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Illustration by Catherine Chan
Oh, I have opinions. Lots. Strong ones. I’m hardwired with them; there’s judgment in my bones. My dad once said if I’d been able to talk on the day I was born, I would’ve criticized the nurses’ substandard gurney steering. He’s right.
As an English teacher, students often ask me where I stand on social and political issues. This is natural; aware of my background in political studies and government, it stands to reason they’d be curious about my thoughts on the breadth of ideologies we explore together. My response is, “Ask me in June.” I say this not because I need time to consider and arrive at a stance on the issues. I assure you my stance is firm and unapologetic. In the classroom, however, assuming everyone’s contributions are appropriate and ethical, I aim to be no man’s land: neither up nor down, left nor right. In some ways, as Shakespeare wrote, “I am not what I am,” but a dialled-down version of my hypercritical self.
Why? What for? I have captive audiences: dozens of youthful ears down the spouts of which I can easily pour my personal ruminations. Who wouldn’t adopt my angle on Orwell’s grim vision of an altered postwar reality? I’m right, after all, so why not take advantage? Why not induce my charges to think as I think and pat myself on the back for a job well done? The answer is quite simple: to me, that isn’t educating. I may think I’m right, but imposing my personal beliefs on students is wrong. It’s paradoxical, no? Taking a strong position on not declaring my strong positions? I’ve made my peace with this because I love paradoxes; they’re confounding and make us want to talk about things, and that’s always good.
In 2016, a student approached me to contribute to a school magazine, proposing I discuss my political leanings. Honoured to be asked, I flatly refused. Our resulting compromise: I’d happily write about why I declined to share my perspectives. We’re all products of the stories we live, so I figured perhaps penning a couple of personal anecdotes would serve to illustrate for them where I was coming from.
To begin, I advised students to abandon immediately any thoughts they may have about universities being impartial institutions – especially politics departments, where I spent four years completing my undergraduate degree. Universities are rife with bias. It’s part of what makes them simultaneously inspirational and disquieting places of learning: we must absorb biases hurled at us by experts and process them according to our only-just-emerging sense of intellectual self. This is hard to do; it’s easier to absorb than process. A handful of my professors treated the podium as a pulpit for preaching the “correct” way to think, the “best” way to view issues. This appealed in the worst way to my sense of justice. Wasn’t it a professor’s job to encourage, guide and refine our thinking? Surely it couldn’t be to prescribe and devalue it.
I love being a teacher. It’s a privilege to help young people discover and nurture their tadpolean intellectual selves. This word – self – is at the core of my educational philosophy, but none of what I do as a teacher is about me. I never want students to submit work stuffed with what they think I want to hear or omit a resource because I’ve disapproved of its position on an issue. My students’ job is to think hard: to use their minds and words to convince me their ideas are worth consideration; to believe what they say and prove it. If they can do this, who am I to tell them they’re wrong? Whether or not I agree is irrelevant. My job isn’t to teach students what to think; it’s to teach them how to think, so that when they end up in the big pond on the other side of high school, they’ll be well-equipped to process for themselves the sometimes-slanted morsels our chefs of higher education will feed them. Our nascent adults must learn to develop opinions using reason, humility, and wide-ranging information, to decide what matters to them, and be confident enough in their ideas not to abandon them when challenged (which they will be). We must teach them to own their intellectual selves.
In the wake of some Toronto schools’ recent ideologically driven activities, I recollected this little column and felt it warranted dusting off and reworking: as a reminder not just for students, but for everyone, that the teacher’s job is not to recruit youth to causes, but to teach them how to appreciate, respect, think critically, and inform themselves about society’s vast philosophical spectrum – and to arrive at convictions independently, based on sound, unbiased foundations.
In the meantime, I’ll keep encouraging my students to think hard and convince me. And if they want to know where I stand, they can ask me in June.
Christine Corely lives in Toronto.