cross the bridge at that time?  Each was brought to that point by a series of events that could easily have gone differently; after all, if God had wanted to spare one of them, all he would have had to do was engineer a five-minute delay in their arrival at the bridgehead.

Or, in Brother Juniper's own case, speed him up by five minutes, if he'd been destined to die.

In either case, it would have been easy for an omnipotent power to alter the course of events.  So that power must have had a reason for letting things work out the way they did.

But in the end, after going into the histories of the five victims, and considering his own life, he realizes that there is no discernible reason.  There's no logic, no correlation, no pattern.  His conclusion is that either the mind of God is so subtle that there's no way a human would ever be able to comprehend it, or there are no ultimate causes, that things simply happen because they happen.  He feels that he has to communicate this to others, and writes a book about what he's learned...

... and it is promptly labeled as heresy by the Inquisition.  After a trial in which the Inquisitors attempt unsuccessfully to get Brother Juniper to recant what they perceive as his errors and lack of faith, he is burned at the stake, along with all the copies of his book.

It's a devastating conclusion.  It rattled me badly; I spent weeks afterward thinking about it.  And I never looked at the world the same way afterward.

Burned at the Stake, woodcut engraving by Ottmar Elliger (early eighteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason I bring this up is a bill that just received Senate approval in Florida that would prohibit schools from using curricula that causes students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."  On that basis, I would never have had the opportunity to read Wilder's book when I was in eleventh grade, solely because it made me uncomfortable.

This idea is so completely wrong-headed that I hardly know where to start.  One of the purposes of good books (not to mention honest instruction in history) is to shake you up, make you reconsider what you'd believed, push you to understand things that sometimes are unsettling.  I don't consider my own writing High Literature by any stretch, but I think that any book, regardless of genre, succeeds only by virtue of how it makes you think and feel.  If you reach the last page of a book and haven't changed at all since you opened it, the book has failed.  As my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, said, "If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

And this may make you feel "discomfort and anguish."  But sometimes that's what we need to feel.  Note that I'm not saying you have to overhaul your political and religious beliefs every time you read a book, but if it doesn't even make you think about them, something's wrong.  As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, you might leave the class on the last day of school with your beliefs unchanged, but don't expect to leave with them unchallenged.

It's the difference between teaching and indoctrination, isn't it?  Odd that indoctrination is supposedly what this bill is designed to prevent, when in reality, that's exactly what it accomplishes.  Don't consider our history critically; if something from the past makes you feel uncomfortable, then either don't teach it or else pretend it didn't happen (which amounts to the same thing).  Everything our forebears did was just hunky-dory because they were Americans.  

How far is that from the Deutschland über Alles philosophy of the Nazis?  Small step, seems to me.

We should be reading books that upset us.  Not only does this allow us to understand the past through the eyes of an author who sees things differently than we do, it opens our own eyes to how we got where we are -- and how we can make sure atrocities don't happen again.  Books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Richard Wright's Native Son, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying succeed because they do make us upset.  (All of the above, by the way, have a history of being banned by school boards.)

Good books should make you respond with more than just a self-satisfied "yes, we are all awesome, aren't we?"  They should be catalysts for your brain, not anesthetics.  It's not fun to realize that even our Founding Fathers and national heroes weren't all the paragons they're portrayed as, and our history isn't the proud parade toward freedom the sponsors of the Florida bill would like you to believe.  But discomfort, just like physical pain, exists for a reason; both are warnings, signaling you to think about what you're doing, and do something to fix the problem.  We gain nothing as a society by accepting sanctimonious ease over the hard work of understanding.

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Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Literature, learning, and the necessity of questioning authority

It will come as no great surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I think the educational system is long overdue for a philosophical overhaul.

