Cockamamie Ideas

I'm working on having more sympathy with my students for some of their cockamamie ideas that they present in their assignments. By "sympathy" I don't mean to excuse them but, rather, to take a little time to prod them to listen to the words that are coming out of their mouths (or out of their fingers) and examine them a bit more.

For instance, in covering Reconstruction, I ask students to evaluate the successes and failures of the era. I have honestly had a number of students essentially say that Reconstruction's failure was good because it led to the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X.

Let's leave aside that the invocation of these three is usually an indication that the student in question didn't read the text and is relying on common knowledge and look at the basic argument that the students are making. Reconstruction, a period of incredible advancement for African American civil rights, ended. In its wake, segregation, qualifications for voting, lynching, and everything else that falls under the heading of Jim Crow, fell into place. That was all ultimately fine because then there was a Civil Rights Movement. The students don't consider that, had Reconstruction ultimately succeeded, had there been no Compromise of 1877, then maybe -- just maybe -- there might not have been a need for a Civil Rights Movement. They don't consider that some sharecropper in Mississippi in 1925 was thinking "hey, this is o.k. so long as Martin Luther King, Jr., can become famous" or even that Martin Luther King, Jr., standing on the Lincoln Memorial thought, "dang, I'm glad Jim Crow happened so I could get up here today and denounce it."

I don't mean to mock them. Really! Nothing they have ever done in their educational life has asked them to consider the implications of anything. Nor do I intend to open a debate on an alternate history in which Reconstruction was successful because that could last forever and I confess that it is not a field of my expertise. Instead, I'm looking at the reasons that students might fall into that pattern of thinking that horrendous events are o.k. as long as they produce great people.

I find this line of thinking very similar to their understanding of the abolition movement as one of self-help in that it overlooks the vast importance of the possibilities presented during Reconstruction as well as the culture that resulted in Reconstruction's end. Also, it reduces the complexities of that moment in history, and the injustice that followed, into a Pollyana narrative that I often find associated with "achiever" stories. This person or that person overcame the institutionalized racism/sexism/classism/heterosexim in order to become great and an inspiration for others, leaving room for the inference that perhaps that racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism or whatever else are not so bad if this one person can become great in spite of them.

I'm trying to be more sympathetic to my students who fall into these patterns of thinking because these patterns are cultural ruts, ideas that serve a particular purpose to inspire individuals but not necessarily to inspire change. Because these stories are cultural ruts, and because my students are new to this world of ideas, I have to meet them where they arrive. Where they arrive, in the classroom, they have not questioned so many of the ideas that they carry about because those ideas so self-evident when they have gone unchallenged.

I also try to have sympathy because I know that I can come down harshly on them simply because these cockamamie ideas are exactly the type that I would have held when I was their age -- heck, even when I was older and should know better, and even now as I run head-first into an awareness that I often operate under unexamined bad ideas.

In fact, this process of examining these cockamamie ideas is precisely reason that the humanities are important. When you study history or literature or philosophy or languages, you are exposed to a wide variety of ideas in a short and concentrated period of time. Exposure to these ideas is like travelling to another place where your concept of "normal" or "self-evident" or "objective" are all challenged. Seldom in your life, unless you have an extreme experience, will you encounter and engage with so many different concepts and in such a rigorous way as you do in college humanities courses.

You explore the act of thinking deeply and broadly in these college courses, questioning human knowledge and considering real problems that have existed in the real world, regardless of what those detractors of the "Ivory Tower" say. In fact, if you engage with the humanities as you should, as an exploration of ways to think about the world, you may find yourself questioning the animosity toward the "Ivory Tower" and realizing that its detractors are actually full of shit. What's more, you can explore these ideas without actually having to commit to one or the other because you are doing just that: exploring, learning, collecting these ideas.

That is also why research is important to teaching, even to people who teach only the survey courses. When scholars research, they are going out there on the cutting edge of thought, of exploring new ideas, generating new knowledge, and conceptualizing real problems in the real world. These scholars may not necessarily bring the specifics of their research to class; but, because they also work in concepts and questions that are applicable to other eras and specialities, they can apply those ways of thinking to the survey courses as well as to specialized courses. When those same scholars step into the classroom, they are about a decade ahead of the textbooks, and can bring new concepts or new ways of looking at old concepts to their students. Their students are not necessarily going to go beyond that survey class in that field of study, but they will have been exposed to a new way of thinking about the world and will have learned to begin to question what they know and how they know it. They will have learned this because people who do this as a matter of course and as part of their jobs will be showing them how to do it.

Furthermore, this is not a matter of generating a workforce for Business, this is a matter of developing a thoughtful and educated citizenry. Clearly, we are at a loss for that these days, when every half-assed -- no, quarter-assed, eighth-assed, sixteenth-assed -- idea is taken equally seriously and without any evaluation or context.

Therefore, I'm developing sympathy and patience for these students. They come to me with cockamamie ideas. As their teacher, I'm supposed to draw these cockamamie ideas out for them to examine, consider, and evaluate, then send them off in the world hoping that something stuck and that they can apply that skill to everything else they encounter.