HIDDEN CHALLENGES AND THEIR ORIGINS

A teacher facing a class and charged with instructing students about the governance and politics of their nation has a somewhat unique responsibility not faced by other teachers. Sure, in some way or other, all teachers have unique aspects regarding their subject matter and their duty to teach it. But in this posting, I want to relate what I find unique about teaching civics and government. I believe that when the job is to teach about these areas, a teacher is dealing with a subject that begins and ends with moral issues. In between there are other types of issues – resource availability and distribution, power arrangements, egos, histories of relationships, and the like – but in the end it's about “who gets what, when, and how,” as Harold Lasswell pointed out, and who should get what, when, and how as Daniel Elazar pointed out. These questions can literally be about life and death, or they can be about progressing toward or away from ideal states when the ideal is a reflection of values, mores, customs, and varying degrees of thought-out theories concerning life both at the individual and societal levels. The teacher faces a group of youngsters who already have embedded within them prejudices and dispositions even before the teacher begins a lesson. In most cases, the outlooks they hold are not even consciously recognized, but are the innermost springboards for how they will respond or react to words or images that the teacher will present to them.

Recent work of cognitive scientists has been shedding light on how these mental recesses function not just for secondary students, but for adults as well. One cognitive scientist is George Lakoff. In this posting, I want to share one the fundamental insights he establishes in his book, Moral Politics, and apply it to the challenge our teacher faces every time he or she introduces a new topic.

Suppose I, as a civics teacher, begin a lesson by asking the following: should an emergency room at a nearby hospital provide medical care to a person brought in with a serious medical condition but who has no means to pay for the care? Some students will readily agree that care should be given and express their surprise that I would even ask such a question. For those students, it's just common sense that such treatment should be forthcoming to a person so in need. Others will probably say “of course not” and again ask why I would ask such a question. Their take is that if you need to “purchase” a good or service you should be ready, willing, and able to pay for it. Yet, while others will simply say they don't know, for many of the students who do “know” it's just a matter of common sense. While I don't know what the distribution would be in a given class among those expressing the different possible answers, I was always taken with how many students see their responses as merely expressing the obvious and not be able to appreciate the complexity of such a situation. Yet, even when seen as common sense by many in the class, the fact that not all agree begs the question: so, how common is this sense?

This situation poses the following concern for a teacher who doesn't want to simply impose a “right” answer to the question of whether treatment should be given to the indigent patient. The teacher must probe the situation in such a way as to not turn off either the students who “know” the patient should be given treatment or the students who “know” that the patient should not be given the treatment. Lakoff addresses this seemingly troubling challenge. He writes:

One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science, one that comes from the study of commonsense reasoning, is that most of our thought is unconscious – not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it.¹

In order to visualize these unobservable mental operations, Lakoff has conceptualized two categories of such unconscious systems of basic inclinations that go into forming the content of our “common sense.” The two categories are metaphorical common sense and radical categories.

Metaphorical common sense operates when we unconsciously see some type of reality in such a way that we are susceptible to accepting a certain language of reference. That is, the language refers to the reality in question – the case of the indigent patient, for example – as exemplifying some other simpler reality that is similar enough to stand in as an organizing vision for that which is less understood. For example, if in my question above, a student is inclined to believe that the above patient should get the needed treatment, a narrative could be one relating the incident to a child needing help from a parent. Such a student might argue that like that child, the government, the proxy parent, makes it illegal to turn away such a patient. The metaphor of a family with parents making sure the children – citizens – are taken care of, at least as far as providing essential things in life such as health care, is quite common in our political literature. On the other hand, a student who argues against the help might use a related image of tough love parents. These parents are willing to administer the harsh lessons of life that teach the would-be patient and others that there is no such thing as a “free lunch” in this world. By doing otherwise, the government or the hospital would be subordinating irresponsibility.

Both use, as often is the case when alluding to government, the metaphor of a family to devise explanatory narratives that reflect deep seated biases. One possible metaphor is that of a nurturing parent in this family arrangement. Such a bias would probably favor providing assistance for our indigent patient. The other version or bias, the one that would deny the treatment, could possibly rely on a strict parent metaphor. Such students would be concerned with the precedent such treatment would set and make it more likely that others would learn that one needs not worry about being indigent when it comes to health care.

Again, the other category of unconscious biases is what Lakoff calls radical categories. Radical categories refer to those tendencies people have in wanting to cast others, who have certain similarities among them, with certain characteristics which are not justified given the facts relating to those so categorized. Lakoff identifies a list of radical category types or prototypes. I won't list them here – get a hold of the book for his complete review – but one of them, to give you a sense of what Lakoff is referring to, is “typical case prototype.” In this type, all members of a group share characteristics unless otherwise distinguished. If someone is described as an American, the bias might be to visualize a white male Protestant. If I said a bird, a common bias is to think of a feathered flying creature the size of a robin or cardinal. In discussion, these biases can and often do conjure up images of reality that can easily be misleading or they can betray or be instrumental in formulating conscious beliefs that are over-generalizations – a primary source of prejudices.

The danger is that in a discussion about our needy patient, a teacher unaware of the varying biases which lead to unfounded conclusions about the situation can find it difficult to discern the unconscious mental origins of the thoughts students express. If a teacher is so disadvantaged, he or she might find it difficult to question the student in such a way as to solicit appropriate introspection. The student, if challenged ineffectually, might simply dig in his/her heels and not entertain any further considerations. Such an interaction between teacher and student can easily end in frustration for the teacher – the purpose of the lesson not being met – and a student who might feel a range of emotional reactions that are counterproductive. These might be the sense of being picked on because he or she doesn't share the teacher's opinion or self- righteousness for standing up for what is obviously true, in the student's eyes, against the authority of the teacher.

This posting is meant to simply present this area of concern. I hope to address it further in the future. But let me conclude this take on this problem area by pointing out again that I believe this concern is somewhat unique to civics and government teachers – at least to the degree it pertains to current societal issues that are very much confronting the nation's citizens on a daily basis. Not only is confronting these unconscious biases germane to civics' discussions, but the biases also pose hurdles to teachers which are highly varied and possibly intense in a given classroom. 

 

1Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Quotation on p. 4.