The Pointy Edge of the Round Table

When I came to Exeter, two years younger, two years too ripe, I was filled with wonderment and an infinite sense of possibility. There it was, the pristine jewel of secondary education, the summation of my adolescent efforts, a dream made reality. Exeter excited me beyond measure. Harkness, particularly, seemed to represent everything I had hoped and yearned an education could accomplish. Beforehand, it appeared almost impossible to conceive any system of schooling that could actually coerce students into more extensive thinking, questioning and articulate debate. School was too dispassionate of an environment to affect the forces necessary to compel real critical thinking required to carry a Socratic discussion. Yet there it was.

If this were true, I wouldn’t be writing this article. Ultimately, Harkness is often a wasted potential. And the most startling realization I’ve encountered in my short time here is that this is essentially not the Academy’s fault. Exeter’s faculty members provide their students with exceptional guidance and quality instruction, as well as a whole slew of interesting assignments. We have an extraordinary amount of resources that are useful in complementing our teaching in a variety of ways. Harkness frequently fails because of us—the students.

Harkness fails because students work, sometimes unwittingly, to censor true debate, true questioning and, thus, true knowledge. A successful Harkness discussion is often seen as one that brings forth consensus. Students carry forward points and alternate between posing explicative questions and complementing trains of thought that have gained traction throughout discussion. Quotes or character traits are picked apart in a cursory manner while students each try to pitch their own interpretation of text or work and eventually one of the more articulate or digestible voices prevails. Everyone nods his or her head in approval; a minute of pseudo-contemplative silence is entertained for theatrics, and closing their novels or textbooks, hitching their backpacks and feeling enlightened, Exonians walk out. Yet, in practice, Harkness discussions almost never culminate in a real clash of ideas. There is no search for contradictions and no lively, impassioned argument of diverging perspectives. Ideas are frequently not examined to their fullest extent or displaced by dissecting their contradiction, but discarded through silence. People around the table never seem bold enough to forcefully try to reassert the integrity of their analysis. There is no back and forth, no dialectic and very little in the way of criticism. Once in a while one person or another will timidly point out that an available piece of textual or common evidence can refute an observation, but to do so is often considered impolite. So we remain content with what’s comprehensible and concise and go about our work-loaded lives thinking the chapter on that discussion is closed and sealed. Very rarely have I been in a classroom where upon leaving the table alongside friends a conversation or dispute arose around the materials we had just recently addressed in class.

Yet, while consensus brings closure, in these circumstances it is the death of any quest for knowledge. Consensus serves a purpose in circumstances where decision-making is required, such as a board meeting or politics, but is often there that dogma begins. At no point in human history has progress ever been achieved without discourse. Science, philosophy and art have never prospered or advanced without a constant re-examination of what is thought conclusively proven. While Exonians often propound objectivity and empiricism, they accept a great deal of reasoning by virtue of the influence of the speaker or the perceived authority of a source, rather than using their own critical sensibilities to determine whether propositions are valid or cogent.

This reliance on dogma is a product of a generational fear of unease. To many of us, disagreement is unpleasant. The abrasiveness of a vivid exchange of ideas is alien to modern sensibilities that exalt contentment over criticism, and reward conformity over dissent. The act of questioning is an annoyance. To breed discord, even if for the sake of truth or values, is to risk alienation. And thus Harkness often devolves into the very antithesis of what’s Socratic. It becomes primped-up Sophism. With the exception of mathematics, Harknessers also do not ascribe to positivist attitudes; seldom do any of us bother with the logical propositions and objectivities we defend in our rhetoric.

These tendencies soil our understandings of every subject we study. In English—which is widely interpretative—our responses start apart as natural gut-level reactions and yet inevitably converge into one single-minded truth, as if we were all one person. Although many protest with their eyes, very few have the courage to be curt and stand contrary to any runaway train of thought that gathers ground when each student half-heartedly picks upon another’s point. We suffice ourselves with meaningless probing of text, afraid to speak of greater human truths because they are met by a silence, which quickly is replaced by empty ethical evaluations of literary characters. In history we make use of the prophetic powers of hindsight to impose our own morality in a callous, anachronistic manner, analyzing wholly distinct time periods, hardly batting an eye to the fact that we gain nothing from history by solely pointing out the good and the bad guys. We leave class with one monolithic interpretation, dangerously accepted, repeating unquestioned misconceptions to the end of time. In science we read and repeat and when we don’t understand we hardly ever really dare to reveal our confusion, all paralyzed by feelings of inadequacy in our school of genii. Math and languages are perhaps the only true subjects where Harkness regularly fulfills its intended purpose. Probably because at this level, they provide answers that can more easily be resolved. Nonetheless, even in math, daring to propose a more strict or elegant proof is often mistaken for a petty personal attack rather than collaboration.

