The Nonpartisan Teacher

SEGL’s nonpartisan pedagogy can seem foreign at first blush.  In an era of exploding emotions and social media sanctimony, is it really possible to let students wrestle with complex ideas together, come to their own conclusions, and foster strong friendships in the process?

Yes!

For sixteen years, on three continents, we have followed a pedagogy we call “growth discourse” - discourse, sometimes messy, that helps each of our students grow.  For some, growth discourse is a scary idea - as scary as the world’s problems and those who seek to manipulate for nefarious ends.  Shouldn't we actively direct students toward the good? For us, the answer is different: growth discourse is the most effective inoculation against evil, and a path to lifelong empowerment.

Here are some of the ideas that inform our work:

1. Students learn from the inside out, not the outside in.

Our starting point is Book VII of Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates describes the purpose of an education: education is not about putting sight into blind eyes.  The effective educator knows that the power to learn is already within the learner.  It simply isn’t directed effectively.  It is the job of the teacher to give students places to look - the most pressing ethical dilemmas of our time - and places to ask - the classic ethical questions that cross cultures, identities, and eras.  Put another way, by the poet Kahlil Gibran, if a teacher “is indeed wise, he does not bid you  enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

**2. Students need to learn how to think, not what to think.  **

This is a common phrase these days, but scratching beneath the surface reveals that many schools do not follow through on this commitment.  At SEGL, we believe that if we tell students what to think, we short-cut the critical thinking process and make students vulnerable to the next demagogue who comes into their lives.  Our pedagogy is called the STAR Method - students must learn to See, Think, Act, and then Reflect in order to be effective learners and leaders.

**3. Nonpartisan is not "neutral."  **

Teachers at SEGL do not posit that the Holocaust might have been fabricated, or that climate change is not affected by human actions, that punching a stranger might be acceptable, or that the sky might in fact be paisley.  Indeed, part of our curriculum involves helping students distinguish between fact and fiction. But when the conversation moves from long-settled fact to modern good-faith disagreement, our teachers shift course.  Rather than sharing their views, they share critical thinking and growth discourse skills.  And then they allow students to explore, debate, question, conclude, revise those conclusions - and learn.  

**4. Teachers are not activists.  **

Every democracy needs citizens who play a variety of roles.  We do not ask farmers to be nurses.  We do not ask firefighters to be doctors.  And we should not ask teachers to be activists.  Activists can teach us a great deal - and many of them come to SEGL to speak each semester.  But teachers stifle knowledge-seeking and drive opposing views into the shadows when they make their political opinions known.  Instead, teachers should seek to surface student ideas - unrefined, questionable, sometimes-upsetting, but also good faith - so that they can be evaluated in a robust exchange.

5. Teachers are activists.

In another way, however, teachers are the most essential activists of all.  Indeed, at SEGL we believe that the most "socially just" goal one can pursue is to help a young person think for herself.  What is the history of activism if not the story of courageous human beings evaluating and then questioning the status quo?  

6. Being uncomfortable is good - but teachers should spread that feeling around.

The best learning happens at the edge of our comfort zone. Despite the current trend of snowplowing parents and softening academic standards, this truth is confirmed by study after study. But less sophisticated teachers forget that all students need to feel uncomfortable, in relatively equal amounts over the course of a class, in order to provoke the maximum amount of learning. If conversations pick on one demographic or ideology more than others, students can cower into shells and lose faith in the process. On the other hand, spreading the discomfort around pulls down guards and lets everyone learn.

7. Exploring ideas and making policy are two different things.

We are not making policy in our discussions at SEGL.  We are not deciding whether to deport someone, raise a tariff, or strike down a Supreme Court precedent.  All of the real world policy questions that exist outside of our classrooms will exist when our conversation concludes.  Students need the freedom to try out ideas - especially flawed ideas - without fearing that they will be ostracized.  There are always guardrails: asserting that another student does not belong at SEGL is a cardinal sin here; we begin with the belief that all of our students belong in our community and that without this belief our work can’t take place.  But within those guardrails, students need the latitude to explore.   

**8. The highest good in a democracy is not convincing your opponent that she is wrong.  **

The highest good in a democracy is not arguing an adversary into submission, as if our political debates were zero-sum UFC bloodfests.  The highest good in a democracy is living alongside those with different values.  This is because living alongside those who are different allows us to understand and build bridges - to recognize, as Sting said once in the 1980s, that the Russians love their children, too.    \

I like to compare the search for "truth" to a bowling lane.  We are all aiming for a strike - to knock every pin down - and no one wants to end up in the gutter.  For amateurs like me, this often means aiming the ball right down the heart of the lane - straight as an arrow, as safe as possible.  But a straight-on shot does not consistently yield a strike.  Instead, if you watch expert bowlers, you will see that there is a better way.  Indeed, the best bowled balls follow a curved trajectory.  They spin perilously close to the gutter of hurt feelings before swinging back to hit those pins at just the right angle, knocking down all the pins.  Sometimes we have to get uncomfortable in order to reach truth. 

In the end, nonpartisan teaching is a work in progress.  Sometimes it is excruciating.  Sometimes we as teachers make mistakes.  Sometimes our students have a bad day.  But over and over again, our faculty finds that committing to these principles works.  More important: so do our students.