21st Century Habits of Mind

From Studyplace

by Maxine McClintock

[edit] Questions for the twenty-first century

Like most people, teachers have a fantasy life, however, their fantasies differ from the general public’s because the dreams they dream are often about courses. During their careers, many teachers will imagine a course they have always wanted to teach because its content and questions reflect their intellectual depth and concerns. Unfortunately, due to institutional constraints or inertia, most teachers’ fantasy courses never become part of the curriculum.

In my case the dream became a reality. As a historian I wanted to teach a course about the future because I was interested in the challenge of demonstrating contingency in the past. Using the future to teach lessons about the past might sound strange, but think back to your high school history class. Boring might be the first word that springs to mind. History becomes mind numbing whenever the past is served up as an inert bunch of facts that creates a singular narrative, seemingly devoid of human agency. Teaching a course about the future, I conjectured, would cause students to realize that what is past to them was someone else’s future. I wanted students to understand that, whether it’s 1846 or 2006, contemplating what’s next is filled with various possibilities and contingencies that emerge from the human need to shape circumstances. In other words, whether we are studying the past or the future, reality isn’t something that passively happens to people; it is constructed by them through decisions that could have gone some other way.

I called my course Dispatches from the Twenty-First Century. After figuring out its name the next challenge was to structure a subject that by definition doesn’t have one. So I found myself looking for present topics that would have long term implications. Paul Kennedy’s book, Preparing for the 21st Century, helped meet that challenge. The topics he discussed such as demographics, the communications and financial revolutions, the agricultural revolution and biotechnology, globalization, threats to the environment, and the viability of the nation-state became the conceptual framework of the course. Although Kennedy’s book was published in the 1990s his themes have remained relevant guides for thinking about the future. I kept those topics current through the use of case studies. The cases change as current events change. This year, for example, I asked the class to read articles detailing the possible demographic repercussions of an avian flu pandemic. In previous years my students have read about the impact of falling birthrates on Russian society and a variety of articles about the immigration debate in the United States.

Although I could write more about the nuts and bolts of designing a new course -- by describing the syllabus, the assignments given, and the types of evaluation used -- I would rather discuss the aspects of Dispatches that were not part of my blueprint. These are the questions and insights that emerged from interactions I had with students and colleagues. Through the give and take of classroom discussions students developed questions that provided the interpretative framework for the course. Questions included the following:

1. What will be the locus of my identity in the twenty-first century? Will it be the nation, the region, the city, my religion, ethnicity, gender, race, or corporation?
2. What are the characteristics of a strong democracy? What role does an elite play in a democracy?
3. How is change initiated? Is change that makes a difference started from the top down or from the bottom up?
4. Are there universal values?
5. What is a just society in the twenty-first century?

Whether we were studying multinationals or urban sprawl these focusing questions enabled students to construct connections between topics and organize those connections into themes.

What is striking about these questions is how old they are. My students’ inquiries would not sound strange to Aristotle. He would consider them variations on his fundamental question, what is the good life? Moreover, a bond between the future and the past is rooted in the means Aristotle relied on to answer his question and the means my students need to answer theirs’; a liberal arts education designed to develop critical intellects.

Currently, when professionals or the general public discuss education, the conversation is defined by a handful of issues. Standardized testing, accountability, alternatives to the public school system, teacher preparation, and funding equity are the issues that gain attention. All of these issues are concerned with how schools should be run. The assumption is that well run schools will create well educated students. Certainly, knowing how to structure a better school may substantially improve the odds that a student will be well educated. But clearly what that student will learn inside her well run school is more important for her education in the long run.

What students learn inside schools is usually taken up by individuals charged with designing or revising curriculums. Should American history or world history be taught in the ninth grade? What books should be read in a literature course? These are the types of questions that usually surface in discussions about curriculum. Their predictability and prosaic quality lull curriculum developers into a false sense of security. They mistakenly believe that creating a list of grade specific courses automatically indicates what students will learn. I think they put the cart before the horse.

