Why did I teach a pro-gun essay?
A conservative columnist and a room of reactive teenagers change my mind about how, why, and to what end readers and writers can engage with our disagreements.
This week, I assigned David French’s “What Critics Don’t Understand about Gun Culture” to my senior seminar. French, a columnist for the Atlantic (which published the essay first, in 2018), is a conservative writer, formerly a columnist at the National Review. He’s one of several conservative writers whose work I read frequently, even (and, in fact, because) I seldom align with his political viewpoints. Specifically, I appreciate the way that French communicates with his audience and the clarity and consideration with which he frames his logical arguments by directly acknowledging his beliefs.
I was nervous to assign the essay. At the New York City private school where I teach, some students identify as conservative, and many more live in homes where one or both parents are active conservatives. By and large, though, all of my students have a clear and straightforward perspective on gun control: they don’t generally feel that private citizens should own guns at all. I could, and maybe will, write a separate essay about why teenagers feel this way (hint: a lifetime of active-shooter drills has a stronger impact than gun-rights advocates realize).
I wasn’t worried about my students’ abilities to understand French’s arguments. They’re eighteen and can usually understand most of what I assign them. I was worried about their willingness to entertain the argument of the piece, their willingness to hear it, and their willingness to tease it apart. I was concerned that they would ignore the nuance of the essay, which is a concern that many teachers with whom I speak share. That uncertainty about their reception only fueled a different kind of fear in me: serious problems can arise when a teacher introduces a text that students refuse to entertain – their refusal or indignation in the classroom is the mildest of the possibilities I imagined.
Then why did I assign the essay?
Mostly, I wanted students to really believe that they could earn my admiration for an essay even if it laid out an opinion with which I disagreed.
Realistically, students earn As all the time for essays that present arguments with which I disagree. I tell students how I interpret texts or problems, becuase I think that it limits their thinking and signals to them that I don’t trust their abilities to draw conclusions. As a result, students make good arguments with which I disagree all the time – they just don’t know that I disagree with them. I though French’s essay would offer me a good chance to make this openness more explicit.
The focus of the course also matters. This course is focused on nonfiction writing; each student will identify an individual area of research, humanistic question, and collection of materials that they can apply as they respond to their self-selected prompt. To prepare them for their own work, we read a series of essays – essays of cultural criticism, opinion, ethical inquiry – and discuss their content and construction in equal measure. In plain English, we spend half of our time talking about what we agree or disagree with, and the other half we spend unpacking how the authors communicate those points.
A few of my students had entered our discussion of Michael Pollan’s national-discourse-changing essay “An Animal’s Place” (2002) spewing their hatred for the author and his core argument, so I was expecting the same response (but magnified) for this essay, since I was sure, this time, that my students would unilaterally reject French’s ideas. I wasn’t giving them enough credit.
We started the hour-long class with an extended, guided writing exercise. They had five minutes to respond to each of the following questions:
What do you think about French’s argument?
Respond to the following sentence from the essay: “In a way that’s tough to explain, the fact that you’re so much less dependent on the state for your personal security and safety makes you feel more ‘free’ than you’ve ever felt before.”
What’s the “point” of this essay?
Based on the ensuing conversation, I probably didn’t need to start with so much personal reflection. Often, I throw in extended, guided moments like this into my classes in response to my own needs or nerves, buying myself time to scan through the essay and prepare my own thoughts, challenging every student to revisit the essay, if they skimmed it, and consider it with a new level of care. It is decent pedagogy, but I’m also willing to admit that it’s a teacher move I lean on in my more nervous moments, because I believe that it asks students to position themselves before glomming on to groupthink.
As it turns out, the students really valued and learned from French’s essay. Now I’m the idiot, I thought as I left the classroom. Why did I doubt them, even though I knew French’s essay was the right one to assign?
The night before I taught French’s essay, I had drinks with an acquaintance who’s a college- and graduate-school professor. We were comparing notes on Gen-Z. The thing he noticed about our students is that they tend to foist around terms that center on diversity and inclusion, but they struggle to commit to understanding the nuance, complexities, and ironies laden in those terms as they apply them. As a result, they often too quickly, too easily simplify or shun.
