Senior Reflection: Hunter Ryerson
“Our objective is to teach you how to think, not what to think,” Principal Rawson promised in his 2022 Opening Assembly address. “As an educational institution, we value free expression. We recognize that free expression is essential to robust and free intellectual inquiry.”
I listened to these words from the rows of plastic folding chairs as a new upper, weighed down by significantly shaggier hair and entirely unfamiliar with the environment around me. The ideals of free thought espoused by Rawson were perhaps the most foreign of all. Hailing from the Bay Area in California, I was used to an education system that enforced a limited standard of regulated and “acceptable” ideas. In my time there, I saw a very select set of viewpoints promoted by faculty and administration, while counterpoints were demonized or simply absent.
With this context, it is understandable why Rawson’s ode to free expression greatly excited me. Exeter and its values, rooted in the principles of liberal thought, appeared to be the perfect stomping ground to explore new ideas and diverse points of view.
However, after two years in this institution, I have identified a significant logical misstep in the Exeter attitude towards critical thinking. Through the way we teach our humanities, Exeter incentivizes students first and foremost to find fault or misinformation in traditionally accepted narratives. While I concede that this can be an immensely productive exercise, incentivized contrarianism is really no different than incentivized conformity. It encodes students with a very unique confirmation bias, where they will find unconscionable wrongdoing in all popular narratives, and find brilliance in marginalized, fringe ideas by default.
This is the maxim of new-age education: that the accepted ideas, institutions, and principles that govern society must be backward and wrong, so the alternatives must be good and true.
The systems that govern us most closely (such as the Academy) have more immediate importance to us than broad ideas of societal contracts, nations, and states. Therefore, there is nothing holistic or fair about this form of “critical thought,” as it is merely agreement with the more pressing authority of the education system and its most recent ideology, which happens to be directed against those macro-authorities we’re less tied to. In my first year, I absolutely fell victim to this trap, as I cared much more about reaping the most immediate reward, so falling in line seemed like a short-term sacrifice that would ultimately pay off.
I have come to realize that this little mental choice of giving an inch to ideological suppression is deeply dangerous. I have spoken with several faculty who, to suss out the extent of this mob mentality, will assign homework documents loaded with awful, oppressive ideology, but present it as something normal and appealing. The reported result: nine times out of ten, students will affirm and praise the document, vehemently agreeing with its conclusions because they assume the teacher agrees with it. That has scary implications.
Many of my fellow students will go on to become yes-men and yes-woman, marching to the tune of governments, agencies, corporations, or even their own families. For some, their Exeter years are nothing but preparation to do exactly that. The issue doesn’t lie with these students’ ideal choice of occupation; the issue lies with their concerning inability (or refusal) to question the authorities that govern them, especially if those authorities disguise themselves as anti-authority.
My grandpa was always fond of the saying: “[poop] rolls downhill.” By this, he means that real change starts at the top of the food chain, because it sets the standard for everything beneath it.
It is no secret that Exeter is, to a certain extent, a leadership preparation institution. At the very least, it has a greater yield into elite circles than almost any high school institution in the world. So, if history is any indicator, the conduct of these future leaders (should they become senators, CEOs, generals, professors, or otherwise) will largely set the standard for the rest of society. Therefore, when those leaders adopt a near-universal tendency to affirm whatever idea gets put in front of them, obey every order that’s demanded of them, or follow every rule that’s enforced upon them without questioning its validity, that behavior is prone to roll downhill.
The end product will be an unquestioning society ruled by an oligarchy of conformists.
To clarify, I am not some disgruntled conservative frustrated with Exeter’s liberal bent. Instead, I am a liberal panicked by the illiberalism that seems to be taking Exeter by storm. A key component of liberalism is, in the words of Ben Franklin, that “it is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority,” because liberalism is, at its core, designed to directly check the advancement of tyranny. And tyranny, as it happens, thrives when critical thought and speech are stifled. At Exeter, it is the authority of dogma that reigns. Even if that dogma opposes damaging past narratives, it is still dogma, and therefore irreconcilable with critical thought.
It is how we act in the face of that tyrannical challenge, however, that defines our future. It was Socrates who, while on trial for leading the youth of Athens towards critical examination of authority, refused to censor his words because “to talk daily about what makes us good, and to question myself and others, is the greatest thing a man can do. For the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates chose death over submitting to the mob and allowing his speech to be silenced. He proclaimed that, if the expression of uncomfortable, bias-shattering ideas can corrupt the youth, then he proudly embraced the title of corruptor.
Not long ago, I was invited (along with twenty-something students) to a dinner at Principal Rawson’s house.
The agenda: to sift through the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict and help inform the Academy’s engagement with the issue. Seated around a long dining room table, I raised my concerns about faculty-governed, Harkness-style discussions on the topic. I suggested that the honesty of each student’s voice would be muffled by two filters: (1) the fear of retribution from surrounding students, many of whom seem very comfortable with pitchforks and torches in hand, and (2) the fear of retribution from faculty, many of whom, intentionally or not, have convinced much of the student body that their treatment of a student is conditional upon how sufficiently that student caters to their perceived worldview.
Some friends revealed to me that this statement was bent into the rumor that I was somehow “pro-genocide,” purely for questioning the wisdom of one school policy proposal. Interestingly, I didn’t even share my perspective on the horrors occurring in Gaza (nor did anyone seem especially keen on hearing it). Instead, a buzzword mischaracterization was sufficient enough to denounce and dehumanize both me and my worldview.
Many of the people in my circle expressed their surprise that I would contribute to any discussion on this matter at all. In their eyes, the issue was a minefield, and the possibility of blowback from the masses posed too great a risk for their ambitions and social standing. These friends’ names are kept anonymous for this same reason: to them, the risk of upsetting the dogmatic absolutists that loom over campus discourse outweighs the importance of free thought and its passionate expression.
Many of these students aren’t exactly sure when they would finally speak up. My time at Exeter is over. There are many times I should’ve chimed in and didn’t. Those moments of weakness can never be undone. So, as a parting gift, I leave you, dear reader, with this very question: at what point would you feel morally obligated to speak your mind in the face of almost certain repercussions? Socrates knew. Ben Franklin knew. Martin Luther King Jr. knew. Alexei Navalny knew.
As we mature, coming to terms with our moral commitments is important. Developing a cohesive framework for one’s approach to life is a necessity. And good ideas are forged in fire – challenging opposing viewpoints only seeks to refine your viewpoint if it is imperfect, validate your viewpoint if it is sufficient, or defeat your viewpoint if it is uninformed.
Question everything. Submit to nothing. A true education, particularly one rooted in the free discourse of Harkness, is not a transfer of facts from teacher to student. Instead, it is a development of the skill to think critically. Don’t waste it in subservience.