In their rush to designate the content that will be taught, educators create curriculums that have only a tangential relationship to the daily life of the classroom. To craft a curriculum which actually connects to the lives of teachers and students, those charged with creating it must think about the intellectual skills, standards, and passions that an eleventh grader needs in order to make sense of her world. Although rarely considered during the meetings of most curriculum committees, these concerns are usually pondered by teachers as they imagine their fantasy courses.

[edit] Habits of Mind

When I think about what a student should learn I am not thinking about the content or sequencing of a particular discipline. Rather I am thinking about the habits of mind educated persons must have to make their present circumstances and their future possibilities meaningful. A rigorous liberal arts education has traditionally been and continues to be the means of forming strong habits of mind.^[1]

Aristotle described the habits of mind the liberal arts cultivated as those exemplified by a free man. By free man, he was describing an individual capable of discriminating between what is significant in his life, and therefore worthy of attention, and what is a distraction. While handing me the teacher recommendation forms for his college applications, a first semester senior provided an example of what Aristotle meant; he remarked that trying to get into a good college was getting in the way of his education. What this student was beginning to grapple with was the difference between education as an accruing of credentials, as represented by the college process, and education as a transformative process, as represented by his course work and his independent reading. To choose the definition of education worthy of his sustained attention and relegate the other to a necessary distraction was the student’s dilemma and for Aristotle the dilemma of a free man.

To make such discriminations is a life long and arduous task. It is difficult because conventional wisdom, largely based on popular opinion, incessantly offers examples of what it deems significant or not. Although this senior would have liked to demonstrate a more insouciant attitude towards the college process, he sheepishly admitted that he had been pulled into the application maelstrom, along with most of his peers. To be fair it would take a seventeen year old with an iron will to buck the conventional wisdom that consistently confuses the credentialing process with getting an education and promotes the false impression that a degree from a handful of select colleges constitutes life’s golden ring. More than an iron will, however, this senior needs a critical intellect to enable him to make the autonomous judgments that for Aristotle are the hallmarks of a free man. Without it an individual depends on others to make judgments for him, and according to Aristotle that is the mentality of a slave.

Critical intelligence is essential for an individual to judge what is significant in his life because it is these judgments that make his life meaningful. To make such judgments is the act of a free man. The habits of mind developed by the liberal arts are the necessary tools for making these judgments -- whether a person lives in ancient Greece or in twenty-first century America. These habits of mind teach a student to use language precisely, to build an analytical hierarchy, to respect complexity and nuance, and to demonstrate generosity of the imagination. Moreover these four habits should be taught in every discipline for they bring cohesion and sense to a curriculum.

[edit] Precision of Language

What shape do these habits of mind take in the daily life of the classroom? Let’s start with precision of language. Around Thanksgiving newly minted college freshmen return to their high schools to talk about the trials and tribulations of getting acclimated to college life. In the course of conversation these former students discuss whether or not their high school prepared them well. Having listened to many of these conversations over the years, I have concluded that the determining factor in answering this question positively or negatively is how well students were taught to write.

To write or to speak well a student has to internalize three fundamental values associated with precision of language. First that crafting a clear, well organized thought is work. What is dashed off the night before or spoken off the top of one’s head are attempts at articulating an idea and not a polished piece of work. A finished paper is the end point of a time consuming and labor intensive revising process. Second the level of clarity, coherence, and persuasiveness achieved by a writer or a speaker is commensurate with his or her command of the subject. Without that command a writer or a speaker has nothing of worth to communicate. Faced with that situation the best course writers or speakers could take is to figure out what they don’t know and spend time closing those knowledge gaps. Third, language reflects the character of the person using it. Grammatical and usage mistakes, jargon, unsubstantiated generalizations, inaccurate information make the listener or the reader suspicious of the writer’s or speaker’s seriousness. If this doubt becomes pervasive, the reader stops reading and the speaker’s words falls on deaf ears. Schools in which the English department is solely responsible for teaching the values associated with precision of language do not take these values seriously enough. In schools that regard these values as the grounds for becoming an educated person, all departments take responsibility for upholding them. Consequently, a student, whether devoted to physics or literature, will graduate having internalized the rigorous standards that precision of language demands.

