On New Year's Day, 2012, Kenneth L. Samuel, a contributor to "Stillspeaking," the daily email devotional from the progressive United Church of Christ, wrote of his time in Divinity School. After his first year, he said, he was in such turmoil that he truly believed he had chosen the wrong field. A wise friend helped him to see that he had in fact spent that first year UNLEARNING, clearing out his "embedded" knowledge to make way for his "deliberate" knowledge. Samuel states, "In a real sense, all education requires the uprooting and the break down of previous assumptions before any informed ideas and information can be put in place."
The building of new knowledge is easy compared to the difficulty of breaking down the old. We can claim no credit for our embedded knowledge. We get it by osmosis in the environments of our homes, our elementary schools, families, churches - our home towns. We don't choose it; it is gifted to us. In order to become truly educated, one must possess "deliberate" knowledge, knowledge one has chosen to believe, that one has deliberately embraced. Even if that knowledge should be identical to the embedded knowledge we started with, we are can become educated only by deliberately adopting it.
Going off to college for the first time can be a very trying time for many students. Some arrive as virtual tabula rasas, with all their embedded knowledge up for grabs, ready to soak up learning like a sponge. I was not one of these. I had to re-examine everything I thought I knew. I chose to keep a lot of it, but much was discarded as I made room for the new knowledge that I sought. I became a seeker, and I realized that in order to know what to accept and what to reject, I had to study the nature of knowledge, critical reading, and critical thinking. I found my lessons in these subjects by becoming an English major, and I still believe that if you can read and think critically and communicate effectively, you can be anything.
I learned from the ridiculous to the sublime. I learned that poetry does not have to rhyme, that colors don't have to match. And I learned that biological evolution is not goal-driven, not Lamarckian, that it never claimed that man was descended from the ape, that human nature evolves over multiple millenia, no faster. I learned that human language is innate in all of us at birth, waiting for an environmental trigger to start our acquisition of the language of our speech community. I learned that the brain does not know Standard English from nonStandard and that learning all languages and dialects are equal accomplishments. I learned that beer is not hard liquor, that Reefer Madness was propaganda, that the religion department taught more than theology, that the US does not have a purely capitalistic economy, that the South still lags behind, that truly all people are created equal in the eyes of God and must therefore be equal before the law. I had to make room for most of this knowledge by unlearning all the folklore that filled my head when I arrived on campus. And I am still learning and plan to continue all of my life.
The tearing down of the old and the rebuilding of true knowledge is especially difficult in politics, religion, and morality. For example, as children my mother and I were both taught that the purpose for Jesus Christ's birth was so that he could be crucified to save us all from our sins and give us eternal life in Heaven, sparing us from an eternity in Hell. One of my mother's favorite books is Leslie Weatherhead's The Will of God, which maintains that it was not God's ultimate will that Jesus Christ be crucified. Weatherhead's theology contains what he calls the "circumstantial will of God," which means that under the circumstances, it did become the will of God that Jesus die on the cross. My mother was terribly upset when in Bible study, she was taught that God had not intended Jesus' death all along. She became nervous, depressed, confused, upset, but she was willing to look at it. She came away rejecting Weatherhead's assertion, still believing that it had been God's will in all senses that Christ die on the cross for mankind, while I came away happy to claim as my own Weatherhead's analysis. But I respect my mother's belief because it is deliberate, not embedded. She had the courage to read a book that challenged her most deeply held convictions, and she came away stronger that when she started. My mother has the habits of mind of the truly literate, even though she does not have a college degree.
As a college professor, I have taught all kinds of students. I have noticed that each college or university has its own character, its own epistemological stance. My first university teaching was in Introductory Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the "Public Ivies." Students came into the class biased toward positivistic philosophies, toward environment over heredity in shaping our mature selves. They did not realize that environment, though it is extremely important, tops off the tank; it doesn't fill it up. The very shape and size of your tank is hereditary, and you share it with most other humans as part of your genetic endowment as a human being.
Students in the early eighties were still steeped in behavioral psychology and operant conditioning, and they assumed that babies are born blank slates, that all knowledge is empirical in that it is gathered through experiences and the senses. Current neuroscience and human development show that we are instead born with amazing cognitive abilities that make all future learning possible.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, most of my students readily confronted the prejudices they had embedded in their consciousness. Most hungered to gain control over what is known about the human being, the brain, the mind, language, and culture. They were open to new interpretations of the literature they encountered, new approaches to literature. They learned that math is not finished, that new discoveries are always being made. They learned the value of basic as well as applied science. They learned that if they lived to be 100 years old, they would only have time to learn a small portion of the knowledge that is available to us. Even though our brains are one of nature's miracles, a lifetime is just too short.