And what values will this routine of consensus building inculcate on us students? I don’t know. I don’t know because the more certain I become of what I know, the more assured I am of my own ignorance.

However, I offer a personal anecdote that instances why I believe this might be damaging, and yet still, illustrate how Harkness can too be a great thing. This fall, when historian William Jelani Cobb delivered an excellent and eloquent, but predominantly informative presentation on Ferguson at assembly, the crowd, myself included, rose together to receive Cobb’s talk with a standing ovation. While initially I thought little of it, it eventually struck me as odd. Cobb’s presentation was almost strictly factual; it did not take a particular stance on the murder of Michael Brown or expound any type of firm criticism of neither police brutality nor institutional racism. There was no resounding message, but facts and an invitation for the audience to make their own mind based on them. It was information that urged the crowd neither into action nor inertia. It was not properly an appeal, but quite intentionally appeared to be a very well delivered lecture on the complexity of issues that might have precipitated or complemented the massive outrage experienced by the residents of Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of an unarmed, 18-year-old boy. I doubt Mr. Cobb himself ever expected such resounding applause. However, we, the crowd, rose and applauded. We rose in collective response to a few specific trigger words which have by now conditioned such a reaction. I even wondered if most of us had even considered or even so much as processed the contents of the presentation.

Yet that same crowd, I found later in winter, after the verdict and Eric Garner’s death, seemed to find a great deal of legitimacy in the course of action taken by Darren Wilson. The evidence, overwhelmingly provided by the same institution that had trained and then presently incorporated the officer that murdered Michael Brown, was not held to biased by my classmates. I could not grasp how citizens assumed this was lawful, and on an emotional level, I could not accept the concept of the shooting of an unarmed person, someone’s son, as anything else but a horrible atrocity. How can there be a dead man, shot-up under the Missouri sun, and yet no culprit? A man murdered by no one. And in class, plagued by frustration, I did not care the least if I was exhibiting a confrontational attitude and if such attitude would reflect a low Harkness grade, simply because it disrupted the dynamics of “democratic” discussion. I felt grades, group cohesiveness, careers and colleges were worthless when the stakes were a human life. And yet in these heated arguments, so callously composed, I found a great deal of growth, clarity and catharsis from a total lack of classroom consensus. In every class I had we engaged in discussion and I vented my frustration. And nonetheless I found frustration and discomforting questions awoke all us Harknessers from the snug confines of our dogmatic slumbers. Moreover, my classmates thankfully placated my vehemence with their own well-reasoned appeals to a broader perception on the issue, progressively unbound from my distempered dichotomy of right and wrong. Yet as colleagues offered me a perspective I hadn’t considered, I also tried to rear in them the possibility of contemplating these issues not only in reason, but also in relation to their own humanity. A greater humanity, not resigned to comfortable abstractions that could simply ascribe the colossal scope of the loss of a life to due process. I left class re-examining my own notions of a systemically brutal, entirely homogenous police force, and emerged outwards to those coated alabaster fields with a greater understanding of the police as a body of people. Individuals forced into fatal failures by the very nature of their work and even more problematic societal paradigms that standardize inhuman behaviors. Ultimately, there was no nodding heads, no solution and no final truth. There was discomfort and growth. It was a test of questions that extended far past the bucolic boundaries of this campus, past our meretricious aspirations, into more profound insights. Insights that lead us to cement a more proprietary sense of values and identity rather than acquire oratory devices to efficaciously pursue vague, ethereal imaginings of what we think might be success.

The truth was disquieting because it is tangible, but not to us. We can stop the journey for knowledge at consensus and contentment, or probe further and risk finding another set of different questions. More question, that force us to think, disagree with our peers and disapprove of our parents and stop and look and wonder what we are doing and if we really even want to do these things at all. What we risk is self-knowledge and the pain and pleasure that accompany it. Yet, as some might respond, don’t we risk being like Hamlet, “Cabin-Cribbed, Confined to Saucy Debates and Fears,” by these same uncertainties which are produced by deeper thinking. Didn’t Fortinbras, man of action, some might add, end up ruling Denmark? Didn’t Hamlet, poor Hamlet, die? Yet, Fortinbras, my friends, lest we forget had passion.

By shunning contemplation because of fear of confrontation, we are at the peril of turning into Mustapha Monds, or worse, the artificially happy, efficient, soma-consuming citizens of his World State. We’re too keen to live comfortably, too ready to get rid of the flies and mosquitoes and other nasty things of the world. We are too afraid to learn to put up with them. And so, in Harkness and life we tend to not really oppose, and we beg not to suffer. We just abolish the slings and arrows. And yes, it does seem too easy. More so, it seems feeble and weak. ♥