What's Come Clearer?

Henry David Thoreau often inquired of friends whom he had not seen in awhile, "What's come clearer since last we met?" I think as educators and education supporters, we might do well to propagate the essayist's question. It seems to me that behind the question is an assumption that people are learning. Many things that have come clearer for me this week but I want to relate only one.

A cross-district training event at Wake Education Partnership this week reminded me that we human beings are predictably self-deceptive. As part of VitalSmart's Influencer training, students view a re-enactment of the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s which, as you may recall, was a study of authority and obedience.

In the video, normally-intelligent adult subjects, playing the role of teacher, were trained by a social scientist at a prestigious university to administer increasingly-intense levels of electrical shock to adult students, depending on their recall accuracy for random word pairs. As experimental confederates, the unseen students in the next room were never actually shocked but led teachers to believe they were through audible howls of pain and an occasional, "I'm done. Let me out of here."

In ninety percent of experimental cases, teachers trained by the scientist continued to deliver shocks even after their students fell silent, ostensibly unconscious--or worse--from the shock. Even though walking away from the experiment was a teacher's option, it was an option rarely exercised.  This was true not only of the bad old 1960s original but also of the 21st century re-enactment.

But people's willingness to inflict pain in the name of science is not my point. Rather it is students' unfailing response to a straight-forward question strategically posed prior to viewing the re-enactment: "Do you believe that within twenty minutes, under fairly normal conditions with no illegal force, you could be induced to torture an innocent stranger to the point of death?" Even in the cloak of anonymity. what do you think was their answer? If you said most people say "no," you would be absolutely right--and dead wrong.

Of thirteen students in the class, only one admitted the possibility that he could be influenced to, oh say, lethally shock an unwilling fellow human being.  I see the disconnect in one of two ways. Either I tend to recruit to my classes the most moral people in the entire world or my students are perfectly ordinary people who believe, against scientifically-validated studies to the contrary, that they are extraordinary. Sorry. I gotta go with science.

I end this cautionary tale with good news: We are sentient beings who may, in fact, chose what to be influenced by. When your mom told you not to hang out with that rough crowd, she was right. You were a good kid but even good kids can delude themselves. The fact is that the graveyards and prisons are full of good kids influenced by bad things.

How much more true that is of us sophisticated adults, walking around free everyday, who can rationalize why we must do the things we do, even when Mom would tell us otherwise. Listen to your mom. Chose your influences. You are only human.