Lectures (4)—Understanding with a Human Face

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."

[a] Lens

This Round and Square post is dedicated to an event (big for me and small for the community) taking place in Beloit, Wisconsin today. I am very pleased (and humbled) to receive the Rotary Club and Greater Beloit Chamber of Commerce's monthly teaching award. I have loved teaching ever since I started doing it about twenty years ago, and this particular award means a great deal to me. It is my home community, and the very best part of it is that it is shared—month after month and year after year—by teachers of all kinds and at all "levels." I dislike that word, "level," because it blurs the fact that elementary, junior high school, and high school teachers are even more important to our society than college or graduate teachers are. I have a role to play in the whole configuration, just like all of my colleagues teaching in colleges and universities, but we are building upon the fundamental work of those who educate the students we inherit. Most of the teaching awards out there focus on each of the "levels." This one, very appropriately, mixes it all up, and honors teachers from the community who teach sixth-grade science, elementary reading, special education, high school geography, and, yes, even East Asian history and anthropology. It is a great credit to the Rotary Club of Beloit that they "get" the fundamental importance of education from preschool and kindergarten all of the way beyond high school. 

[b] One-room history RF

The Rotary Club is busy, so I have three minutes (in the "live" version) to explain something about myself as a teacher. Ellen Joyce, my colleague and chair of the history department at Beloit College, remarked (when hearing that I was to speak for three minutes) that it would be worth being there just to hear me speak for three minutes. Since she is introducing me today, she can see if I can pull it off. I also want to mention Dean of the College and Provost Ann Davies, who nominated me for this award. I truly appreciate it. It is also a pleasure to thank my former colleague in Beloit College's education department, Tom Warren, who has always been an inspiration to me when it comes to engaging with students. His organizational work from the time I was nominated on was as efficient and orderly as I ever could have expected. It means a great deal to have the support of my colleagues and the community. Above all, as I have mentioned, it is an honor even to be considered in the same conversation with my real heroes—preschool, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers who make my job very easy, indeed.

This is the long version of a "three-minute" talk. 

***  ***

Human...Understanding
On a cool, thawing Minnesota spring day in 1980 I had the most important educational experience of my life. I never saw it coming; I never had a clue.

It was one of those hopeful early-March days in southern Minnesota. I went to my early classes and then saw fit to go for a run through Carleton College's spacious arboretum, where I had been running and thinking ever since my family moved to Northfield, Minnesota ten years earlier. On that spring afternoon, I was troubled by something I could not shake, no matter how hard I tried. I had been studying the Chinese practice (even then defunct for the better part of a century) of footbinding. That day, I had learned in my Chinese history class that the practice was not known until the tenth or eleventh century, became the prime mover of marriage politics for eight hundred years, and then died out, almost as quickly. It was completely gone by 1930, as I was told.

[c] Written RF

I had heard about the practice before, but mostly through popular culture "lenses" that did not help my understanding very much. I had not known that it was unheard of for the first two thousand years of China's historical—"written"—tradition, that it dominated almost every aspect of Chinese cultural life from about 1200 until almost 1900, and then died out in just a few decades. I had no idea, but I was befuddled.

And a little angry.

As I tap-tapped through the spring mix of leaves, melting snow, and mud—on the familiar ten-kilometer trail along the Cannon River—I kept thinking about how much I despised this practice. I could not get around it; I had feelings about it. I thought to myself that it was bad for women, men, adults, children—everyone. No good could come of it, I mused. I really didn't like it, and it had as much to do with the relative recency of my "understanding" of the many dimensions of the practice. I had (had) no idea that it was a part of "family strategy" in China for many generations, or that relatively poor families often went through extremely difficult choices with regard to future marriage possibilities and current family labor necessities (bound feet and work in the fields did not go together very well, to say the least). Raising hackles I never knew I had, I ran on, disturbed.

[d] Trail RF

Later that afternoon, I went to see my anthropology professor. It so happened that I was also in a course called Peoples and Cultures of Africa. In that class, I was struggling with the ways in which various tribes (called Nuer and Dinka) would raid each other and steal each other's cattle. I was bothered by the way in which it was all right (as I saw it from my readings) for Nuer to think of their Dinka neighbors as "other," and "lesser." Then they stole their cattle—or vice versa.

I had feelings—powerful ones—and I wanted to talk.

I had no way of knowing it then, but this was about to be the most important educational experience of my life, and it would stay with me right up through the South Carolina primary last Saturday...and today's State of the Union speech. It has affected every aspect of my teaching and learning ever since then.

When Professor Riesman opened the door that day, I had no idea.

He asked me to sit down, and I unfurled my frustration over footbinding and what I perceived as mindless aggression between neighbors in Africa. I spoke of China and what today we call "the Southern Sudan." I did not speak about the United States and Europe, and it never occurred to me why I had not done so. I let out my frustrations about these matters, and then finished my confused ranting and imbedded questioning with a phrase that I have come to recognize in my own teaching. My own students say it all the time, and it is one of the most important pivots—and teaching moments—I encounter, every semester of every year.

     I am really angry when I read these things. I have strong opinions about
     them, but I know that I shouldn't...because that's their culture. It's their
     business. Not mine.

