Fixing Our Harkness Classes
You’re in your history class, sitting around one of those big old Harkness tables with little pictures and people’s names carved into it. There are 12 people sitting with you: 11 students, one teacher. You’re discussing a reading most of you completed the night before. It’s not the greatest topic in the world, but it was mildly interesting when you read it and has been entertaining enough to sustain your interest in trying to untangle its meaning. You’re really looking forward to your free period, though, and your mind is wandering a little bit.
Exeter does its best to gather a well-rounded and cosmopolitan student body. It’s one of the great things about our school; in the middle of rural New England, a community of over 1,000 kids from just as many backgrounds attend school and learn to live with each other. Exeter also has the capacity and audacity to throw you into a classroom of people with whom you would likely never interact. Here, they expect you to engage with your peers and run a Harkness discussion with them, no matter your thoughts on their thoughts. They do this because part of the Harkness process is dealing with people’s differing opinions, including fundamental differences in worldview. By learning to connect with people you don’t naturally relate to, you are learning to be a stronger leader and a more effective communicator.Then, out of nowhere, that annoying kid goes and drags their inflammatory views into the discussion and injects the reading with their uncultured interpretations of the world. What do you do? You probably shot them a subtly snarky comment and complained about them at lunch. This is not the best way to handle an obtuse person at the Harkness table. You know you should converse with them and try to understand their viewpoint while emphasizing your own, but it’s a lot easier to talk to your friends about them and more satisfying to send a zinger his or her way. In doing so, however, you are limiting the effectiveness of the teaching style that we as a community have embraced. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you are engaging with such a person.
Knowing this, you may be able to let that person’s insensitive beliefs slide, just a little. However, other kinds of interactions might be more challenging. After you leave your history class, you encounter the opposite problem in English—the discussion is dead. You and some others try time and again to rejuvenate it, but you talk only to blank faces. Without hurting your classmate’s feelings or griping about them later, you must encourage them to participate. Sometimes it is a simple prod at the table; other times the entire class must be restructured, or even spend time outside of class to get to know each other better.
Harkness, in all its functional and dysfunctional forms, goes beyond the table and the people sitting at it. It is an institution by itself, separate from Exeter and much farther reaching in its scope. It is a tool that has educated high schoolers for over 80 years and will continue to teach them after you have graduated. It collectively carries everyone to higher and higher levels of excellence in a way that lecture-style teaching cannot. Honing everyone’s talents and soft points will drive the discussion to further clarity. Helping fix the toxic history class or stagnant English discussions in a positive way will help you learn better, too. Focusing on their flaws will weigh the discussion down and keep everyone from learning.
I fully expect you to continue to dislike other people’s opinions and groan about other people’s silence. I do, too. It’s a part of human nature. However, remembering the reasons behind Harkness and focusing on these ideals rather than the details of how they play out with one another may keep us from sliding into frustration and missed opportunity.