[edit] Analytical Hierarchy

Precision of language constitutes the foundation for a liberal education’s second habit of mind -- building an analytical hierarchy. As mentioned, one of the values associated with precision of language is command of content. Building an analytical hierarchy is the means towards that end. It structures thought from the concrete to the abstract. A student constructing this intellectual edifice starts with the facts of a particular subject, recognizes patterns among facts to form concepts, looks for connections between concepts to form themes, and uses themes to construct an argument. If any of the building blocks of the hierarchy are incorrect or nonexistent then the student has formed a personal opinion rather than an argument with a validity that can be publicly judged.

One would expect that building an analytical hierarchy would be the least controversial habit of mind associated with a liberal education because it demonstrates a student’s increasing intellectual sophistication. A first grader might be able to recite many facts about the American Revolution. Even the most precocious six year old, however, would be hard pressed to organize those facts into an argument defending or disputing whether an actual revolution took place between 1776 and 1783. By the time he has become a high school senior, our precocious first grader’s ability to link the concrete with the abstract has developed. It is the step that transforms a literal thinker into one who can use abstractions to create meaning. The senior, unlike his first grade self, interprets the facts associated with the Revolution to argue that the colonists’ uprising against Great Britain was or was not a revolution because of the social, political and economic changes it did or did not unleash.

However in an educational environment that increasingly touts standardized testing as the most accurate method of evaluating what a student has learned, interpretation is a highly suspect habit of mind. For example, the Florida Legislature recently passed a law that decrees, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, and shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable."^[2] For Florida’s lawmakers, building an analytical hierarchy that uses facts to create an argument that is open to public scrutiny and interpretation is officially suspect, perhaps un-American. Why? Why is this group of lawmakers so determined to keep students tethered to a rudimentary understanding of the past, one in which the starting and ending point of history is reciting the facts?

My hunch is that Florida’s lawmakers, like their colleagues in the other forty-nine states and on the national level, have bought into the least common denominator model of education. That model attracts supporters because it reduces education to the most elemental relationship between knowledge and students. Advocates of the least common denominator model of education perceive knowledge as inert and students as passive consumers of it. They ardently support this relationship between knowledge and students because it demands the least intellectual exertion from students and teachers, thereby giving the erroneous impression that the majority of this nation’s students and teachers are meeting rigorous standards for learning and teaching. This false sense of accomplishment is buttressed by the bevy of standardized tests that are the preferred evaluative tool for the least common denominator model of education. The only skills these tests actually evaluate are a student’s ability to recall facts and a teacher’s ability to train them to do so. Since the least common denominator model demands so little intellectual energy from both teachers and students, everyone comes out a winner. The student with the well trained memory does well on the test, possibly the first step towards winning a scholarship; his teacher is rewarded with merit pay; and the state legislators can boast about higher statewide test scores and receive more federal funding because their state demonstrates that no child had been left behind.

Pretty nice arrangement, everyone is happy. Why spoil it with concerns about analytical hierarchies, intellectual rigor, and critical thinking? Although able to deliver intellectual contentment to the many, the least common denominator model of education is pernicious. By presenting knowledge as inert and students as passive consumers of it, this model of education misrepresents both. An idiot savant can spout fact after fact about a favorite topic, but no one would call this litany, knowledge. Facts become knowledge when they can be linked to other facts, thereby forming a pattern of understanding. By creating patterns of understanding, our student begins to recognize themes that no simple amassing of facts can reveal. In addition, our student is responsible for interpreting the implication of these themes by crafting a thesis and defending it. Linking facts, forming patterns of understanding, recognizing themes, interpreting implications, and crafting a thesis and defending it, our student is far from passive. To do all this intellectual heavy lifting he cannot rely on a received language offered by a teacher, a set of state guidelines, or a textbook. Rather he undertakes these intellectual demands using his own words, attempting to be as precise in his use of language as possible.

The student actively using knowledge to create meaning is exactly what the least common denominator model of education rejects and a liberal education fosters. When the relationship between knowledge and the student is perceived as dynamic and interpretative rather than inert and didactic, the outcome is not easily predictable. That frightens a good number of professional educators and politicians. Once a student takes responsibility for transforming information into knowledge and then judges the significance of what he has learned, he is no longer a consumer of facts but a critical thinker. A state populated with critical thinkers just might vote the proponents of the least common denominator model of education out of office.