A certain degree of hard-headedness and simplistic thinking is a characteristic of adolescence, a part of teaching that secondary educators in any era have to anticipate. I think we’re only worried about this tendency now because instead of seeming like an aberrance from a more sophisticated, nuanced, adult world, it feels like a distillation of an adult world that’s no longer sophisticated or nuanced. Teenagers’ rejection of critical thinking these days is just a mirror to society more broadly. Because of that broader concern, I forget both that it’s natural, even healthy, for my students to struggle with nuance of ideas with which they disagree and that it’s possible, more so than I often remember, to teach them to approach those ideas. It’s not only possible – it is, I think, my job.
I’m speaking about how effective French’s essay was in my classroom, but I couldn’t do so without first acknowledging that a different set of students might’ve rejected it. I teach a particular set of largely high-achieving students who have generally positive visions of school and our school in particularly; their generally positive connection to me also fosters a certain amount of trust in my intentions. Still, I do believe that the context of the course matters. Specifically, I think that the scaffolding of and experience in thinking about not only the thoughts within, but also the construction of, writing allowed my students to appreciate French’s work, and therefore entertain his ideas, differently.
To really communicate about core differences in conviction, I believe, we need to push ourselves to be more thoughtful writers and readers.
There’s something offputting about someone saying, “I found the way you wrote this persuasive, but I disagreed with your point.” There’s something in that response that sounds very “Judge Jackson is extraordinarily experienced and talented as a judge, but I can’t vote for her” about that kind of response. As a teacher, though, I valued my students’ ability to be persuaded at all. Specifically, I was struck by one student, whose initial response to French’s essay was the following: “he wrote in a way that helped me enter into the mindset of a gun owner and relate and connect to the concerns in his mind.” Though French lost my students (and me, honestly) when he vaguely argued lumped the right for a private citizen to own an assault rifle into his argument, overall he introduced my students to – better yet, immersed them in – gun culture enough to help them enter into the belief that undergirds his thinking.
I was concerned about assigning this essay to my seniors, but now I’ve pivoted: I shouldn’t be comfortable allowing my students to graduate and move to new places and communities unless they’ve had this kind of learning experience.
Eventually, I circled and underlined the idea of belief that’s central to French’s argument. Indeed, he even acknowledges at the beginning of the essay that he doesn’t think it’ll really change many minds among the Atlantic’s (largely liberal) readership: “we’re products of our place, our time, and our people. Each of these things is far more important than shaping hearts and minds than any think piece, any study, or certainly any tweet.” Belief, as it turns out, is at the core of who we are – more than, or at the very least before, logic is. This idea aligns with what I’ve learned from Eugenia Chang’s The Art of Logic, a book which I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, that when it comes to humanistic questions, any logic we claim to present is undergirded by our core, often untouchable and early-determined, beliefs about life and how it works.
I introduced that idea to my students, and they really seemed to soak it in as a novel concept. They disagreed with French’s conclusion that the ability to own guns will make the population writ large safer – but they were stumped when they had to acknowledge that what forms French’s position isn’t just or even mostly made up of logic, but a “backdrop of experience and sincere belief.”
I’ve written, often, about the tendency of schools to train students to argue and counterargue. Those skills are well and good – essential, in fact – but in truth, they’re insufficient on their own. They don’t account for belief, which is something that all of us – even the most nonreligious among us – hold. In fact, I often teach children and push myself not to mention personal belief explicitly at any point in what we write; rather, writers across time have always used belief to shape their ideas – we can’t not – but in this moment, maybe more than ever before, deny or ignore the influence of belief in their craft. French’s essay unabashedly acknowledges that the debate over gun ownership is personal, felt, lived, and believed. The best essays do this: they don’t shy away from the personal, and they generalize in a way that the purely rational mind might reject. They’re also, as it turns out, more persusasive. Most of my students, in an anonymous poll, said that their minds were changed five percent by French’s essay.
To my students, five percent isn’t significant. They’re aiming to persuade. I’m starting to see that we live in a culture of persuasion, where five percent change feels too marginal to matter. But in the game of forming, shifting, and developing our beliefs – the less controllable, quantifiable deeper parts of us – a five percent shift can be everything.
Today, I’m wondering what it means to acknowledge, even center on, the role of belief in my work and in my life. Almost counterintuitively, it’s starting to look like the best place to begin.