A later professor of mine (Allan Bloom) would mock such lines almost before they were out of a student's mouth. He would have reviled them as the kind of soggy relativism that had ruined America's students, so he argued. He wrote a book about it. He would have pontificated without reflecting further. I am writing a book about him.

But not Paul Riesman.

His way of thinking was far more nuanced. He practiced the Socratic Method in a way that most teachers bungle. Clearly, he was ready for my question and inarticulate ranting. It was not as though he had "heard it all before," because, if you ever spoke to Paul Riesman, you knew that you were the only person who mattered. Ever. This could be uncomfortable, which should tell you as much about the student as the teacher. He wanted to understand what you were thinking, and that had everything to do with his exemplary teaching.

     So...you are saying that you can't have feelings—human feelings, your own
     feelings—because it is "their" culture? Are you saying that you can't let yourself
     feel your own emotions if you are going to understand something? Are you
     telling me that you can't have human emotions and rigorously analyze human
     life at the same time?

Dumbfounded.

[e] Curving RF

I wish that the English language had more words for my befuddlement, but dumb is a pretty good start for my perplexity. I wish that language and emotion were more closely merged than they ever can be in...life. My consternation was quintessentially postmodern, and I could not make it divide along the lines I wanted—feelings, on one hand, and analysis on a completely unrelated "academic" side. I think the word "objective" cropped up at some point in my thinking.

I had no idea how to respond, but I tried.

     How can I allow myself to have negative feelings about things in cultures I don't
     live in? How could I even have a right to an opinion?

Of course, I did not speak grammatically ["in which I do not live..."]. Grammar had nothing to do with it. The real question was more troubling. Like everyone else, I had spent loads of time having opinions about things regarding [sub]-cultures I did "live in." It was called "politics" and "history." My own—whatever one's "own culture" means. I felt very comfortable having strong opinions about things in American society. I even (this took me some time to recognize) had come to "understand" opinions and political stances with which I did not agree. Paul Riesman helped me to see, with one series of questions—one thirty-minute (or so) meeting in his office—that opinion and analysis, lived experience and discerning judgment, can merge in the very being of a very human being..can both have feelings and understand others.

As spring became summer, I let it sink in. By doing so, I avoided the more simplistic ways of looking at his message, such as interpreting it as an ability to debate "their side." No, Riesman was implying something much more expansive—something that felt both exhilarating and vaguely dangerous.

What a concept. It had never occurred to me...except in my own culture. I could have my own opinions and understand that culture is contested. I could start to see that "Chinese culture" itself had many nooks and crannies, and that a simplistic phrase such as "that's their culture" was as defeatist as it was intellectually indefensible. The other lesson I learned from Paul Riesman was even more dramatic. It is one thing to learn both to acknowledge your own human emotions and to understand—in deep and discerning "human" ways—people who are "other" than you. At one point in our many classes and meetings, Professor Riesman  mentioned that anthropology was at least a potentially "subversive" discipline." What he meant, as I understand it, is that the best student of cultural understanding will seek to understand even the most befuddling, irritating, thorny...

[Insert your own example from politics or "culture" here]

...example of difference in even your own society. My, my. That has been harder for me to do than even to understand footbinding or cattle raids among neighbors. How am I going to understand...really understand...the other side? We don't do much of that anymore in the nation of my birth (at least not as much as I like to think we once did).

I started by having Professor Riesman's questioning make me rethink the way that I looked at East Asian and African history. I finished by, well, changing my life.

You see, anthropology and history (if they are done well) are a little "subversive," in a good way. If we do it well, we learn to understand even things with which we don't agree—things that perplex and bother. We don't often end up agreeing, nor should we feel the need to, but we start to understand that there are various and challenging ways of viewing the world. If this seems "easy" (and many of my students initially think it is and that they do it routinely), I would urge you to think again. It is not a matter of being able to create a quick synopsis; it is a matter of understanding the complex thought of another. If we start to understand that life and personality and culture is complicated—profoundly so—is it possible that we will never be able to understand the world in simplistic ways again? Is it possible not to think that "everything is equal" or "subjective," or "the same" while still coming to an understanding of how others, even opponents, think?

I surely hope so. I have bet my teaching career on it.

[f] Politics RF

Where is this going? Does it mean that I might watch Fox News and yet might try to understand—really understand—MSNBC's evening programming? Yup. Does it mean that I might read the New York Times and, on my very own Kindle (or Nook) read the Wall Street Journal...every day? Yup.

I'll go so far as to say that the true educational ideal might even be to understand...

 ...Wisconsin politics.

No, really to understand.

What I learned from Paul Riesman that afternoon in Northfield, Minnesota is that understanding, humanity, and analysis are all of a piece. This is difficult stuff. It is also the world in which we live. Are we even going to try to understand things with which we don't agree? I have taught for years and years, and Paul Riesman's teachings have inspired mine. If only a few more people would go against the grain (think about really understanding "the other side," even if you disagree or vote otherwise) what might become of our society?

What if we really sought to understand (I mean really understand) the other side?

Check that. I mean...the other sides?

Nothing has ever shaped my thinking as much.

[g] Culture RF