Last fall I read The Great School Rethink by Frederick Hess, who works with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He focuses largely on education policy initiatives, many of which might be familiar: school choice, assessments, funding distribution, and curriculum adoption, among others. While I find these topics and the debates around them interesting, my main takeaway from reading this book was broader. It reminded me that a person is not static, and when we talk with someone we have to focus more on the thoughts they’re presenting and not conflate that with our notions of who the person is when taken as a sum of their parts.
In discussions around self-care, growth mindsets, and any other progressive psychological ideas, a common theme is an understanding that you as a person are separate from what you think, feel, and do. All of those are indicators of some underlying being, but we are not static. The opinions we have do not define us forever, and we are capable of change.
Fighting against that concept is how naturally hypocritical we are when comparing ourselves against others. People can excuse their own mistakes pretty easily—they’re just learning, they had a bad night’s sleep, work has been difficult—yet we rarely extend that grace and understanding to those around us. We’ve changed over some period of time, and our thoughts have evolved; we’ve gained skills, let some others rust, and emerged different than before. Then we look at someone else who we’ve met a few times and lock in a caricature of their personality and thoughts and rarely give them the benefit of the doubt we give ourselves.
This is why I find writing to be the ideal format to engage with an idea, and why The Great School Rethink had me rethinking how I handle my implicit biases. Writing can be separated from the person. You are not watching someone in an interview, or listening to their voice. You could be given a piece of writing and not be told who wrote it, left only to evaluate the idea itself1The presentation of the idea is via writing, so it’s not “the idea itself”. People have different writing voices which could affect your perception, but I believe it’s farther removed than seeing or hearing the person. At some point we have to accept that ideas themselves can only take meaning in a shared world if we find ways to communicate them. on the merits you’ve been provided. If instead you saw a video interview on, say, Joe Rogan or MSNBC, your perception is affected at the outset.
I went into this book with my idea of Hess based on where he works, what other people who work at the same place discuss, and some bits of writing of his I’ve read before. I don’t align with many, or most, traditional conservative ideals, so I had my eyebrow raised from the start. Why did I start reading the book? Because my manager essentially assigned it to our team. It was not a high-minded ideal that I should seek out opposing viewpoints; it was compulsory.
I read this book more closely and critically than I typically do others. I found points that I didn’t like, disagreed with, or found disingenuous. I also learned interesting new ideas, a different framework for viewing education, and insightful arguments about a few topics I’d written off. I became aware of my biases early on in the book, and began shifting to focus just on the words and the ideas, letting my thoughts on Hess fade into the background. They were present, but muted in favor of the argument itself.
I’ve tried to keep this lesson in mind as I talk to new people, worry about what I read online, and also think about my growth. We need a two-way approach to carefully considering ideas—there are those we wish to share with others, and also critiques we hear back from them. We can only give effective feedback, and accept it from others gracefully, if we understand how to separate ideas from people. Otherwise we set ourselves up to be resentful and defensive when someone takes issue with our creations: we feel they are attacking us. Similarly, it makes us more empathetic and precise givers of feedback, because we know to focus on only the item itself.
These are vital skills that should be exercised thoroughly in school. While it’s important for students to learn how to assess themselves, and I adore seeing what a positive self-image of growth potential can subsequently do for actual academic ability, it’s also important to frame those discussions around other people. As students grow, they need to grow beyond themselves to recognize that everyone they meet has that same capability to learn and adapt, so we shouldn’t place them in unalterable boxes, tidily organized within our world view.
If you’re interested in education policy at all, I can recommend The Great School Rethink as an engaging read with a solid perspective. I also suggest you go through this same activity about a topic of interest to you. That doesn’t mean go straight to the cranks—I don’t care too much what Betsy DeVoss has to say about education—but someone just on the other side of an argument in your area of expertise. What are they really saying? What can you learn from that? Focus on the fact that, for this exercise, we don’t care who was saying it, just that it was said at all.
- 1The presentation of the idea is via writing, so it’s not “the idea itself”. People have different writing voices which could affect your perception, but I believe it’s farther removed than seeing or hearing the person. At some point we have to accept that ideas themselves can only take meaning in a shared world if we find ways to communicate them.