We have lost sight of many things, but primary amongst them is the idea that education is supposed to broaden the world of the learner.  In our hoisting the flag of "career and college readiness," we have largely abandoned the goal of expansion of students' worldview in favor of measurable outcomes and a reductionistic approach whose only selling point is its expediency.  Even the origin of the word education should tell us that this is wrongheaded; it comes from the Latin verb educere, meaning "to draw out of."  We have too long looked upon education as a means of putting stuff into minds, where our real task should be to see what can be drawn from them.

Nowhere does this show as much as in the way we so often teach literature.  How many times are works of fiction used as avenues simply for teaching lists of vocabulary words and literary elements, and not to blow open the reader's world?  I know teachers who use literary works as a lens for bringing the Big Questions into sharper focus -- but it happens far too infrequently.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This all comes up because of something that happened last week at Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, Florida.  A summer reading program was planned, in which the goal was to have every student and staff member read the same book for a discussion at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year.  The school librarian, Betsy Woolley, and an English teacher, Mary Kate Griffith, got the whole thing rolling, and everything seemed fine -- until the principal, Dr. Michael J. Roberts, found out that the book that had been selected was Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.

Here's the description of the book, from its page on Amazon:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. 

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. 

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Challenging stuff.  Too challenging, according to Dr. Roberts, who promptly cancelled the entire program, saying that the book painted "a positive view of questioning authority" and had "discussion of sex and sexuality in passing."

I find this extremely troubling, especially the first part.  Since when is questioning authority a bad thing?  Do we really want to teach our children that authority is to be obeyed, regardless of whether or not it is moral?  In canceling the program, Dr. Roberts has reinforced the dogma that the dominant paradigm is to be followed, blindly, whatever it says.  Read what we say you can read; do not read what we forbid.  And whatever you do, don't question.

Doctorow, and his publisher, Tor, have retaliated -- by sending 200 copies of the the book to the school, for free.  It remains to be seen whether the school administration will allow them to be passed out, but at least the fact that this whole thing has become public has sent a message to the students -- that there are always ways to circumvent the people who are trying to keep you from learning.  An important message, and perhaps a bigger one than even the book itself would have taught.

Myself, I think we should deliberately assign books that challenge preconceived notions, especially on the high school level.  If you leave high school with your basic assumptions unexamined, we have failed as educators.  Students should be reading books like Doctorow's.

Lots of them.  Not because they put ideas into students' heads; believe me, those ideas are already there, given that we're talking about teenagers.  They should read these books because it opens up the discussion of such questions as when authority should be rightfully questioned, and what our response should be to it when the authorities are in the wrong.  It takes a skilled educator to navigate something like this -- to launch such a discussion, let the students bounce the ideas around, and not to try to drive it to a particular conclusion, while still steering it toward the central points.  But regardless of the risks, it is an absolutely critical part of education.

I try to do this with my Critical Thinking classes, in our reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's short story The Wall.  In this mind-blowing story, we have a man imprisoned and under a sentence of death for insurrection during the Spanish Civil War, who has been promised his freedom if he'll betray the leader of the rebellion.  I hope you'll read the story -- so I won't give you any spoilers -- but by the end, we're forced to question such things as when a cause is worth a human life, whether a sacrifice means anything if no one knows you've done it, and if an act is moral even if it has the opposite effect you intended.  And as deep as these waters are, it is one of my favorite lessons of the year to teach, mostly because I never know which direction it's going to go beforehand.

And personally, I can't imagine how my mind today would be different if I hadn't stumbled upon, been given, or been assigned to read works of literature that rattled my foundations -- books like Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami), Keep the River On Your Right (Tobias Schneebaum), The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin), Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman), Watership Down (Richard Adams), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder), Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), The Women of Brewster Place (Gloria Naylor)... and many, many others.  Each one shook some part of my world, made me see things a different way, left me a changed person by the time I reached the last page.  To stop children from approaching literature because we're scared of what questions it might raise is exactly backwards; we need, as educators, to say, "Don't be afraid of questions; be afraid of where you might be led by others, unwittingly, if you fail to ask them."

Or, as Nigerian poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka put it: "Education should be a hand grenade that you detonate underneath stagnant ways of thinking."