Will this be on the final exam?: a plea to educators

Teachers are busy preparing for their school year: putting up bulletin boards, attending meetings on classroom management, reviewing policies, writing lesson plans, etc. These are stressful days, as well as a time pregnant with promise.

As a grandparent, a pastor, and a citizen of the United States, I have one big request of educators. Please teach your students to think critically. Let it be the explicit and implicit curriculum in everything you do. It could solve a lot of problems down the road. I know because I can see the problems that have come about because the people of my generation seem to have missed it, and we’re leaving the next generation with a mess to clean up.

It took me a long time to figure out that I couldn’t believe everything I saw in print. Just because someone wrote it in a book, or a newspaper, or even the Bible, doesn’t mean that it’s factual. Every author has a bias. I can’t remember ever learning this until I got to college. As an English major, I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking. Without critical thinking, literature was no more than a bunch of words bouncing around in my skull. When my eyes were opened, I saw how a lot of stuff that had been fed to me as "fact" had distorted my view of world.

Critical thinking has become even more challenging today, with immediate access to every piece of information that ever has been disseminated in the history of civilization. It’s literally at our fingertips. How do we sort through it all? Unfortunately, many people take the easy way out. They gravitate to whatever reinforces the view they already have. They listen to a cable news station that is clearly biased, but are deaf to that bias because it tells them what they want to hear. Many adults I know these days receive the bulk of their news on Facebook. On Facebook! That’s the place where you can unfriend people who say things you don’t like. Where you can flat out lie about someone you don’t like and before anyone can dispute it, the lie is out there and they’re toast. I know other people do the same thing with other social media sites.

How do our youth negotiate all this? They need help! Parents can challenge them to think critically, if they have become critical thinkers themselves, but I wouldn’t count on it. Teachers, please, can you take this on for the future of our country and world?

There’s a story about Paulo Freire, a Latin American educator who began as a language teacher and then an adult literacy instructor. At that time, literacy was required before a person could vote in presidential elections in Brazil. By design, this prevented the poor from participating. As the story goes, when he taught the sounds of the word for water, he used a picture of water being pumped from a well. Then he taught the word for well. Once the words had been mastered, he asked his students, “Now, who owns the well?” That’s what teaching for critical thinking looks like. How many teachers would teach the words and consider the lesson ended?

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire wrote: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want our youth to simply conform and perpetuate the world as it is now. I want more than that for them and for my grandchildren. I want them to transform the world. I know many teachers share this passion and I thank you. We need more of you!

There are all kinds of tests students take before they can graduate from high school--tests that measure their ability to conform to the academic standards set for them by educators (or in too many cases, politicians, who know nothing about education, but that's a subject for another blog). This can be as stressful for teachers as it is for students. I don't mean to add to their load, but I wish that we could make it a rule that nobody can graduate from high school until they demonstrate critical thinking skills. Is there a way this could be added to graduation requirements, please? Maybe if students and teachers know it will be on the final exam, they'll take it seriously.

Believe me, it will be on the final exam. 


After posting this blog, I heard from my sister Wendy, who is an educator in Massachusetts. She informed me that critical thinking skills are required on some of the questions on their state tests, so that's a step in the right direction. Is this true in all states? So, I stand corrected here. But I wonder if this makes a difference in whether or not a person graduates. And Wendy writes that this raises a bigger question, "... can our students apply this skill to the world beyond the school walls? Or do we as adults beat them down when they question?"

He does a (Nazi) mother proud

My son Ben’s brain works in an unconventional way. Keeping up with him exhausts me. I often feel like Alice trying to pin down that elusive white rabbit who had her hopelessly lost in Wonderland. While I don’t always follow Ben's logic, I do admire his creativity. And I know beyond a doubt that he can think for himself.

When I hear people these days lamenting the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in our schools, I think of Ben. No one had to teach him to be a critical thinker; he questioned everything from the moment he emerged from my womb. Challenging me at every turn, he accepted nothing at face value. Not even the rigidity of the American educational system could break him, and believe me, they tried.

