Paul Smith wrote:
Trosset, C. (1998, September/October). Obstacles to open discussion and critical thinking. Change, 44-49.
This is an intersting article. I wonder, however, how much its result was influenced by the fact that the questions asked seem to have been only about controversial political issues (e.g., equality of sexes, race, multiculturalism) rather than scientific issues about which one can disagree, but aren't typically of great "personal" import. Would students be more willing and able to productively debate issues from which they are more "detached"? If so, might such debate be used as "training" for "detaching" from and then productively discussing issues that do have more personal import?
I should say, I'm not personally optimisitc about this path. I suspect that, instead, students will bring the "I-can-think-what-I-want-and-no-one-can-object" attitude they have with respect to political discourse to scientific debate as well, thinking that this is how debate is "supposed" to work. (Of course, that is what they have learned from faux "debate" shows like CNN's "Counterpoint," which seems to have taken as its model an old Saturday Night Live routine -- life imitates art!)
Along similar lines, I regularly see person-on-the-street interviews in which someone is asked about some obviously irresponsible thing they are doing (e.g., a single individual driving a giant SUV to commute on a well-maintained highway every day) and their "defense" (as it were) is simply "This is a free country" or some such. The reporters *never* come back with "I didn't challenged your freedom to do it, but rather the *wisdom* of doing it." These people seem to have confused their freedom to do something foolish with a non-existent freedom to not have their foolishness pointed out. It is hard to tell from a few selected TV spots how prevalent an attitude this is, but it seems related to the students' belief that the mere possibility of an contrary view being voiced somehow interferes with their freedom to express themselves. (Wasn't the point of freedom of speech that it would get all views into the public arena so that they could be sorted out in a rational -- this was the Enlightenment, after all -- way?)
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
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