A local media outlet recently wrote

“Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics” — writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy — including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel — can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is…. Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

How often does this happen in our classrooms?  How often do we require students to memorize and repeat things they actually think are nonsense?  

• “Heavy things fall at the same speed as light things.” (Sure, whatever.)
• “An object in motion will stay in motion forever unless something stops it.” (That’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows that everything stops eventually.  Even planets’ orbits degrade.).
• When you burn propane, water comes out. (Pul-lease.)
• The answer to “in January of the year 2000, I was one more than eleven times as old as my son William while in January of 2009, I was seven more than three times as old as him” is somehow not, “why do you not know the age of your own kid?“

Real conversation I had with a class a few years ago:

Me: what do you think so far about how weight affects the speed that things fall?

Students (intoning): “Everything falls at the same speed.”

Me: So, do you think that’s weird?

Students: No.

Me: But, this book… I can feel the heaviness in my hand.  And this pencil, I can barely feel it at all.  It feels like the book is pulling harder downward on my hand than the pencil is.  Why wouldn’t that affect the speed of the fall?”

Student: “It’s not actually pulling harder.  It just feels that way, but that’s weight, not mass.”

Me: (weeps quietly)

Please don’t lecture me about the physics.  I’m aware.  Please also don’t lecture me about the terrible fake-Socratic-teaching I’m doing in that example dialogue.  I’m aware of that too.  I’m just saying that students often perceive these to contradict their lived experience, and research shows that outside of classrooms, even those who said the right things on the test usually go right back to thinking what they thought before.

And no, I’m not comparing the role of teachers to the role of Presidents or Prime Ministers.  I do realize they’re different.

Should I Conclude Any of These Things?

1. Students’ ability to fail to retain or synthesize things that don’t make sense to them is actually a healthful and critically needed form of resistance.
2. When teachers complain about students and “just memorizing what they need for the test and forgetting it after, without trying to really digest the material,” what we are complaining about is their fascism-prevention mechanism
3. Teachers have the opportunity to be the “warm up,” the “opening act” — the small-scale practice ground where young minds practice repeating things they don’t believe, thinking they can safely forget them later.
4. Teachers have the opportunity to be the “innoculation” — the small-scale practice ground where young minds can practice “honoring their dissatisfaction” in a way that, if they get confident with it, might have a chance at saving their integrity, their souls, and their democracy.

Extension Problem

Applying this train of thought to the conventional ways of doing corporate diversity training is left as an exercise for the reader.