My best teachers read beyond red and blue

Robert Schultz

Recently there's been a spate of media coverage recounting the conflicts between politically conservative students and their liberal professors, and most of these stories mention the Students for Academic Freedom, who protest a perceived liberal bias in the academy. By contrast, when I was a student in the 1960s and '70s, the young were usually confronting the conservatism of their elders. But I was fortunate then to have a teacher, Mrs. Mary E. Moore, who taught literature and writing at City High in Iowa City . It was my senior year, 1969-70, and the University of Iowa campus downtown was the scene of protests and riots, with the Highway Patrol knocking student heads when lines were crossed. In that volatile atmosphere-the Vietnam War and cross-generational suspicion threatened to tear the country apart-Mrs. Moore seized upon the barricades as a metaphor in her teaching.

"We'll end up on opposite sides of the barricades," she told us, "unless we read each other's books." She was in her 40s then-ancient, we thought-but she'd read the authors of our generation that we hadn't even heard of. She lived, it seemed, in her leather reading chair at home, devouring books, smoking cigarettes, and drinking iced tea. Widowed young and a long-time insomniac, she often read through the night, cat-napping when she could.

Exhorting us to read each others' books, she wasn't counseling inaction. She was passionate and committed. There was a time for taking to the barricades, I suspect she thought. But she detested ignorance, and one of the values she championed most consistently was informed empathy. Years later, home from college, I told her about my childhood dream of inventing a machine that would stand between two people, connect them with wires, and allow them to see through each others' eyes, to feel each other's feelings. She laughed, then looked at me sadly and commented: "Whatever happened to holding hands?" Holding hands and reading each others' books-in matters both personal and political, she counseled intimacy.

In the early '70s I attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa . Much as we are divided now into "red" and "blue," we were too often then divided into black and white, or young and old. Slogans drew the lines ("Don't trust anyone over 30"), and ideologies were clubs to swing at enemies.

My teachers at Luther, as I learned over the years, were strongly committed to social justice. Most of them were politically liberal, but their views combined values and positions that defied easy categorization. And they changed their minds! When a student brought up a stubborn "misfit" fact the professor had overlooked, it was received like a gift, an insight to crack open our too-small discussion and to release us into a wider play of thought. And when we students dug in our heels, settling on a fixed idea, our professors challenged us with all we were ignoring in order to feel comfortable within a partial view.

My Luther College teachers were politically active, but they were careful not to abuse their position of power. The chief reason they didn't preach in the classroom, however, was because they weren't finished learning, themselves. Because we live inside history, they taught us, to close one's mind was to stop living in the real world. By example, they showed me that a liberal arts education is a never-ending process of leaving small, safe worlds for big, interesting ones. Consistency was a value, but a minor one. Truth was the goal, but we tried not to deceive ourselves about getting there.

Luther is, like Roanoke College, a school of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. My teachers were mostly, but not all, Lutherans. My Christian teachers there welcomed the dialogue between faith and learning. They were not threatened by science. They did not fear tension or paradox. It was all part of the jostling process whereby they trained us to grope our way forward, ambitious for insight, but with a final humility that felt a lot like reverence.

I have tried to absorb, practice, and pass on to my own students the lessons of my best teachers. We are plagued again by sloganeering, by fixed ideologies of the right and left, and by public "debate" unworthy of the name. My best teachers tried to inoculate us against these things, not by providing "correct" views, but by training us in sound habits of thought. They taught us to:

Respect facts, research, and all kinds of learning;
Think critically about sources of information, considering their points of view, credentials, funding sources, affiliations, etc.
Examine our own unquestioned assumptions, points of view, motives, and interests;
Practice open-minded listening, with a special effort to seek information and opinion outside our usual circle of reference and association;
Demand that the news media respect our need for in-depth, fact-based reporting; that they respect our attention spans; and that they respect our need for news from beyond our own borders, including the points of view of those who are affected by U.S. policy decisions;
Resist argument by slogan and sound-bite. True debate is about more than winning; it is collaborative truth-seeking.
And since my major field of study was literature, I was taught this particular lesson: One of the best ways to grow beyond our usual habits of thought is to read good stories. Really good stories told well-whether nonfiction or fiction-carry us beyond fixed ideas to individual cases. They immerse us in particular lives in particular times and places under specific circumstances. Really good literature expands our experience and broadens our point of view. It doesn't offer pat "morals." Instead, it provides us with the basis of moral behavior-it helps us imagine the reality of other lives.

There are times to stand the barricades, but those are desperate times. Far better to avoid them, if we can. And the way to do that, my best teachers suggest, is to come out from our red and blue tents into the arena of genuine encounter. Mrs. Moore died several years ago, but I'm thinking again of her sage advice: Read each other's books.