Of course, there is a fine line between critical thinking and stubborn defiance and sometimes it’s hard for me to be around Ben. My daughter Gretchen would be quick to point out how Ben and I are alike in that way. Sometimes when the two of us get into an argument I feel like I’m driving my car down a one way street and he’s coming at me going the wrong direction. Despite all my warnings, he refuses to turn around and go the way he’s supposed to. Instead, he insists that I’m the one in the wrong. What’s a mother to do?

Given all that I’ve written above, it will probably come as no surprise to you that Ben has no time whatsoever for organized religion. Once when he was visiting me at Christmastime we were taking a morning walk in the park on December 24 and I asked him if he would come to the Christmas Eve service that night at my church. (For several years he had shared this time of year with Gretchen and me and he never attended church with us. Never.)

“Mom, you know I don’t believe in that stuff,” he told me.

I came back with, “I’m not asking you to believe in it. I’m just asking you to come because I’m the pastor and I'm your mother and it would mean a lot to me to have you there with me.”

I’ll never forget his reply. “Mom, if you were a leader in the Nazi party and they were having a rally tonight and you were making a speech, I wouldn’t go to that either.”

Now, how can you argue with logic like that?

So, we returned home and I stewed over his comment for about an hour before I decided that this year I couldn't let it go. I went to him and said, “Ben, do you think of yourself as an open-minded person?”

“Yes.”

So I asked, “Do you have any friends who are Muslim?” I knew that he did, and he affirmed that. “Well,” I said, “if one of your Muslim friends invited you to go to worship at their mosque with them, would you go?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said, “So how open minded is this… You’re here to be with your mother and your sister at Christmas. And tonight, there will come a time when Gretchen and I are going to get in the car and go to the Christmas Eve service. And you’re going to sit home by yourself… because you’re so open minded.” I actually managed to say this quite calmly and left it hanging there as I walked out of the room.

I didn’t hear anything from him for a good long while and decided that I said what I needed to say and that would be the end of it. But that’s not what happened.

Ben came to me and said that he would be going to church with us that night.

I’m not big on miracles, but if I were into that sort of thing, I’d have to say that this felt like one to me. Ben was growing up. He was able to do something that I have rarely witnessed in this world; he changed his mind. And in the process, he demonstrated to me that his mind truly was open after all. No, he didn’t agree with my beliefs, but that wasn’t really the point. My son, the critical thinker par excellence, was able to bend for the sake of love. I have never been prouder of him.

Coffee & Some Serious Brain-pickin'

“So, what makes you think there really is a God and he isn’t just a social construct created to fill a need?”

It was the logical question for her to ask. Raised in a conservative church and steeped in Biblical literalism, now that her critical mind had been awakened, the house of cards she had constructed to contain her faith was crumbling. If she could no longer believe what she had been taught about the Bible, how could she believe in God, who, for her, had always been somewhat synonymous with the Bible?

She had asked me to meet her for coffee. For someone who doesn’t drink coffee, I’ve been meeting quite a few people for coffee lately. It’s a comfortable venue for younger adults, so I'm glad to meet them on their own turf. I realize that coming to the pastor’s office for a conversation may be a little too churchy. And I’ve come to expect that meeting a young adult for coffee means I’m in for some serious brain pickin’. They’ll sit across from me, gently stroking their paper coffee cups with their fingers, asking me the questions that are keeping them awake at night. Basically, these are the same questions that keep me awake at night. And they consistently challenge me because I can’t hide behind a pulpit, or offer pat answers, or toss theological jargon around when I speak with them.

As I sat with her, I was thinking about another young woman I met for coffee/brain pickin’ just a few days before. Like this woman, she wasn’t a member of my congregation and she was smart as a whip. But the woman I met with a few days prior had no faith background at all and she came to me mystified by a church culture that was so far removed from her experience. Now today, my brain picker was the exact opposite. She had been thoroughly indoctrinated with all the “right” answers. It occurred to me that both women were blank slates so far as faith was concerned, but in different ways. One was a blank slate that had never been written upon, and the other’s slate had been completely covered in writing that she had erased. Both were sincere in their search. And both made me squirm a little, like a bug under a magnifying glass catching the sun’s laser sharp heat.

