- December 18, 2014
- 10:36 pm
- Raymond Benton Jr
- no comments
Teaching Controversial Issues
We recently had a curriculum meeting at which two issues came up that I thought I’d share with whoever reads this blog. One had to do with handling sensitive or controversial issues in our classes. The other had to do with a sustainability topic. They are related so I will treat them both. My treatment of the first is also an expression of my teaching philosophy.
The starting point in all my classes is the preposition that our task is to educate the leaders and managers of tomorrow, not those of today. I borrow this notion from Father Cavanaugh. In the preface to his 1976 book, American Business Values in Transition, he wrote,
Although most schools of business do not behave as though it were so, they are actually engaged in training the managers of tomorrow and not the managers of today.
IYou can sense that he didn’t think we behave as though we are educating the leaders and managers of tomorrow. I don’t either. Benton’s corollary to this is that we behave as though we are educating the leaders and managers of yesterday, not even those of today. This is accomplished primarily through the material we choose to emphasize in our classes.
Now, to the first of the two issues we dealt with in the curriculum meeting. The question arouse as to whether or not we, as instructors and professors, should insist that in some of the controversial issues that arise there is, indeed, a right view, a correct view. My position is that we should not insist that students accept any particular view on the issues, even if it is our view. I don’t mean that we should not have a view, or that we should not stick to it if we do. My point is that we need to present multiple views and equip students to make up their own minds as to which is correct – and to understand why others may disagree with them. They should be open to persuasion (real persuasion, the persuasion that comes from fully considering the issues and the facts as they are known, not the manipulation that parades as persuasion in today’s media and commercial [i.e., advertising] landscape). That is, they should be open to changing their minds. And so should we. At some point in our discussions we can let the students know what our view is and why, but we should not insist that they accept our view and we should be open to changing our views when presented with good reasons for doing so.
Or we may present multiple points of view and never express which we actually hold. When I first came to Loyola I was assigned an MBA class called Sociology and Psychology for Business. It was required of every MBA student and three of us taught at least one section every quarter. Nobody really knew what the class was supposed to be. One of us taught it as a class intended to help students manage their career in the corporate world. Another one taught it as a consumer behavior class (as hard as it may be to believe this, we didn’t have a consumer behavior class in the MBA program at the time). I didn’t know what it should be, either, so used it as an excuse to read and study three books that the students might otherwise no read. I used three books: Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, George Cabot Lodge’s The New American Ideology, and Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale. One foreign student from Mexico described the course as an intense course in ideological introspection.
Although I had a favored analysis, and was often asked in which it was, I never told them (although it was one of the three). What I favored mattered not. Once, as the class was coming to an end, a student told me that he had figured it out. I was a Quaker, he said. I am not, and I had no idea from where that idea came.
The point was not that they agree with me. The point was always that they consider alternative views and, in the end, know where they stood and why. They often surprised themselves, too, after they considered all three sides of the contemporary issue. But now they could engage in civil conversation with others that disagreed with them. In fact, another time a student came to me toward the end of class and related this story. He said he had a twin brother. When they went off to school his twin brother went to college and studied sociology while he went to study business administration. The result of these divergent paths was that the two of them had stopped talking and hadn’t spoken with each other in several years. But over the Christmas holiday the one that was a student in my class approached his brother at a family gathering. They can talk now. Why? Because the one that was in my class could now understand where the impasse was. He could now have a civil conversation with his brother.
So that expresses part of my teaching philosophy. Educate for tomorrow, not for today, and present multiple sides of an issue, not just the conventional wisdom, the textbook version.
But my teaching philosophy is also that we should not avoid dealing with controversial things in the classroom. This came home to me when I driving home from the parking garage where I live the night of our curriculum meeting. On the radio I heard an All Things Considered segment (NPR) that makes my point. This audio segment would fit nicely, if uncomfortably, in a classroom discussion of global issues. That needs a little explanation.
Few of my colleagues read the things I do. I realize that. That is in large part because of my background (about which you can watch this, if you have about 45 minutes. For example, recently I’ve read Serge Latouch’s Farwell to Growth (2009), Mark Hertsgaard’s Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011), Paul Gilding The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (2011)—the subtitle of which should invite every marketer to read it, Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (2011), and most recently the German economist Niko Paech’s Liberation from Excess: the Road to a Post-Growth Economy (2012).
It is not so much that these characters and their ilk are right, but that students should not be sheltered from this literature just so we can advocate on continued full-throttle corporate growth. Of course they can’t be expected to read the encyclopedic textbooks that we use, but they can read, for example, Paul Krugman’s New York Times op-ed from September 19, 2014 in which he defends the notion that we can disengage economic growth from environmental damage and despoliation—in short, his defense of sustainable or green growth.
After discussing Krugman’s op-ed students could then consider Richard Heinberg’s reply to Krugman, which can be found on his blog, the MuseLetter #269 (October 2014). Heinberg’s position, like that of Niko Paech, is that sustainable growth is a chimera. The point is that students are fully capable of reading both points of view and making up their mind which is correct. But they can only do that if they are exposed to both, or multiple, points of view. As it is, our textbooks are very one sided in their presentation so they must be supplemented.
So what does this have to do with the NPR segment? It was a segment on Japan (makes it of global interest) and the upcoming elections (which, by the time you read this, will have already taken place), and the post-growth economy.
I am taking here, without proper citation, from the transcript of that audio broadcast. The point was made that no Japanese government in nearly two decades has been able to revive the country’s stagnant economy. Heading into a national election, some think the country needs to rethink its priorities, especially the importance of economic growth. The person being interviewed, a Japanese person, then said,
Japan is definitely the frontrunner … in terms of going the way of the postmodern, post growth society. There is really nobody in front of us, and everybody behind us is watching to see whether we will make it.
So, from a global standpoint, the question to ask, it seems to me, is this: should be watching China or should we be watching Japan? I vote for watching both, but especially Japan (and Bhutan and the State of Maryland).
All this plays into the controversy surrounding GDP and alternative measures of well-being, about which there is an abundance of information – a simple Google search of GDP vs. GPI will turn up a lot, but about which our textbooks are pretty quiet.
I could go on. But I needn’t and best not.