Teachable Moments

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Learning Begins with the Tough Questions

By Edward C. Pease
© 1996

“Judge a man not by his answers, but by his questions.” Gender bias aside, that’s one of the mantras of the classroom—for the professor, anyway. Or it should be. And in the context of “values” and learning, it represents a crucial tenet of education: curiosity and critical thinking.

At USU, as at any good university, the quality of the end-product—education—is measured not so much by what the professor tells the student, as by what the student is motivated to ask. And the worth of the outcome is not necessarily just in getting the answer right, but in students having the freedom and the will to ask the question in the first place. In that freedom to ask questions resides an element of risk for both the student and the professor, because asking tough questions is an inherently subversive activity that, when done right, both implies a challenge to what is accepted as “conventional wisdom,” and reflects a desire to seek new answers.

When I moved to USU from New York City two years ago, some of my friends and colleagues thought I was nuts. Aside from the East’s regional chauvinism (stronger on the East Coast, which considers anyplace west of the Hudson or Potomac rivers “the hinterlands,” than in any other part of the country), I got the usual battery of Mormon jokes, and concerns from well-meaning people about how an avowed liberal Democrat would survive in the arid conservative climate of the land of Orrin Hatch. Was I doing “missionary work”? they joked.

In a way, that’s what any teacher does. But more than that, I have learned to appreciate more fully than before the text of a poster I got from a mail-order place in Minnesota: “Minds are like parachutes: they function only when open.” As a teacher, I am in the mind-opening business; and, over the past two years at USU, my students have served the same mind-opening service for me.

Take Amy. When she and I met, she was a sophomore political science major from Idaho who, after an internship in Republican U.S. Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s Washington, D.C., office, decided she wanted to become a lobbyist for conservative causes. Despite her misgivings about left-leaning journalists, she wanted a second major in communication to pursue her career goals.

Amy knew within the first five minutes we met that she disagreed with me on just about everything from politics to primetime. Over the past two years, I don’t think I ever changed her mind about anything, but we like each other, enjoy butting heads, and both have learned something in the process.

Amy lives to bait me: “Rush Limbaugh said...,” she’d say.

“Pompous windbag,” I snort.

“Where is he wrong?” she challenges.

“Where not, Ditto-Head?” I retort.

“Oh, you liberals....” She waves me away.

And we’re off to the races.

The reason Amy and I like to torment each other is the process, the exchange, the joy of disagreement, and, as the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill said, the value of defending what each we each know as “truth,” which makes learning happen.

This process of questioning, of disagreement, of examining one’s beliefs, and, finally, either reaffirming or altering them—that’s the joy of teaching and learning. It’s not that we professors necessarily know “the truth”; the best we can do (on a good day) is to force our students—kicking and screaming, if that’s what it takes—to learn facts (which are different from beliefs), and make them decide for themselves what they believe.

Amy is not the only student at USU whose worldview conflicts with my own, and she also is not the only one willing to debate me. In the process, both my students and I find our minds opening like parachutes, and discover a willingness to reexamine what we thought we “knew” in the context of each other’s new ideas.

For me, a child of the activist, anti-establishment 1960s and ’70s, this process recalls the counterculture mantra of my youth, “Question authority,” now reborn as my favorite teaching tool in the 1990s. In some ways, it is an alien concept in Utah, where so many young people are raised to do just the opposite. But for students like Amy, a willingness to distinguish between facts and beliefs, and a growing enjoyment in questioning everything (including whatever the professor says in class), healthy skepticism becomes a valuable tool for learning, and for life.

I despair when I see students relentlessly scribbling down everything I say, because I know they think they’re getting the answers without ever having had to figure out the questions. So when I sit in my office or classroom and have a student bristle at me, get in my face, disagreeing, pushing back, questioning what she’s been taught as “common knowledge,” starting statements with, “BUT...!” and trying to change my mind. Well, that’s a good day for teaching and learning.

This willingness to question and examine and then reexamine is particularly critical in my teaching area—the mass media. Because the journalist who simply writes down what the mayor or the police chief tells him is a scribe, not a watchdog on society. And the TV viewer to moviegoer or voter in a presidential campaign year who simply absorbs and unquestioningly accepts what he or she hears in the information age isn’t a citizen, but a sheep. For me, teaching about the mass media is the same as teaching about life. It is a playground for the curious and socially conscious. And, if done correctly, it is prime territory for teaching students to question what they think they know.

For example, if “more Americans get their news from ABC than from any other source,” as the network claims, what then? What about this new study that finds kids learn about sex from TV, not from their parents or schools or even the older kid next door? Will the Internet cause intellectual birth defects? If children spend more time with “Barney” than with Dad, will the next generation talk and walk like purple dinosaurs? Does the “v-chip” defend kids against TV violence, or against parental neglect, or both? Should women look like Barbie or Elle McPherson or Rosie O’Donnell? Can you believe anything politicians say on television? What about Martha Stewart? Do movies really make people go nuts and kill their parents? Why does TV portray African Americans as criminals or buffoons, and women as sex objects or Donna Reed? And so on.

Questioning what we’re told—whether in the classroom or on TV—is what learning and good citizenship is all about. And it is an especially crucial life-skill in an age when most of what we learn or think we know about the world comes to us second-hand, in soundbites and images transmitted to us from far from our own lives, by people we don’t know. For students like Amy, whose generation has been raised by the mass media, honing a healthy skepticism is new and exciting, and a critical survival skill in the electronic age.

And for teachers like me, who are lucky enough to have such students in their classrooms, this is the joy of the profession—watching students challenge what they’ve always accepted as the way things are, and seeing them come up with their own answers, arrived at not because that’s what they’ve always been told, but because they’ve done their own thinking about the questions, and not just memorized the answers of others. Provoking questions is a noble and enduring profession, and students, if they are engaged, ask better questions than professors do.

So when Amy wants to fight about politics, when Ken declares that he “gets it,” when Evan gets angry at the evening news, when my students ask tough questions for which I have no good answers...that’s a good day on University Hill.

• Edward C. Pease is professor and head of the Department of Communication at USU. This appeared in the USU Magazine, Fall 1996.