At Howard University in Washington, DC, I had a similar, even more fulfilling experience. Students asked constantly, "Why didn't they tell me this in high school?" Many learned the craft of written language by throwing out all they had been taught and starting over. I never had a student who fought against learning. As a white professor at an historically black university, I met students who were willing to unlearn what they had learned about racist white people, students who accepted me as a human being first, a Caucasian last. Students at Rutgers, in New Jersey, were also true learners, ready to deliberately choose knowledge even when that meant re-adopting pieces of their embedded knowlege. This re-adoption is most easily seen in religion, and it is a beautiful sight for a teacher to see when a student bravely allows her beliefs to be challenged, hears counter-evidence and counter-examples and then chooses to live in the church of their youth, this time with deliberate knowledge and beliefs instead of hand-me-downs. It is equally beautiful to watch the student soar in a whole new direction. What education is doing is opening minds.
UNC-Chapel Hill, Howard University, and Rutgers University are all true universities. They have large research libraries, law schools, medical schools, Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts. The campuses were alive with learning and unlearning and relearning. The linguistic purists came into my linguistics class with strong biases against all dialects but the Standard, but all, even the students who left with those biases intact re-examined their hearts and minds and listened and read what linguists had to say on the matter. They learned that all languages change, that English bears the imprint of languages from all over the world; it is not pure. This knowledge did not mean that the students became sloppy and permissive and began to slight good speech and writing. It just meant that their embedded knowledge became deliberate knowledge. A true understanding of linguistics never makes one permissive, a habit of mind that comes from misunderstanding the lessons of the study of language, that window on the mind.
Late in my career, I moved to the mountains of Northwestern North Carolina to teach at another university that was part of North Carolina's sixteen campus state university system. But Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, was no UNC-CH or UNC-Greensboro. For the first time, I encountered students who dared me to teach them something, dared me to ask them to examine their minds and make their knowledge deliberate. ASU began as a "normal" school, a teachers' academy. It was called Appalachian State Teachers College before UNC President William Friday created the state's university system. It's a horse of a different color from Chapel Hill and Greensboro, UNC-Greensboro having been "Woman's College" of UNC back before women could enroll at Chapel Hill straight from high school. Chapel Hill, the flagship campus, is a national treasure. I have never been a fan of Friday's plan to create the 16-campus system. It has compromised the excellence and integrity of the top schools in the state, taken money from their faculties and libraries, and treated less rigorous schools as equals.
Of course there were many wonderful students at ASU, but to my dismay, many more students seemed to want credentials and training, not education. They wanted to learn only what would assist them getting and keeping THE JOB. The campus did not crackle with excitement for learning for learning's sake. And many students held on tightly to their embedded knowledge. When my freshman English Composition students learned that is in fact okay to begin a sentence with a conjunction or to use the passive voice in their writing, they did not ask why their high school educations had not shown them this. They did not ask why those high school teachers took the easy way out - not all high school teachers by any means - choosing to give out flat rules rather than to face the challenge of teaching students when and how to use conjunctions and passive voice.
Too many of my ASU students said, "Well, in high school they told me that..." whatever. Too many flatly refused to cast a critical eye toward their embedded knowledge and to embrace it deliberately or cast it out, making room for new, consciously gathered knowledge. They seemed afraid that their beliefs couldn't bear scrutiny, although they never admitted this fear. But I could see it. It was an intellectual and emotional strain to deal with students like this, students unlike those I had encountered all of my career. I did not thrive in this environment.
I think that Pastor Samuel is correct when he says that all education requires the breaking down of existing beliefs and knowledge, embedded knowledge, before the building up of a true education. We must protect those colleges and universities that serve the truly literate. When we inspire our students to learn for learning's sake, when we teach them not to fear examining old beliefs, when we open their minds to more than one way of looking at a question, when we do these things prior to college, our public schools will be revitalized. When we realize that true literacy entails critical reading, critical thinking, and effective expression, both oral and written, and not just decoding and reciting, maybe we can stop the decline in our educational standards.
The greatest threat to self-government is an uninformed electorate.
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