[edit] Respect for Complexity and Nuance

Once a student starts structuring and judging the significance of the knowledge that will form the basis of his education, he takes ownership of it. In shaping the ideas that will in due course shape him, our student develops a deepening respect for complexity and nuance. This respect constitutes the third habit of mind characteristic of a liberal education.

This frame of mind became evident in the Dispatches course during a discussion about the public qualities that are necessary to create, maintain and strengthen a democracy. Initially nearly all the members of the class assumed that the United States was currently the strongest democracy on earth. Consequently, all one had to do was to analyze how we created a democratic republic and make sure other nations replicate our methods. I then asked what American policy makers should analyze so that they could give others a blueprint for democracy. The answers were simplistic and conventional. Analyze the Constitution particularly as a means of checking and balancing power within the federal government, analyze federalism as the means of balancing power between the national, state, and local governments, and impress upon others the importance of voting. Moreover, whatever inadequacies American democracy demonstrated, the class attributed to voter apathy and the influence of money in politics. At the end of this initial session I assigned Amartya Sen’s article, "Democracy and Its Global Roots"^[3] for homework. My hunch was that it would add complexity and nuance to a discussion that was rife with stock ideas and platitudes.

In his article Sen argues that the west did not uniquely create or have a monopoly on democracy. While Athens was developing its form of democracy other varieties were taking root in ancient India. Sen also names and explains the public values that all varieties of democracy share -- public reasoning, transparency, pluralism, and accountability. Upon returning to class, my students’ certainties about the United States as the exemplar of democratic practices and values were shaken. This was evident because the direction of the discussion had changed from the previous day. Initially my students wondered if other nations were capable of putting the United States’ blueprint for democracy into practice. After reading Sen’s article they wondered if the United States was a democracy. Their understanding of democracy had grown more complex. The class began to understand that along with structural safeguards, like constitutions and suffrage, democratic government must cultivate a public in order to survive.

My students had not thought about the public and an individual’s relation to it. Why should they? Born in 1989 they have grown up hearing that the problem is government and the cure for everything from substandard public schools to world poverty is privatization. By the time they are seniors, most students define the public as a maleficent group of slackers who like nothing better than to drain hard working individuals of their initiative and passion for excellence, consequently undermining the prime mover of society, which is competition. Furthermore, in their opinion, raising taxes is the mechanism the public uses to unleash all this evil. Even though the majority of the students in the Dispatches class had not read Milton Friedman’s policies lambasting the progressive income tax, or Ayn Rand’s novels urging the gifted individual to struggle against the resentment his fellows use to thwart his strivings, or Herbert Spencer’s essays celebrating competition as the process that insures that only the fittest survive, thereby strengthening society, their view of the public coincided with the ideas these authors espoused; those ideas amount to little else than the conventional wisdom of the last twenty-five years. That there might be a bond between the health of a democratic society and the cultivation of public priorities was a new and an intriguing possibility to many of these seventeen year olds.

To elicit a further sense of complexity and nuance, I started the discussion about the public with a simple question. What role does a person assume when she is acting in the public interest? Maybe it was the classroom setting or adolescent self consciousness but slacker was not offered as an answer. Instead there was silence, deafening silence. Forced to commit teaching’s cardinal sin of answering my own question, I suggested that the class consider the role of citizen. Like the term public, citizen was another word my students had little occasion to use or to ponder. In their experience its importance was usually restricted to filling out forms, job or college applications or a request for a passport. For those students eligible to vote, citizen took on a bit more heft; one had to register and make the attempt to become an informed voter.

To start the discussion, I asked what are the fundamental responsibilities citizens living in a democratic republic assume? The initial responses, voting, paying taxes, obeying the law, evaded the question because, as I pointed out, all the activities my students mentioned are dutifully performed by citizens living under repressive regimes. In due course, one student decided to return to first principles. Drawing on some American history, she started to talk about popular sovereignty and concluded that one of the primary responsibilities citizens shoulder, in a democratic republic, is to make their will known to those who represent them.

