While I was reading Mark Danner’s insightful analysis of this year’s presidential race in the New York Review, this particular passage struck me:
Of course whatever its virtues as a campaign theme, the picture the President offered was not especially “fact-dependent.” Many well-known facts—on which Kerry, in his campaign, had laid such stress—were either irrelevant to it (the missing weapons of mass destruction, which went unmentioned) or directly contradicted by it (the failure to demonstrate connections between Iraq and the attacks of September 11). But the facts did not matter—not necessarily because those in the stadium were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts.
It caught my eye because it was strikingly similar to a passage in a book I recently read called What the Best College Teachers Do. The passage described research done by Ibrahim About Halloun and David Hestenes in the 1980s to determine what knowledge students were taking away from an introductory physics course. What they discovered is that while the students learned how to mechanically compute Newtonian results, they still thought about motion in an Aristotelian way. The course had taught them formulas, but hadn’t succeeded in giving them true understanding. (You can download the actual papers here and here if you’re curious.)
In the experiment, they showed the students some experiments with results that the Aristotelian model couldn’t account for, and asked the students to explain why this was happening. Bain writes
What they heard astonished them: many of the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion. Instead, they argued that the experiment they had just witnessed did not exactly apply to the law of motion in question; it was a special case, or it didn’t quite fit the mistaken theory or law that they held true. “As a rule,” Halloun and Hestenes wrote, “students held firm to mistaken beliefs even when confronted with phenomena that contradicted those beliefs.” If the researchers pointed out a contradiction or the students recognized one, “they tended at first not to question their own beliefs, but to argue that the observed instance was governed by some other law or principle and the principle they were using applied to a slightly different case.” The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe. Perhaps most disturbing, some of these students had received high grades in the class.
Coming back to the presidential race, is it any wonder that if students sitting in a class for a whole semester can still discount facts that don’t fit in their comfortable worldview, that voters informed by snippets of media don’t do much better? Effective teachers, the book theorizes, are able to avoid these results by focusing on the students’ learning processes, leading them in the right direction by posing provocative questions and presenting knowledge as its own reward, rather than as something to be checked off on a scorecard. How could those teaching methods be employed to sway voters’ political beliefs?
