DIALECTIC: Hitchens’s essay (see below) has some great descriptions and defenses of dialectic as a way of approaching the study of history. He doesn’t talk about the conditions that make dialectic easier or harder; so I guess I’ll have to. Here’s my incomplete list of stuff a class should have if it wants the most robust, personal, rigorous dialectical approach to history:

1) Core knowledge. Students who don’t know what they’re talking about can’t challenge their own beliefs, since they barely know what their own beliefs are. (Cf. my post below on vouchers/religious education–which I promise I’m coming back to!) Core knowledge–who was Alexander Hamilton, which were the original 13 colonies, how much did American colonists actually pay the taxman, what was the Triangle Trade, etc. etc.–forms the basis of any discussion of history. It’s easy to get bogged down in these facts, letting them obscure rather than illuminate; but if you don’t have them, there’s no point in trying to get a discussion started at all. That doesn’t mean the “fun stuff” of dispute and questioning has to wait until you’ve spent weeks memorizing names and dates–core knowledge should come naturally as you move deeper and deeper into the problems and questions native to the period under study. The more core knowledge you accumulate, the more difficult or vigorous your questioning becomes.

2) Trust. Students who feel like they will be laughed at, dismissed, or accused will not speak honestly and will not question themselves or their classmates. Students need to know one another; some understanding of one another’s backgrounds and beliefs is necessary. I don’t have any huge insights on how to foster that kind of trust, but generosity and openness on the part of the teacher is really helpful–teachers who are up-front about their own beliefs, or who unobtrusively discuss their own experiences where relevant, can turn a tentative and repressed classroom into a symposium-like group of investigative and honest companions. Two quick examples: a high-school Spanish class in which our teacher occasionally talked about why her family fled Cuba; a college philosophy professor who at one point revealed that reading Augustine was what had led him to take up a life of philosophical questing (he was basically a Platonist, I think); and a college religious history class in which the professor made clear what he thought about the Catholic Church’s relationship with Jews during the Middle Ages, avoiding easy or comforting conclusions and speaking his mind whether it disconcerted Catholics or those who sought to demonize the medieval Church. Counterexample, showing how a teacher can foster mistrust due to the way he revealed his own beliefs: a college biology professor who interrupted class to rant about how evolution proved atheism. The watchwords here, I think, are: up-front; relevant; attentive; and generous. The first and fourth are the most important. The bio prof muffed the last three. Students have to be willing to put themselves and their beliefs on the line, and professors can be great role models in that difficult task.

3) Comradeship, or a sense of shared purpose. This can be more or less specific. I wrote a while back about how exciting it was to be in a class on Christian doctrine in which I was (to my knowledge) the only non-Christian; we all had an invigorating and challenging sense that understanding what we were learning was absolutely essential for the rest of our lives, so we needed to work hard and risk a lot. Other classes can be equally intense and truth-seeking when there’s much more diversity of belief; what doesn’t work is a classroom in which some students, because they disagree radically with the professor or the rest of the class, insist on keeping the discussion at an elementary level, rehashing the same fundamental problems over and over rather than letting the class move on to questions that require some degree of shared assumptions. For example, we could never have discussed Anselm’s theory of the Incarnation (which turned out to be one of the major reasons I became Christian) if we’d spent the whole semester on whether the existence of God was possible. Students who try to disrupt the class’s forward motion are sometimes helpful dissidents or questioners; sometimes, though, they just don’t want the class to be able to discuss anything other than their own pet obsessions. In some cases, they need to be–not to put too fine a point on it–suppressed, like the hamster (gerbil?) in Alice in Wonderland.

4) Authority. Somebody has to be able to redirect conversation when it veers into irrelevancy; someone has to be able to provide corrections when people get stuff plain wrong; someone has to provide structure; someone has to have the responsibility for injecting new topics and problems into the class. Someone has to be respected enough to play peacemaker and judge when feelings are injured (judge, because either the injurer is off-base, or the injured party is being too sensitive–or both, of course). A classroom can’t work like a group of friends; the personal ties aren’t strong enough, and the group is usually too large to handle the inevitable differences in interest level and personality type without some center of authority.