When you teach, you have to leave room for students to discover that what you want them to learn is something they don’t agree with. Conservatives continue to accuse left-leaning faculty of indoctrination, which is just one more in a long line of examples of them using accusation as a synonym for aspiration. They see education as indoctrination because it’s what they want to do with it.
They’re not alone: there are a lot of organizations and institutions that reproduce this mistake, that think that “teaching” means “we will show people that we are right”. Sometimes the stubborn determination to do that goes well beyond “I am going to give you an F”. Recently, for example, the Shasta County 4-H Club in California decided that a 9-year old girl who concluded that she did not in fact want to kill a goat she’d been given to care for had learned the wrong lesson, and that the corrective was not a letter or a lecture but calling upon the sheriff’s department to drive 500 miles in order to track down the goat and slaughter it.
Among other things, that’s one more drop of evidence in the vast ocean of reasons for massive reform of policing in the United States. But the underlying story comes back to the proposition that if you have a mission, the only reason you teach anybody anything is to produce agreement and alignment with your mission.
I’m pretty sure I’ve previously recounted here my teenaged experience with the organization Junior Achievement, the century-old non-profit with a mission to teach young people about entrepreneurship and business. My high-school friend and I joined at the same time. He got sorted into a group that was making compact “emergency kits” designed to go in your car’s glove compartment (in the pre-cellphone era)—some first-aid, a flare, a reflector for the rear window, a note-pad, etc. I got into a group whose two corporate sponsors wanted us to make a complex decorative wood planter that required gluing and clamping two relatively expensive solid pine blocks together, cutting a series of notches around the perimeter of the top block with a band saw, sanding, then gluing a variably-long series of slats that had been cut by a chop saw into the notches. Oh, also, staining the wood and sanding all the components before assembly. Since our sponsors knew that asking a bunch of teenagers to do precision work with a band-saw was both improbable and nearly inevitably going to end with a missing finger or two, the company had to pay for someone else to do that work and send us the assembled base with the notches. Everything else we did. Somehow I ended up elected as the VP in charge of the assembly process. I took three complete sets home and tried to time out the assembly. (Our sponsors had not tested it out themselves.) The two base blocks needed hours to dry, which meant we’d have to say one week ahead on assembling enough of them, since the club only met for two hours a week. Staining all the slats (16 per planter) and the assembled base took a good while—my fastest was about 30 minutes with a regular paintbrush. And then I hit a snag—the wood glue we were using didn’t stick very well on the stained slats. (I didn’t know enough about woodworking to know if there were any solutions for that.) And the notches the sponsors were having cut in the bases were too loose to hold the slats tightly. Clamping them was impossible unless you had a wide enough clamp to get all the slats on one side and the opposing side, and if you did, you couldn’t clamp the slats on the other two sides with the actual clamps we had.
I came in the next week and said, “There isn’t a production process that we can come up with that will get more than 4-5 of these done at each meeting, and the results won’t be good regardless, the slats are going to fall out no matter what.” I demonstrated with my three sample models. The young executive sponsor who worked with IBM said, “Ok, thank you for your opinion, you’re fired from the role. We’ll get someone else to do it.” The kid who had been elected president of the group promptly stuck his thumb up his own ass and the kid who was the VP of Marketing promptly told us that we were expected to sell at least four of the units to our family (and they were expensive by 1970s standards) by next week.
This, as you might suspect, taught me a lesson about corporations and business. (I turned out to be right about the production process—every other kid in the club took his or her turn at trying to manage it and failed and most of the units we produced fell apart. The IBM guy told us in the last week of the club that he was shocked at how incompetent our generation was.) It was a valuable lesson, if plainly an unintended one. (My friend’s group had great success and made a ton of money, so I was aware that my experience was not the only experience possible.) The thing is that I think it would have been better to intentionally teach that sometimes ideas don’t work out and that sometimes it’s hard to accept responsibility for that, especially if you had responsibility for the idea in the first place. (E.g., our corporate sponsors.) The way I learned it, I didn’t want anything more to do with that experience and I wrote off the kind of people who sponsored our group as assholes from an asshole culture. The way it might have been taught, I could have decided it was worth another shot some time.
If you set out to teach, this is the basic risk to your own understanding and knowledge. The girl who found she couldn’t kill the goat learned something powerful about raising animals for slaughter. The 4-H Club should be proud of that lesson and learn in turn from it. By that I do not mean, learn better how to reliably indoctrinate the principle you hope to teach, which is what I suspect they’re going to do after having been the subject of so much negative attention.
Maybe you learn better how to talk about the gravity of what you’re teaching—that you don’t take on this responsibility lightly, that the opportunity isn’t meant to help you find a pet—but you also accept that it is possible that a given learner will decide that they don’t agree with what you’re teaching. The more that happens, the more you have to think in new ways about what you hope to pass on.
I often try to consciously build “off-ramps” in my classes—to say, “historians think a certain way about the problem we’re considering; there are other ways to think about it. Here are a few of them”. I am not trying to build a prison for my discipline. It’s a reason I don’t care for the language of “teaching outcomes” that are pinned solely to departmental or disciplinary missions. Or maybe even institutional ones: one off-ramp I want to consciously point towards is the possibility that some knowledge and some wisdom is best produced or practiced outside of higher education entirely, some skills precede us or acquired beyond us. Yes, I have intentions, but one of my intentions is that my teaching be open to intentions unknown to me and needs that I have yet to discover. Moreover, there are oppositional positions to my content or my lessons that I am already aware of. Some of them are not welcome—I’m not going to patiently negotiate with overt white supremacism in an African history course. Most of them are very much welcome, or at least necessary.
I can’t imagine setting out to teach rural children what it is to slaughter livestock where I am committed in advance to punishing any pupil who decides they don’t want to. It speaks to the withering of a capacity to imagine dissent, particularly dissent that arises from experience in plain sight. I know perfectly well why some people might sit down with history and decide that history is dead and gone, a ghost in the house of the living, something to forget rather than study. I feel with them sometimes. I am perfectly willing to teach someone towards that feeling even if it means the negation of what I value. It makes sense as a feeling, its muscle and vitality rests on the same bones that I build my own thinking from. For the 4-H leadership in Shasta California to harden their hearts against a girl and her goat, they have to be afraid for themselves, of themselves, to fear the possibilities that experience always reveals to us as we live and learn.