This insight returned our attention to Sen’s public values. Citizens making their will known, first among themselves and later to their elected officials, is Sen’s public reasoning. The public will becomes manifest through the discussions citizens have with each other to hash out the priorities they recognize as essential for promoting the common good. These discussions can take place in a multitude of environments from Internet blogs to front porches. The link between the various forums that sustain public reasoning is the content of the discussions.

Whether deciding if evolution should be taught in the local schools, or stem cell research should be prohibited, or if a nation should go to war, individuals, acting as citizens, are making decisions that affect the lives of people far beyond their immediate circle of family and friends. To do this well the public requires the other values Sen describes -- transparency of information, accountability of its elected officials and pluralism. Without transparency of information and accountability of elected officials any decision the public makes can be easily manipulated to serve the private agenda of a particular individual or group, thereby subverting the public’s ability to recognize what is in its best interest and corrupting its trust in the democratic process.

In a democratic republic needing to cope with complexity, like the United States, public reasoning is intellectually demanding owing to the fourth value Sen mentions, pluralism. To create a consensus about what constitutes the public good is never an easy task. It becomes less difficult, however, if the people you are reasoning with share the same race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and class. Thinking as a historian, my hunch is that such a society was always difficult to find and it will become increasingly difficult to find as the twenty-first century unfolds. Consequently, citizens of a democratic republic will have to engage in the risky business of reasoning with individuals they might have nothing in common with other than their citizenship. I say risky because trying to find common ground among one’s fellow citizens while respecting their differences tests a person’s intellectual capacity to respect complexity and to self correct in the face of the contingencies complexity creates. Students who have been shielded from grappling with complexity and have had little reason to question their own views will not be good democratic citizens.

These may not be the outcomes that the advocates of the least common denominator model of education would applaud. Respect for complexity and nuance, using language with precision and originality, structuring information in order to make it meaningful are the characteristics of a critical thinker. Critical thinkers are human hazards for those individuals who define questioning and dissent as impediments to building the good school or the good society. However, because critical thinkers have the habits of mind that make thinking for oneself possible, they are, according to Aristotle, free. Consequently they are exactly the type of citizens needed to cultivate democracy.

[edit] Generosity of Imagination

The last habit of mind nurtured by the liberal arts is generosity of the imagination. Those individuals who embody generosity of the imagination demonstrate the ability to listen to another point of view, understand the circumstances that lead to its formation, and imagine how they would think and act given similar circumstances. Advocates of the least common denominator model of education perceive generosity of the imagination, like the other habits of mind, as subversive because it has the potential to subvert mindlessness, a state of consciousness that those in power count on to keep them there.

Generosity of the imagination opposes the current cultural attitude towards discourse. That attitude transforms face to face communication into a battleground populated by individuals proclaiming their unwavering convictions. Victory goes to the combatant who can strip an idea of complexity and nuance, loudly and incessantly reiterate the resulting bromide, and make anyone who offers an alternative point of view look like a tongue tied ignoramus. Rather than view the terms of engagement for discourse as akin to the rules of war, the person who demonstrates generosity of the imagination views discourse as an opportunity to broaden and deepen his and the other participants’ understanding. Listening to the perspective of others, imagining what it would be like to be in their place, and reserving judgment until one understands the circumstances that contributed to forming the other’s point of view is generosity of the imagination in action.

The skill that is fundamental to generosity of the imagination is listening. Listening and silence are not much valued in a culture where communication is largely polemical; they are mistakenly assumed to be the attributes of the loser in a battle of words and wit. Moreover, silence and listening are devalued in a culture that relies on "continuous partial attention"^[4] to prevent the public from remembering or taking anything too seriously. Listening and silence counter this attitude because they create a place for concentration in a world of distractions. Finally, silence and listening are dismissed in a culture that equates uncertainty with weakness and certitude with intellectual and moral strength. A person imbued with generosity of the imagination listens because his uncertainty constantly reminds him that his words are not the last words on any given topic. Call it a display of intellectual humility on the part of those with generous imaginations; I call it an essential quality for creating a 21st century world citizen.

