During one academic year while serving as Ogden City Schools superintendent, I took the opportunity to teach a class at each of our two high schools on constitutional law. Ogden High and Ben Lomand High are “highly impacted” schools. Using child nutrition data as a convenient proxy for poverty rates, in 2016, Ogden High had nearly 61% of its students on free and reduced school lunch and Ben Lomand was more than 69%. The schools chose how students would be placed in my class and I had a wide variety of proficiency levels, language skills and backgrounds. At Ogden, for example, I had students who were in the International Baccalaureate programs as well as ESL students who struggled to express themselves in English. At Ben Lomand, I had student body officers and students who were making up credits after having dropped out of school for their sophomore and junior years.
The structure of my class was simple. We read and discussed, in a Socratic dialogue, cases from the United States Supreme Court. There was no other text or text book. I did not edit the cases. My students chose the general topics and I selected the cases. For example, they selected the Second Amendment; we read and discussed Heller v. District of Columbia for several days. They wanted to discuss the rights of immigrants or illegal aliens; we discussed Plyler v. Doe. Supreme Court cases are not easy reading for anyone; they are challenging reading. For most of my students, this was the first time dealing with actual legal documents and the first time where they were subjected to careful analysis of their own reasoning as well as the Courts in a Socratic setting.
What I saw was startlingly apparent. Many students were far more vocal and assertive about their views, far more able to articulate a position in a Socratic discussion, and better able to think and analyze closely reasoned matters than others. Initially, I made the assumption that the differences I observed were primarily related to academic training, or perhaps to socio-economic status. Upon a little deeper review, however, I realized that these differences were not adequately explained by such differences. Certainly IB students were often more verbal or more articulate, but not universally.
When I met with students individually and began to know them individually, some things became more apparent. Students with a rich store of life experiences, broad reading, and lots of observations, simply had more mental categories to draw upon in seeking to understand, analyze, and criticize difficult textual materials. Other students often simply lacked both the language, but also the mental infrastructure, to begin to look at high level text in a meaningful way. They suffered from hypocognition. Many of the students least able to access and address the Supreme Court texts had been lifelong students in my school district. To me, it seemed obvious that we had woefully underserved these students; they had attended school for twelve years, and yet their ability to read, analyze, synthesize and project their learning was all but none-existent.
As we discussed case after case, I was horrified to learn that basic civil rights that I took as fundamental givens in our society were unfamiliar and strange to my students. For example, we read the case of Tinker v. Des Moines School District, a case in which the Supreme Court held that students protesting the Vietnam War were entitled to wear black armbands to school, provided they were not otherwise disturbing the educational process. Many of my students simply could not understand that students could legitimately defy their elders in such ways; this lack of understanding did not have a politically partisan component to it. Students on the left and right were equally unable to discuss ideas like freedom of speech and the need for rights of conscience. One of the greatest moments for me in this process was to simply affirm that there was a “fat, white, middle-aged, Mormon, Republican, lawyer” who trusted them enough to
believe that they could responsibly and civilly challenge me and my generation. We discussed that my agreement with their thinking was not a condition precedent to my respect for them. To the contrary, my respect for them as fellow-citizens and fellow-learners, meant both that I would carefully listen to them and that I would engage with them in a no-holds-barred discussion.
What was also apparent to me was one of the fundamental failures of our educational system. In our district, we had allowed our standards to become so weak and diluted that we actually stated that poor or Hispanic students in schools in downtown Ogden simply could not do as much as wealthier or whiter students on the eastside of town. With pure hearts (I assume) and empty heads, we were content if students were exposed to only the most rudimentary recall and recitation lessons. The idea of analysis, synthesis or strategic thinking was simply never tried. As a result, we had generations of students who were underserved, unable to obtain first-class jobs, or engage as fully-endowed citizens. Moreover, just as slavery degraded both master and slave, this process degraded both the teacher and the learner; teachers no longer really taught and students never really learned.
To me, the grandeur and the power of education, lies in exposing minds to new thoughts, new pathways and new vistas. Those points in my own life are bright, and energized, and filled with power. For example, in high school, taking chemistry and physics and realizing for the first time the tight and deep and enduring connection between mathematical expression and physical reality was like breathing new air; it was heady and exhilarating. Living in a foreign country and being immersed in a foreign language as a Mormon missionary in Finland, was daunting and frightening, but it was also a period of enlightenment as a new language opened upon new ways of thinking about familiar topics. The sun shone from a new angle. Or, law school was an entirely new experience for me in precision and care in expression and thought. My point is that each of these and other times created opportunities for me to experience life in new, unexpected, and unique ways. Absent these chances, my own life would lack dimension; and it is almost impossible to discern the lack of a dimension from within the space bounded by known dimensions.
Education, then, is all about creating the conditions for students to experience their life and their personal dimensions to the fullest possible extent. Certainly, that means creating a space for them to explore and expand without the limits of authority or dogma, However, it also means establishing, without apology and without fear, proficiency in fundamental learning. My students were almost all perfectly capable of reading the words of the Supreme Court, but they had had no training in understanding, criticizing, and synthesizing their own views of the ideas. I want students to be sufficiently instructed that they can understand, criticize, and act for themselves.
Across The Divide: A Dialogue 