Civil Discourse

I recently wrote about some of the institutional madness that is crippling American education and invited parents to say something about it.  One reader left this comment.  "Your call to action for parents has me feeling ambivalent.  I have read the minutes of local school board meetings that consist of parents shouting about masks.  [W]hat troubles me is the manner that parents have gone about these conversations.  We are all collaborators in the education of our children.  Why can't we approach disagreements with genuine curiosity?"

There is a simple key to making our civic discourse more civil and filled with the kind of curiosity this reader and countless others desire, but while it is simple, it seems difficult for many to put into practice.  We all know the old adage, "Listen more and talk less," and although this would indeed move the level of communication in the public square toward the humane end of the spectrum, there is something else that, if implemented, should clear things up in a hurry.

Good Morning, Eastside High

In the 1987 movie Good Morning, Vietnam, comedic legend Robin Williams portrayed Adrian Cronauer, a radio personality for the Armed Forces Radio Service.  Despite the genius that Williams brings to the movie, hilarious performances are also given to us by Bruno Kirby as Lieutenant Hauk and Noble Willingham as General Taylor.  In one scene the lieutenant explains to the general why he thinks a bit that Cronauer did on air regarding Vice-President Richard Nixon was disrespectful, noting that the former V.P. is a "good man and a decent man."  The general disagrees in some rather salty language, modified here for more sensitive readers.  The original script can be found here.

General Taylor:  Bull!  I know Nixon personally.  He lugs a trainload of manure behind him big enough to fertilize the Sinai.  Why, I wouldn't buy an apple off the man, and I consider him a good, close, personal friend.

Just two years later we saw the Morgan Freeman movie Lean On Me in which Freeman plays high school principal Joe Clark who takes over struggling Eastside High School in Patterson, New Jersey, in an effort to make it an institution of true education once again.  His heavy-handed tactics, however, land him in hot water with the superintendent, Dr. Napier, portrayed by Robert Guillaume.  In a tense verbal altercation, the superintendent lays down the law.

Dr. Napier:  End of discussion!  Debate is over!  You will write a formal apology for your treatment of Mrs. Elliott and Darnell and for your thoughtless insult to the women of this community!  Get used to it! It's the way of the world!  If you're so hot for discipline, then start by accepting mine!  Come on.  Let's get something to eat.

Bullshit!|I know Nixon personally.W
He lugs a trainload of shit behind him|that would fertilize the Sinai.
Why, I wouldn't buy an apple from|the son of a bitch, and I consider|him a good, close, personal friend

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=good-morning-vietnam

What do these scenes have in common?  They both portray the ability of people to disagree, yet get along.  They show that it is possible for one person to call another out for being wrong and yet for the two of them to remain friends.  They give us a clear picture that dispute and civility, disagreement and amiability, can live side by side in our hearts, words, and actions.  The question, of course, is how this is possible.

#1 Rule of Engagement

Neither give nor take anything personally in discourse about ideas.  There it is.  That is the number one rule of engagement that makes discourse civil, which is usually if not always a prerequisite to pursuit of curiosity.  To reference just one more movie from the '80s, consider a scene from the Patrick Swayze action flick Road House.  Swayze's character Dalton takes over security at a Missouri road house where the customers have become used to getting out of hand.  At his first meeting with the bar staff, he tells them not to take insults from inebriated customers personally.  One of the bouncers questions whether or not a particularly vulgar appellation is personal or not, and Dalton replies, "No.  It's two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response."  Unwilling to let the matter go, the bouncer continues.

Bouncer:  What if someone calls my momma a whore?

Dalton:  Is she?

Shakespeare it's not, but the scene illustrates a vital point in public discourse.  Don't take things personally.  Ideally, don't dish out anything personal either, as that amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem attack, but even if someone else does not know the rules of civility, you still have the choice of whether to respond.