As students in Dispatches strengthened their liberal habits of mind (to use language precisely, to build an analytical hierarchy, to respect complexity and nuance, and to demonstrate generosity of imagination), they began to explore more reflectively the focusing questions that emerged in the course. Defining the meaning of citizenship was the subtext for the first focusing question my students raised in the course. They asked: What will be the locus of my identity in the twenty-first century? Will it be the nation, the region, the city, my religion, ethnicity, race, gender, or corporation? Consciously assessing the identity one passively received at birth is the rite of passage every adolescent undergoes. The question my students raised, however, indicated that they were thinking about identity in its broadest scope by not limiting their quest for self definition to immediate circumstances. Their question hints at a world in which identity is no longer stable or singular. These students recognize that one of globalism’s effects is to make the boundaries between cultures permeable; consequently, forming an identity becomes more open ended and complicated.

For example, many of my students might find themselves working abroad for a multinational corporation. Let’s say one young woman takes a job in a country with no cultural concept of sexual harassment. Unfortunately she is subjected to a variety of behaviors that, if she were working in the United States, would be recognized as harassment and the perpetrator would be disciplined. However, after voicing a complaint to her superior, she is told that she is making too much of the customary ways men and women interact in her host country. So this young woman faces a dilemma. Does she put up with the harassment because she is expected to accept the cultural norms of her host country? Or does she start to challenge those norms because she believes that sexual harassment, wherever it takes place, is an injustice that should be stopped. The course of action she will take depends on whether she primarily identifies with her job or her gender. If it is her job, she will endure the harassment and try to deal with it privately. If her primary identification is to her gender she might join a group committed to raising awareness of this issue, even if her employer is against employees joining political movements that upset the status quo.^[5]

What makes my students uneasy about forming an identity is a deep seated ambivalence. On the one hand, they are concerned that cultivating an identity is like peeling an onion -- so many different layers but no set of core values. On the other hand, they wonder whether a set of core values is an anachronism. As long as an individual could assume that he would live most of his adult life in the same cultural milieu he grew up in, then developing a set of core values made sense; it became the foundation for defining who you are. Due to the highly mobile and connected society they inhabit, today’s adolescents do not automatically assume that the cultural values of their formative years will serve them well as adults. In fact, some of my students perceive a set of core values as an ethical strait jacket; it makes a person’s character rigid and incapable of adapting to the contingencies that global living requires. These concerns -- how to navigate between absolute and relative values, between local and universal knowledge are not new. In the West they are as old as the tradition itself. The people who first addressed my students’ concerns about the slippery nature of identity were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Their response was to create an ideal type, the world citizen, the kosmou polites.

[edit] Kosmou polites

Martha Nussbaum, in her book, Cultivating Humanity, describes the individuals and philosophies that created a context for world citizenship in the classical world. Diogenes, was the thinker who coined the term. When asked where he came from, Diogenes replied, "I am a citizen of the World." According to Nussbaum, Diogenes’ answer meant, "that he refused to be defined simply by his local origins and group memberships, associations central to the self-image of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns." Although Diogenes was the first to announce his world citizenship, his unconventional behaviors, like choosing to live in a tub set up in the agora, made it easy for people to dismiss any idea associated with him. The group that gave world citizenship cultural and intellectual legitimacy was the Stoics. They refined Diogenes’ idea of the world citizen and developed the "image of the kosmou polites." The kosmou polites makes himself at home in two communities—the local community of his birth and the human community; that community encompasses the planet and is as diverse as the populations who inhabit it. "Act locally think globally" was a popular slogan and bumper sticker several years ago, and one might add, the most recent declaration of the kosmou polites.^[6]

Why did the Stoics make the cultivation of the kosmou polites the purpose of an education? Why should a person try to keep the local and the universal perspectives at the forefront of his consciousness? How does a person get through the day with his mental life divided in such a manner? For the Stoics, the kosmou polites embodied Aristotle’s free man. The kosmou polites’ double consciousness freed him from confusing conventions (nomos) with those traits that are innate in human nature (phusis). Mistaking convention for the natural limit on good possibilities can corrupt the public judgments people bring to bear on important issues. For example, the first European explorers labeled the native populations they encountered in the New World barbarians. Unable to see distant cultures clearly, Europeans concluded that Native Americans were innately barbaric because they did not conduct their daily lives according to the local conventions and values that structured a European’s day. Cultural partisanship is dangerous whenever it occurs. It is particularly dangerous during this century because the encounters between cultures are more frequent than those that took place in the early modern period and the consequences of misinterpreting cultural cues have global repercussions. In fact one of the most hotly contested debates about the twenty-first century is whether those who predict that its distinguishing characteristic will be relentless clashes between civilizations are correct.^[7]

