Is it possible to trust someone with whom you disagree?
Skepticism, in place of mistrust, can help us navigate our dangerous distrust.
I wonder: do you have to agree with someone in order to trust them?
As I’ve mentioned across the past few weeks, I’ve been reading as many articles and Twitter arguments as I can about recent motions to ban books in schools. This week, I found that Jessica Grose’s NYT op-ed, “Book Banning is About the Illusion of Parental Control” closed a final underrecognized loop in those conversations. Grose clearly articulates my central observation about the politicization of school curriculum in general and book banning debates in particular: that parents who call to ban curriculum illustrate, both to teachers themselves and to their own children, that teachers and schools are not worthy of their trust. Sometimes, this signaled mistrust is intentional. Grose points out what is obviously true: that parents (except for the most authoritarian ones) have never and will never have complete control over their childrens’ experiences of the world. The effort to abolish texts from curricula if they don’t reflect the interests, especially politics, of parents – most of whom, if you ask, usually haven’t read the text and have only read summaries or reviews from other parents on the internet, and most of whom also have no training in education or teaching – reflects a desire to grasp at straws, a paranoia over the thought that what a kid learns in the world might diverge from what a kid learns at home. We all know, though, that via the internet, the kid even learns at home about phenomena and realities from which their parents work to protect them.
I think that mixed messages between home and school are the best thing that ever happened to me. I think that they are, for most people, the way that we find our senses of selfhood and agency in the world.
What parents who call to ban books really seem to focus on is the idea that political or cultural disagreement is a cause for fear. In 2022, this fear is not misplaced, and I don’t take it lightly. But fear doesn’t need to mean mistrust, especially for stakeholders whose core desires (for children, at least) are remarkably well aligned. In order to trust those with whom we disagree, we need to cultivate healthy skepticism.
My parents provide an excellent model of what healthy skepticism looks like. I grew up in Massachusetts and attended an all-girls’ private school through eighth grade. The school supportive environment with individualized challenges, which my parents knew would be good for me, a fairly precocious young kid. In Massachussets, they knew they weren’t likely to send their kids to a school where many teachers’ views and opinions reflected their own: they were active Republicans who were active in their church, and Massachusetts runs blue. Though there were some moments when my parents added their opinions to my learned understanding of the world – during the fiery gay marriage debates of my middle school years, for example, or the seventh grade sex ed curriculum – ultimately, my parents looked at my and my siblings’ curricula with curiosity and appropriate distance. They knew to restrain their opinions, which is not always easy, even when they had formed them about teachers and teachers’ curricula. If they had a real problem, they started a conversation with adults, perhaps named their grievances and moved on. In short, they treated disagreement with respect, ultimately seeking an identifying the core value that they shared with teachers – namely, the desire for their children to learn and grow and love – and using that to guide all interactions with school.
If the fear that a teacher holds a different worldview from a family means that parent cannot trust that the teacher holds the requisite expertise, judgment, and ultimately care for children to expose them to the world responsibly nonetheless, then what do kids learn about school? They learn that teachers are not worthy of trust. This means that for the majority of their waking hours, parents will send their children to a place outside of the home populated with empowered adults who neither deserve the respect of kids nor can be trusted with any of their problems, ambitions, or fears. Signaling that teachers possess neither the moral authority to determine where students should direct their attention nor the wisdom to protect them as they learn places kids in a trap.
When fear, whether poorly or well justified, immediately leads to mistrust, kids suffer. Parents whose children attend schools where their selfhood or identity feels questioned (even I, a kid who for all intents and purposes represented a school’s dominant culture, never talked about going to church on the weekends) are usually the models of restraint. Parents of students of color at the predominantly white school where I teacher are astonishingly constructive in their relationships to our school, especially, in many circumstances, given the justified causes they have for absolute mistrust. Though a parent may have a reason to fear, they might understand that their kids will not benefit from seeing their mistrust. It is possible seek out a healthy skepticism, out of care for their children; that position of skepticism can allow them to interrogate and build conversations around curricular material with the understanding that the central goal of the pursuit is the well-being of children. Importantly, parents who possess less financial power and/or cultural capital in the school are more likely, in my experience, to approach a school with an attitude of healthy skepticism, and parents who believe that they have power or should have power within that system are more likely to leap to distrust at the drop of a hat.
Skepticism is actually good for teaching, just as it is often productive in many fields. Every teacher knows the feeling, from the online learning days, that a student’s parent stands just outside the frame during a discussion of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, armed with a grumble about “wokeness.” Knowing that parents and other stakeholders are curious about the means and methods of teaching forces teachers to have answers to their questions. Why am I teaching this book? Why did I give this assignment? If anyone asked why, teachers would give an answer. No one’s asking why.
Book banners skip skepticism, which is the tack that would allow them to disagree with decisions from a posture of curiosity and trust. In order to build a healthy skepticism about divergent opinions, a person must suspend the instinct to distrust in pursuit of shared values.
I absolutely love Eugenia Chang’s The Art of Logic, and one of the reasons I love it most is for the way that it encourages its reader to think about the axiomatic beliefs that undergird opinions. The opinions on which we disagree, Cheng reminds her reader, aren’t the deepest level of our logic; they’re situational manifestations of the thoughts we hold more deeply, like beliefs or core values. Many trying to solve the book banning frenzy focus on the “shared belief” that censorship is largely wrong, and many are trying to galvanize Americans around that. I think that tack is misguided, because claiming “shared beliefs” among Americans has, I think, been more difficult than most people have been willing to admit and for longer than most people have been willing to admit. That’s not for me to take on. What I will say is that a look at our core values – not our political values, but our core values about children and education – are a better place to begin.
Perhaps: we all value raising children who can make informed and wise decisions about how to act and think in the world.
Perhaps: we all value raising children who can care for themselves and others with reverence and respect.
Teachers and classrooms, ironically enough, can offer a model for how to translate divergent opinions through the prism of shared values in order to promote healthy skepticism and productive problem solving. The classroom, then, is a model for how to repair relationships and reconstruct between stakeholders in schools.
In an upcoming interview with Jay Hutchinson, a teacher and chaplain at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, he explains to me (and my audience) that kids have to learn to sit in their disagreements in school. In Jay’s eyes, the most beautiful moments in a class discussions are when two kids find a way to sit together and disagree. This happens because students can look at one another and understand what they value about the room in which they sit: they value the ability to be together, to exist as individuals within a community. The community is the classroom environment that Jay develops, and the ability to identify shared values rests upon the fact that Jay, as many teachers do, reinforces the school’s and his classroom’s own shared values both through his own adult modeling and through general references to those shared values. If my students know of and identify with a stated value, they are able to ask one another questions and sit in the uncomfortable silences that come with disagreement, without letting trust erode.
That teenagers – who often don’t trust anything, and whose hormones drive that distrust – are capable of interacting like this, then surely adults are too.
If we – as a society, now – hope to create space for trusting agreement, we’ll need to first find a basis for trust that’s much deeper than shared opinions. Then, we’ll need to work for it, making decisions to trust. Though nearly every part of American society calls for this deeper work, the debate around school curricula perhaps requires our attention first. Skepticism, in place of distrust, could be our way through.