There is a widely accepted belief that we must answer every taunt and insult in kind, or perhaps even go it one better.  Why?  Why is that necessary?  Someone calls you a name or insults something or someone you hold dear.  What, exactly, is gained by your doing the same in response?  To return to Road House, another bouncer tells Dalton when he first arrives that he had heard he was really tough, but then adds, "You don't look like much to me."  Dalton merely responds, "Opinions vary."

The Path To Killing Cats

It is said that curiosity killed the cat, and that may well be true if the feline confused the ball of string with a ball of electrical wire, but for humans curiosity is the key to learning.  The person who commented on my other post asked why we can't approach disagreements with genuine curiosity, and too often the reason is that we have violated the first rule of engagement.  Curiosity and exploration many times come to dead ends and wrong conclusions.  That is part of the adventure and, dare I say, the fun.  Sometimes we need to be told rather directly that we are wrong, but if we take everything as a personal slight, we can never have the meaningful engagement that genuine curiosity and learning require.

To end with one more reference to a dramatic scene, consider an episode from the television series The West Wing, which ran from 1999-2004.  John Amos, who superbly portrayed James Evans in the '70s sitcom Good Times and Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots, gives equally powerful performances as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In season 1, episode 3 of The West Wing, the President's chief-of-staff is about to hire a young, African-American man as personal assistant to the President.  He asks Admiral Fitzwallace if he would have a problem with it, since the young man would occasionally have to carry the President's bags.

Admiral Fitzwallace:  You gonna pay him a decent wage?  You gonna treat him with respect?  Then why should I care?  I've got real battles.  I don't have time for cosmetic ones.

If we take a page from the admiral's book, we will be more likely to engage in civil discourse, and this allows curiosity to flourish and true learning to take place.

Brazen Chains of Madness

Venus Petitioning Jupiter on behalf of Aeneas, 18th century

In Book I of the Aeneid, Jupiter describes to Venus a coming age of peace for the as yet unfounded Roman people.  One of the features of that peace was that Madness

saeva sedens super arma, et centum vinctus aenis
post tergum nodis, fremet horridus ore cruento.

Upon its savage weapons and bound with a hundred bronze knots

Behind its back will frightfully roar with its bloody mouth.  (Aeneid I.295-296, translation mine)

But what if those brazen chains were created by insanity itself?  Surely those bound would also roar frightfully, and so they do in the halls of many American schools.

When Teachers Talk

I recently attended a conference during which those in my session shared some of the evaluative practices in their schools.  As soon as one teacher mentioned having to provide documentation of various instructional practices for year-end evaluation, the others almost unanimously chimed in to share their own experiences of the sort of top-down hamstringing of educators that is all too common.  I immediately thought of the scene in the movie Gladiator in which Maximus exclaims to his trainer, "Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo.   This is not it.  This is not it!"

Imagine Pope Julius II requiring Michelangelo to document how he involved the painters on his team in the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Imagine the great painter being forced to provide evidence for the different approaches to fresco he had employed.  Wouldn't it have been better simply to gaze at the finished ceiling in awe and wonder?

This insanity of binding our teachers with chains of bronze stems from treating education like a quantifiable natural science, which it is not.  It stems from the belief that such control improves learning.  It stems from the belief that a pseudo-scientific veneer will give credibility to a maligned profession.  It stems from the need to justify various administrative positions created to orchestrate this circus of bedlam, a word used here in its original sense as a colloquial pronunciation of "Bethlehem," the famous mental hospital in London.

If This Bothers You

I do not suffer from such professional indignity, such deliberate obstruction of true education, at the school where I currently teach, but far too many of my friends and colleagues in other schools do, and this is one reason private, public charter, hybrid, and homeschool models have the freedom to operate more nimbly and efficiently.  As I once told a friend who was on the school board of the public school district in which I taught, this should bother you, but the response should not be to shackle non-public educators in a similar way, but rather to remove the ridiculous restraints from all teachers.

