“The Great Enemy of Truth…”

Dear colleague,

In a recent article, I shared about a PD trip that allowed for my visit to the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. Today I'd like to share one more JFK thought that I found to be profoundly related to the argumentative work my students and I do in whatever class I find myself teaching. (For more on my approach to teaching students to argue well, see Chapter 4 of These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most.)

Here's the JFK quote, which is excerpted from his Yale commencement address given on June 11, 1962:

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

(The complete speech text is here.)

Early in my teacher-writer days, I was fortunate to come across Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe, in which he argues that students in college are largely confused about what the disciplines are actually for.

• What is math for?
• What does science do?
• What is the study of literature about?

This confusion, Graff contends, is evident in the typical experience of a college student: I go to this professor's class, figure out what the professor wants, give it to her; then I go to this other professor's class, figure out the things he wants (which don't seem much aligned with the first professor), and give it to him. And so on. Give enough professors what they want, and eventually you get a piece of paper that lets you get on with your life.

This is the titular cluelessness he's referring to. And it needn't be so.

What all the disciplines have in common, in Graff's view, is that they are cultures of argument. If we did a better job making this clear to students — which is basically the goal of Graff and Birkenstein's popular They Say, I Say book — then our students would have a much better (more successful, more engaging) time with school. After all: every person is immersed in argumentative cultures. For some, it's sports; for others, it's video games; for all of us, there are ways of arguing in our family of origin or about current events.

And so it was Gerald Graff who guided me into seeing argument as one of the essential six things that all teachers should aim to master.

Back to the JFK Quote

This is why I found the JFK line so compelling. “The great enemy of truth,” he argued, “isn't the lie but is [rather] the myth.” In JFK's thinking, a lie is something deliberately created to deceive; it's intentionally made up; it's dishonest. A myth, on the other hand, is an unexamined assumption. You don't need to be convinced of what he's calling a myth; you don't even need to think about it. It's just there, persistent, persuasive, and detached from reality.

In my work with students, the myths I see most often are that:

• School is pointless.
• Success in school is getting good grades.
• Some people are good at school and others are bad, end of story.

And in my work with teachers, the myths I see again and again are:

• Some kids are just ___________ [insert fixed, unchangeable, unmalleable state].
• It's all about relationships.
• It's all about skills, not knowledge.
• etc.

Do my students “enjoy the comfort of [the above] opinion[s] without the discomfort of thought”? Do teachers?

I think many of them do. I know for myself, my soul slips very easily into the autopilot of my opinions; left to my own stubborn inclinations, I'll avoid the discomfort of thought like the best of 'em.

So colleague: may our classes be places in which the discomfort of thought is as regular and unavoidable as the ringing of the bell. And may we relentlessly teach into why this is so important.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. JUST A FEW DAYS LEFT — I'm hosting a live session for school leaders next Monday called “The Will to Teach.” It's about the Five Key Beliefs applied to teachers — and what leaders can do when the will to teach starts to erode. $29 for an individual, and $99 for a team. [Details and registration here.]