[edit] Sixteenth Century Europeans Think About Cannibalism

Whether the twenty-first century will be rife with clashes between civilizations depends on the type of citizens who populate this planet. In my opinion, a world inhabited by people whose identities are formed by cultural exchange and connection stands a better chance of defying Huntington’s prediction than one inhabited by people committed to defending cultural purity in any of its nefarious guises. To examine this assumption, I would add another topic to the Dispatches’ syllabus. It would be labeled "Exemplary kosmou polites". Students would study works by individuals whose lives illustrate the demands and possibilities of the world citizen, a type of Plutarch’s Lives for the twenty-first century.

Michel de Montaigne would be one of my exemplars,^[8] and his essay, "On Cannibals" would be assigned. The title whetted the reading appetite of his contemporaries because cannibalism was much on the sixteenth century European mind. Throughout the continent, reports were circulating that described the inhabitants of the New World and the communities they created. In this essay Montaigne discussed a newly discovered Brazilian tribe which allegedly practiced cannibalism while at war. According to Montaigne’s account, whenever prisoners of war were taken by this tribe they were treated well. To gain their freedom, all these prisoners had to do was acknowledge that they had been vanquished. If the prisoner refused to confess his defeat then he would be killed and eaten. To the astonishment of the Europeans, who were documenting the routines of this tribe, not one of their prisoners chose confession over death. Apparently dying as a coward was more terrible than becoming someone’s dinner.

However the shock of the essay is not Montaigne’s account of the Brazilian tribe’s alleged cannibalism, but his application of the word to his fellow Frenchmen. Although his countrymen recognized and were repulsed by cannibalism when practiced by the Brazilian tribe, Montaigne argued they were blind to their home grown variety because it had become enmeshed in the routines of daily life, practically to the point of invisibility. The religious wars ignited by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation conditioned Europeans to devour their own in the name of the one true Christian church. "On Cannibals" is a powerful essay because it causes Europeans to take a label they smugly used to define the behaviors of distant peoples and apply it to themselves. Towards that end Montaigne wrote, "I am sorry that, seeing so clearly into their (the Brazilian tribe’s) faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, in tearing by tortures and the rack a body that is full of feeling, in roasting him by degrees, causing him to be bitten by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not among inveterate enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and what is worse, under color of piety and religion), than in roasting him and eating him after he is dead."^[9]

[edit] Prefabricated and Contingent Certainty

The Stoics insisted that the cultivation of kosmou polites was the purpose of an education; reading "On Cannibals" illuminates why. The individual who can simultaneously keep the local and universal perspectives in the forefront of his consciousness will have a difficult time claiming certainty about any topic. In the case of Montaigne’s essay, the reader is not certain whether its title refers to the Brazilian tribesmen, the author’s neighbors, or both. Uncertainty seems like an odd, if not a perverse, educational goal. Whenever the least common denominator model of education is in the ascendancy, as it is now, sowing the seeds of skepticism is exactly what an education must not do. These days certitude is equated with a superficial mastery of content and doubt is considered a weakness of both intellect and character.

Think about the evaluative tool the least common denominator model of education prefers, the standardized test. It gives the student the impression that every question has a single, short, correct answer and that an answer’s accuracy has no relation to context, rendering it immutable. The certitude these tests foster, however, is false. First, it is based on an illusionary command of content, one that is reductive and incomplete. Second, the certainty attained by the standards movement is prefabricated because the student does not construct it for himself. To attain certainty that isn’t prefabricated the student would have to analyze, interpret, and judge the content he is studying. On the other hand, to attain prefabricated certainty the student has to perform reasonably well on the test by making the correct conditioned responses to questions he didn’t raise. He does not have to concern himself with analysis, interpretation or judgment because any further probing of the content is a waste of time. It only complicates matters and the questions that might arise, from his personal investigations, probably won’t appear as one of the multiple choice questions.