A good friend of mine who is not in the field of education replied after I had told him about the experience with my conference colleagues mentioned above, "Bureaucrats will, by nature, legislate the life out of innovators and entrepreneurs -- leaving organizations highly regulated but without a pulse."  Any good teacher at the primary, secondary, or university level can testify to the truth of that statement, and tax-paying citizens should know that this is what is happening in their schools.  Would you rather the teachers of your children spend their time designing creative ways to help their students learn from the past and prepare for the future or in keeping track of artifacts to prove whether a particular approach to teaching was used the correct percentage of time?

Living in the Land of Sokal

In 1996 Alan Sokal, physics professor at NYU and University College London, published an article in Social Text, a journal of postmodern culture studies.  The article was titled "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and proposed that quantum gravity was nothing more than a social and linguistic construct.  The article was sheer nonsense, and Sokal's aim was to expose academic publishing for the Emperor's New Clothes that it too often peddled.  The article was published, and a few weeks later Sokal revealed the whole thing had been a hoax.

I am willing to bet that most teachers today will recognize the academicese of Sokal's article title.  Consider for a moment the following paragraph.

"If one examines precapitalist deappropriation, one is faced with a choice: either reject constructivist capitalism or conclude that art may be used to marginalize minorities. But Marx uses the term 'precapitalist deappropriation' to denote the paradigm of postsemantic sexual identity. A number of discourses concerning deconstructivist neocultural theory exist."

To the teachers reading this, I ask how similar that sounds to something you were supposed to read for a professional development session you have attended in the past few years.  It is precisely the kind of thing we are used to, and yet that paragraph came from an article that was intentionally created as pure nonsense at elsewhere.org/pomo.  The creators of the site use a tool called the Dada Engine, "a system for generating random text from recursive grammars."  As they note on their website, "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodern Generator."  They describe the background for this in an actual, non-nonsensical article here.

In that article, author Arthur C. Bulhak of Monash University references the work of Douglas Hofstadter in his Pulitzer-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach:  An Eternal Golden Braid.

Hofstadter is a brilliant and inquisitive person whose work takes him through philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and more.  Many years ago I had the pleasure of taking him to dinner and, as I wrote in another post, he was no fan of jargon.

Years ago I had the opportunity of taking Douglas Hofstadter to dinner before he gave the inaugural lecture in an annual series a colleague and I had developed at our high school.  This Pulitzer-winning author who works in cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, and seemingly everything else, spoke on what may have seemed a strange topic for him.  His talk was titled "Is Modern Poetry Complete Rubbish?," and in it he took issue with poets who write in such confused ways and on such esoteric topics that no one reads their work.  In fact, he found the poetry of "Surrey With a Fringe on Top" to be of more value than much contemporary work, which he considered little more than prose with a ragged right margin.  Even in discussing other more heady topics, he had a particular abhorrence for jargon.  In that he reminded me of the character Margrethe Bohr, who in Daniel Frayn's play Copenhagen persistently asked her husband, Niels, and Werner Heisenberg to put their theories in plain language.

No Vermicelli With Red Sauce

A fellow graduate student asked me one day years ago if the lunch I was heating up in the office microwave were vermicelli with red sauce.  It was rather obviously just spaghetti, yet "vermicelli with red sauce" apparently sounded more sophisticated.  To educators everywhere, resist the urge to use jargon and the pseudo-scientific collection of data as if doing so actually improves teaching and learning or gives any respect to our profession.  It doesn't.  It is merely laughable.  Teaching is a difficult calling.  Those who cannot understand and respect that...well, that's on them.  Posturing merely hinders the work of teachers who are leading their students on the shared journey of discovery that is education and working to correct the true causes of failing education.