“What makes me think there really is a God? Well, that’s a good question. It depends on the day you ask me. I don’t always believe in God. But, I guess here’s where faith comes in for me… I know that God doesn’t need me to believe in him. God is. And I trust that even when I don’t know if there is a God, God is never going to stop loving me. That’s what I trust in. My feelings come and go. I can’t trust them. What I believe comes and goes. But I trust that God’s love is bigger than all that.”

“How do you know that God loves you?” she asks me.

Now, the stock answer would be some verse from the Bible like John 3:16. But that’s not how I know God loves me. I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe anything just because the Bible says so; it has to ring true by my own experience. And I couldn’t lie to her. So I said, “I know God loves me by the God glimpses I experience in my life. Again and again, something will happen in my life that reminds me that I’m not in charge, that God is. And my experience shows me that God is loving and good and I can trust that. Often it’s something little, but if I’m paying attention, I experience God’s love. And it always seems to come to me through other people.”

It may be heresy. I may not have been approved for ordination if I had answered in this way, but it’s what I have experienced in my life. It’s the God glimpses that get my attention. That’s where I start. I don’t find truth in the Bible just because “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I find truth in the Bible because it resonates with my own experience of God.

So, we’re sitting there in a Panera in the suburbs at lunchtime. The table next to us is about two inches away, which means that your neighbors can’t help but hear your conversation. And, wouldn’t you know that a man sits down at the next table right about the time we’re talking about salvation, which, of course, I explain in a way that my brain pickin’ friend seated across from me has never heard it explained before. Apparently, my neighbor is disturbed by our conversation because he gets up in a huff and moves to another table.

Then the conversation comes around to hell. Do I believe in hell? she wants to know. In the course of my explanation, I mention Rob Bell’s new book that has raised the ire of so many evangelicals. I ask if she has read it and she hasn’t. Well, neither have I and, for that reason, I’m a little sorry I brought it up. But I tell her that he seems to have something to say about the existence of hell that has a lot of people all riled up and she might want to check it out.

Right about then, two men sit down to eat at the vacant table next to us and I hear one of them say, “Pastor Nancy…” I look over and see a young man, also not a member of my church, with whom I had a similar coffee/brain pickin’ meeting a couple of years earlier. I recall that he is a Rob Bell junky and think --- this is too good to be true! So I explain to him that we were just talking about Bell’s new book, Love Wins, and I ask if he could tell us a little about it. He looks toward the man sitting across from him and explains to me that he is having a business meeting and really needs to take care of that, but if his lunch companion doesn’t mind, he could give us a brief synopsis. The guy sitting across the table looks a little surprised, but nods his consent.

Now, this is pretty amazing! Here I am sitting with this woman, for some reason talking about a book I’ve never read, and all of a sudden this guy appears who may be one of the only people I know who has actually read the book. Just a little weird.

So, after the book report is finished, the man turns to his business associate and apologizes. Of course, they were sitting close enough that I could hear their exchange. “I hope you don’t mind,” he tells his business associate, “… church stuff.” He pauses and takes a sip of his coffee. Mixing church and business can be a little touchy, I know. But then I hear him ask the man sitting across the table, “Do you have a church you go to?”

“I go to Christ Lutheran,” the man replies. And I about fall off my chair. The young man he is speaking with, his business associate across the table, also is a member of Christ Lutheran. They work together and they had no clue they went to the same church.

And all the “what ifs” start clicking through my brain. What if I hadn’t come here to meet this brain pickin’ young woman on this day? What if she hadn’t asked me if I believe in hell? What if the first neighbor hadn’t moved to another table? What if the second neighbor hadn’t sat in that chair? What if it had been someone else? What if I had never met him for coffee two years earlier and learned about his faith journey and his interest in Rob Bell’s writing? What if I hadn’t remembered that and hadn’t asked him to tell us about the book? What if he hadn’t asked his associate if he has a church? If none of that had ever happened, the two men never would have come to Panera for lunch that day and they never would have learned they were a part of the same faith community. Too darn weird.

I smile at the young woman seated across from me. “How do I know there’s a God? This is exactly what I was talking about.”

Did God make all that happen? I don’t know. Does it prove to me that there is a God? I don’t know that either. But it was one of those God glimpses that bring me to the conclusion that the question isn’t something I need to spend a lot of time worrying about. It used to keep me awake at night. It doesn't any more.