Fortunately, everyday reality is richer, because it is more complex and unpredictable, than the one dimensional version prefabricated certainty conjures. The reality we live, unlike the reality manufactured by the standards movement, is composed of multiple often conflicting narratives and perspectives. This thicker reality requires that a strenuous intellectual effort be made before any declaration of certainty can be proclaimed. This was evident in the Dispatches class during its discussion about democracy.

If you remember, initially, my students were certain that the United States was the one true democracy and a role model for other nations with democratic aspirations. The class was speaking from a local perspective because the only democratic structures and processes they were acquainted with were American. However, after reading Sen’s essay and gaining a more universal perspective about democracy’s characteristics, my students’ certainty was shaken. Their growing doubt concerning America’s fitness as a democratic role model motivated the class to try to find common ground between the democratic practices they associated with the United States and those that Sen ascribed to all democracies – accountability, transparency, pluralism, and public reasoning. Their analysis revealed that their country fell short in meeting those standards. The class then took on the critical and disquieting intellectual task of judging whether their nation could still claim to be a democratic republic. They decided that the United States could no longer make that claim. Consequently, the class faced the formidable challenge of precisely defining its current political identity.

My students’ original certainty about the political identity of their country was undermined when their study of democracy included information and interpretations not bounded by their local knowledge. The outcome of this broader perspective was not comfortable; it replaced certainty with doubt. For advocates of the least common denominator model of education, doubt is a condition that should be eradicated by an education, not encouraged by it. However, for those supporters of a liberal arts education, doubt is the catalyst for becoming educated because it redefines a student’s understanding of certainty. Doubt teaches that reality is replete with a diversity of perspectives and that it is impossible for one human being to know them all. Therefore, any certainty a person claims about reality is contingent and is likely to change as one learns more.

You can immediately hear the supporters of the least common denominator model of education screaming moral relativism. They would argue that a person living without absolute certainty about what he knows and what he believes will never develop the moral backbone to defend any principle that doesn’t satisfy his immediate desires. They would also argue that a society largely populated by these intellectually and morally rudderless people, each having their subjective view on reality, is decadent. It can not muster the will or the energy to act cohesively. For the advocates of the least common denominator model absolute certainty is education’s raison d’&#234:tre. It makes individuals easier to control by transforming them into a cohesive force, a mass, ready, willing, and able to do what should be done. Moreover, if you are lucky enough to be in charge of deciding what should be done, cohesiveness trumps skepticism any day.

Education as control, an unnerving definition for some, is attractive for those individuals who decide what should be done and want to demonstrate as little accountability as possible towards those who have to carry out their programs. That’s a description of tyranny. Not surprisingly, the best defense against tyranny in the twenty-first century remains the same as it did in the fifth century BC, the education of a free person, a liberal arts education. The student exercising the habits of mind associated with a liberal education girds himself against a prefabricated reality, thereby making it less likely that he will be manipulated by others. He steels himself against a ready made reality through arduous intellectual effort. First, the student has to state precisely that which he has come to doubt. Next, he must find and interpret the knowledge, in the fullness of its complexity, which will either dissipate or deepen his doubt. Finally, owing to his generosity of imagination, the student must remain open to new perspectives even if they undermine what he regards as certain. Moreover, if these new perspectives resurrect his doubt he will have to detach himself from any claim to certainty and start the process all over again. By cultivating these habits of mind, the student commits himself to the lifetime practice of critical thinking.

1. What will be the locus of my identity in the twenty-first century? Will it be the nation, the region, the city, my religion, ethnicity, or corporation?
2. What are the characteristics of a strong democracy? What role does an elite play in a democracy?
3. How is change initiated? Is change that makes a difference started from the top down or from the bottom up?
4. Are there universal values?
5. What is a just society in the twenty-first century?

These are the questions raised by my Dispatches students and they are worthy of sustained and intellectually rigorous attention.^[10]