To parents, do not be fooled by lofty language and jargon about time spent by your children's teachers on some of the practices of their job.  One of my students' parents used to ask me about what teachers were being asked to do in the school where I taught.  She was involved in what was going on in the lives of her children, as she should have been.  If your "Spidey senses" begin to tingle when you hear what is happening in the lives of your children's teachers, if you begin to sense that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark," then dig a bit deeper.  If it turns out that those teachers are being bound by the brazen chains of madness, help them to break free by telling administrators and school board members that you will not accept it.  Good schools see their enrollments increase and teaching positions easily filled.  Bad schools do not.

Phaëthon vs. Jesus

What happens when someone challenges a young man's paternity?  Should he take up the challenge and prove his accusers wrong, or should he use a different approach?  And what is the role of pagan mythology in a Christian school?

Jesus Teaches Logic Class

In Books I and II of his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Phaëthon, who was challenged by his friends regarding whether the sun, personified as Sol, was in fact his father.  To prove his lineage, Phaëthon asked Sol for permission to drive his chariot, which pulled the fiery ball across the sky.  Chaos ensued when the young man was unable to control the horses as they soared high above the earth, causing the tops of mountains to freeze, or dove too close to the earth's surface, burning the areas that became deserts.  In the end Zeus was forced to intervene by hurling a lightning bolt that killed Phaëthon and allowed Sol to regain control.

There is an interesting parallel between this famous story of Greco-Roman mythology and an episode we find with Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-12.  After having fasted for forty days, Satan tempts, or tests Jesus regarding His identity as the Son of God.  In the first two of the three tests, Satan begins by saying, "If you are the Son of God."  For the sake of this piece, we will only look at the first of the three tests, the one in which Satan challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread.  His exact words are, translating literally from the Greek, "If you are the Son of God, speak to this stone so that it may become bread."

Whereas Phaëthon sees the challenge to his paternity as a simple matter to be proven, Jesus recognizes that there is more going on and that Satan has in fact presented Him with a dilemma, which runs as follows.

If you are the Son of God, you will turn this stone into bread.

If you turn this stone into bread, you are doing what I tell you to do and thus are subservient to me.

You have only two choices.  You will either turn the stone into bread or you will not.

If you do not turn the stone into bread, then you are not the Son of God, but if you do turn it into bread, then you are doing what I tell you and thus are subservient to me.

It would seem that Satan has trapped Jesus on the horns of a dilemma, but Jesus deftly avoids the logical trap by, as we say, going through the horns.  He simply refuses to accept either of the two unacceptable options, admitting to not being the Son of God or admitting to being subservient to Satan, and cites Deuteronomy 8:3, which says that we are not to live on bread alone in the first place but on every word that comes from God.  As we read so often throughout the gospels, Jesus simply will not be taken in by the verbal trickery of others, and this can be a good reminder to us as well that just because people may try to trap us in argument, we do not have to respond in the way they expect.  By keeping our eyes fixed on God and His word, we will respond in truth and need never fear the conversational dilemma.

Christians and Mythology

It may seem that Christians should not bother themselves with reading and studying pagan mythology, and some Christians have taken just such an approach to learning, relying on no less redoubtable a supporter for their position than St. Augustine.  In Confessions I.13 he wrote,

Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, Deus, lumen cordis mei...?

For what is more wretched than some wretch not pitying himself and weeping over the death of Dido, which happened by loving Aeneas, but not weeping for his own death, which happened by not loving You, O God, the light of my heart...?

Augustine rightly saw that it is folly to delve so deeply into the lives of fictional characters like Dido and Aeneas from Vergil's Aeneid while ignoring our own spiritual condition, but this does not mean that we must approach literature and faith as an either-or proposition.  Contrasting the story of Phaëthon with the episode of Jesus and Satan, we gain an even greater understanding of and appreciation for the boldness of Christ's response to His enemy.  It helps us see more clearly how we can respond to our own temptations as we endeavor to stand strong in imitation of our Lord.

What works of fiction have helped you grow in your walk with Jesus?  How has Scripture allowed you to critique and read differently the novels and plays and poetry and movies that enter your life?