How much consistency do we really need?
A conversation with my students helps me to see the value of contradictions in the classroom and the public sphere.
“We keep noticing,” my students said, “that he’s contradicting himself.”
As my students synthesized their conversation about Chapter 4 of Richard Wright’s Black Boy this Tuesday, they kept landing on the contradictions in his writing. Noticing and explaining contradictions is an empowering skill, one that, by junior year, most students possess, at least at its most basic level. Since Wright’s book is a semi-autobiographical novel – a memoir that famously, and like many, also fictionalizes – students find that contradiction especially frustrating. How could a writer who so clearly crafted his own narrative not notice the contradictions? If he noticed them, why didn’t he fix them? I myself often wonder, when I read, to what degree those contradictions compromise the value of the writing, or whether they compromise it at all.
How much consistency do we really need?
Education is a compelling space to think through this question, because even as it needs to mirror the consistency mindset that’s common in functional institutions and companies, it also needs to introduce students to the fact that the world is not always consistent. In general, I support pushes to make structures and practices in schools as consistent and coherent as possible, because I believe that equitable access to success and mastery for all students relies on clear expectations, focused curriculum arcs, and transparent delivery. Often, though, classroom teachers argue that efforts to standardize what is taught and when (for example, for all courses in a discipline to use parallel language to describe writing techniques or classroom tasks) does students a disservice, as it does not train students to move between communication styles in a way that they will need to in future school and work environments.
Both sides of that argument, in schools, have a point: we all need both consistency and inconsistency in certain environments, in thoughtfully calibrated measures. Inconsistency from person to person and leader to leader is a natural outgrowth of intellectual diversity. If we are to preserve linguistic and thought diversity, honor differences in communication styles, and preserve the mental and emotional plasticity to respond to a variety of messages, imperatives, and thought processes that mirror the complexity of the brain, then we need to cherish inconsistencies, not spurn them for their inefficiency.
The mental and emotional plasticity to respond to a variety of messages, imperatives, and thought processes that mirror the complexity of the brain. Even, perhaps especially, those who strive to operate solely using “pure” and “efficient” logic don’t arrive there immediately. Eugenia Chang’s The Art of Logic in an Illogical World explains why. For that reason, when the goal is logic and efficiency, we always need to think through and refine our ideas. Moreover, we’re usually well served by rethinking those ideas, as Adam Grant’s Think Again has effectively argued to a bestseller-sized population. Classrooms cannot be so streamlined that they present to students a world of perfect consistency, a “right” and a “wrong,” no matter how much politicians and kids themselves yearn for that clarity. The world is, and the people who live in it are, full of contradictions. We have to train our brains, and to train kids’ brains, to work from and not against that inconsistency.
I would propose that Literature, History, and Art can and should be vehicles, delivered with consistent measures and language, to introduce and acclimatize kids to contradiction, incoherence, and instability. All of these disciplines stimulate everyone – not just kids – not to think one thing, but to stimulate new ways of thinking through problems, conflicts, glories, and joys of human existence.
When we focus our attention on what stories and histories we allow into classrooms, we ignore the fact that stories and histories matter in our curriculum not only for the content that they give those who read them, but also, and arguably more importantly, for the mental skills and disciplines that they demand of those who interact with them. If students – and adults – look deeply and honestly at historical artifacts and work of literary, visual, and multimedia art, they will not encounter perfect clarity, but the kinds of human contradictions and confusions of which we must all endlessly make sense.
Here’s an example from Black Boy (which parties have placed on banned books lists periodically since the 70s) that caught my students’ attention:
“These boys and girls were will-less, their speech flat, their gestures vague, their personalities devoid of anger, hope, laughter, enthusiasm, passion, or despair. I was able to see them with an objectivity that was inconceivable to them. They were claimed wholly by their environment and could imagine no other, whereas I had come from another plane of living, from the swinging doors of saloons, the railroad yard, the roundhouses, the street gangs, the river levees, and orphan home; had shifted from town to town and home to home; had mingled with grownups more than perhaps was good for me. I had to curb my habit of cursing, but not before I had shocked more than half of them and had embarrassed Aunt Addie to helplessness.” (104)
What’s contradictory here? There isn’t a chart comparing two primary sources, like one might expect in a typical history book designed to show contradictions. Rather, this passage shows a particular kind of inconsistency, a human one, reflective of the narrator’s voice and bias as a youngish adult looking back on his childhood. My students notice how Richard’s tone of derision toward his classmates because they are “claimed by their environment,” and they also notice how the contrast he makes between his experience and their ignorance hinges on the influence of his own environment. If he can look down on other people because they’ve been shaped by their environment, my students asked, then why does he feel as if he should be praised for being shaped by a different one?
It was a great question, I thought. We discussed it from many different angles, acknowledging the tendency of most people to self-mythologize, comparing this one to other derisive passages, and considering the idea that maybe, because the environments are so different, the judgment isn’t a contradiction at all. Though many readers might have an instinct to simply reject an author whose final draft of a document contains contradictions, unpacking the contradiction helped me students to realize that this human flaw of failed logic is, if anything, useful, because it helps them to see the narrator’s humanity more clearly. There’s a chance that it might’ve even been an intentional, humanizing feature of Wright’s craft.
The lesson can extend out further, because as people in human relationships, people who vote, and people who think, to spurn inconsistency would be dangerous, if not destructive. When we demand or expect consistency from a child or a parent, for example, we ignore the fact that learning requires us to change our minds. When we expect politicians to always follow a predictable line of actions and voting, we ignore the fact that across a decades-long political career, both problems and their solutions change. When we allow ourselves to think with perfect consistency, we ignore the interference of outside information and emotion that will deepen our thinking. To ignore any or all of these forces and facts is to deepen divides between ourselves and knowledge that reflects the moment in which we live. It deepens the divide between one and another, between political parties, and between who we have been and who we could be. To embrace inconsistency is to embrace humanity, both our own and that of others. Those facts of humanity that hurt and complicate are also the ones that allow us to grow and to demonstrate love.
My suggestion for schools is this: to create a consistent environment in which we can introduce inconsistency, teaching interaction with that inconsistency and incoherent as a necessary skill, not a choice. My suggestion for citizens is parallel: to lean into moments where the simplicity we hope for in our lives descends into chaos, and to approach that chaos not as a thing to accept or reject but an environment through which we must swim. That’s how it always has been and how it always will be. Approaching the inconsistency of who we are with care and consideration not only strengthens our minds but also our hearts.