The Socratic Experience and Contemporary Cultural Controversies

The Socratic Experience from time to time has parents ask for our stand on various cultural controversies. Recently TSE Academy Founder Michael Strong wrote this statement up last week for our community as well as for prospective parents.

TSE’s purpose as an organization is “a scalable, affordable virtual learning environment for the cultivation of virtues in support of lifelong happiness and well-being (eudaimonia) for young people ages 7-19.”

Our goal is to support your child to achieve lifelong happiness and well-being.

In addition, we have adopted the following Core Principles:

1. Respecting the universal humanity and dignity of all.
2. Personal empowerment, agency, and responsibility.
3. The obligation to support and shape our beliefs through reason and evidence.
4. The spirit of enterprise, taking initiative to achieve.
5. Voluntary, mutually beneficial, win-win solutions whenever possible.

Because we have had prospective parents ask about our position with respect to various cultural and political issues and debates taking place in the U.S., here I will apply these principles to contemporary U.S. culture war debates.

Contemporary American Cultural Controversies

As should be clear, we are committed to the universality of shared human experience. Thus we seek to transcend the divisive debates that are raging in public schools, in public media, and across the US in recent years. An election year will serve to exacerbate partisan debate, rhetoric, and rancor.

Both media and political partisans have an incentive to emphasize the most outrageous and divisive incidents. One aspect of our approach to human agency is to encourage our students to be proactive with respect to their media diets. We encourage them to be acutely aware that much of what they encounter online is based on an attempt to manipulate them somehow. In all aspects of their lives, we want our students to become more thoughtful, intentional, and conscious of the implications of their actions on themselves and others.

In addition, we are a global community, with students and faculty from around the world. Many US issues and debates are narrow and parochial from a global perspective. Millions of people are starving, their children are dying, they are enslaved, they risk death to emigrate to get a job, and so forth. Most Americans are focused on a very narrow range of human experience. The population of the U.S. is about 4% of the global population. From our perspective as a global organization, any focus on U.S. issues is already neglecting the reality of the vast majority of human beings on the planet.

Concretely, we’ve had parents ask about our position on CRT (Critical Race Theory). Technically speaking, CRT is an academic movement that is not typically an explicit subject of study in most of K12 education. But with respect to key high profile issues that have been associated with CRT:

1. Any framing of human relationships that is largely focused on a victim/oppressor narrative lacks nuance and is inconsistent with the principles above. Empowering all students is inconsistent with identifying some as necessarily victimized by society (or others as necessarily oppressors). We do not encourage students to see themselves or others as victims. We do not encourage students to see themselves or others as oppressors.
2. In general our perspective is broadly aligned with the Enlightenment and the associated notion of universal principles. The rule of law, equally applied to all, remains an ideal, however imperfectly applied in practice. CRT is largely critical of, and sometimes hostile to, the concept of rule of law. This aspect of CRT is inconsistent with our core principles. For a good review of the ways in which African-American progress has been based on universal principles and will continue to be, along with the ways in which the US has often betrayed such principles, see Ferguson and Wichter, Black Liberation in the Marketplace.
3. We have a very diverse community with respect to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. We support each individual’s right to develop their own perspective as long as they support their positions with reason and evidence and engage in civil disagreement in class. This includes diverse perspectives on historical topics. There are no topics we would choose to avoid, though we do appreciate that there are developmentally appropriate framings for some of the horrors of the past (i.e. it is neither necessary nor appropriate to share graphic images of violence or sexuality with young children).
4. If students wish to research, study, write on, or discuss controversial topics, we support the student in doing so – with the expectation that they adhere to the same standards of reason, evidence, and civil discourse that is characteristic of our program as a whole (again with the proviso that the topics are developmentally appropriate – we do not believe it is necessary or appropriate to discuss violence or sexuality with young children).
5. More broadly, we see our program as a continuation of the heroic tradition of intellectual integrity and freedom of conscience associated with Socrates, Galileo, and best articulated by J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, excerpts from which are read in our high school program. In order to pursue the true, the good, and the noble, we encourage students to consider Paul Graham’s proposal to “Keep Your Identity Thin.” That is, the less we are attached to identities that demand we defend certain beliefs, the more free we are to pursue truth without constraint.
6. The combination of a commitment to reason and evidence, on the one hand, and a broader orientation towards agency, initiative, responsibility, entrepreneurship, and voluntary win-win solutions focuses us on pragmatic approaches to improving the human condition for all. With any proposed reform, we are inclined to ask, “How exactly will this improve the human condition?” Symbolic gestures are usually less valuable than practical initiatives that result in tangible improvements in the quality of life for people. Outcomes matter more than gestures.

We’ve also been asked about “gender theory.” Here as well we are guided by our principles:

1. We respect the universal humanity and dignity of all human beings. We do not disparage any person based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. Insofar as we support voluntary, win-win solutions, we do not support some groups forcing their views on others, be they socially or religiously conservative groups forcing their views or socially or sexually progressive groups forcing their views. We do not believe that it is appropriate for us to force our views on each other nor on any of the children or parents in our community.
2. It is, on the other hand, entirely legitimate to use reason and evidence to explain why we hold the views we have and to ask others why they do or do not find our reasoning compelling. We do not regard it as offensive to ask people for the reasons for their beliefs, nor do we regard it as ipso facto offensive for people to express sincerely held beliefs. In order to understand each other honestly, and to learn from each other, we need to be able to be honest with each other without being attacked for holding a particular belief. As a former student (who now teaches with us) put it, we are on “a quest to have a thicker skin, but not a skin so thick that you are ignorant to the plight of others.” Our students often find that they build closer relationships with each other than they do at other schools as a consequence of discussing beliefs on issues where they disagree constructively.
3. Insofar as highly politicized issues (guns, abortion, transgender issues) are more likely to result in emotionally charged arguments rather than thoughtful, reflective conversations, we do not seek out debates on such issues. That said, when they do come up, we expect our students to exemplify rational, mutually respectful dialogue even on the most heated topics. We may use the techniques of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) when necessary to diffuse hostile communications, but mostly we avoid getting into such situations because they do not lead to thoughtfulness. If a highly charged issue comes up (and sometimes they do), then we would much rather our students model an exemplary conversation on the issue. The guide’s role is to ensure civil dialogue, not to favor any particular perspective.
4. We do not prioritize conversations on sexuality or gender. We respect the rights of diverse kinds of parents to provide their children with an appropriate sex ed for their children, but given the limitations of time and the extreme range of parental beliefs and commitments on this topic, we leave it for parents to decide what kind of perspective on sexuality is right for their family. We have some parents from extremely conservative cultures and others from extremely progressive cultures. We respect parent requests on these issues when possible, though we will not censor a classic text or artwork because it happens to include a sexual incident or nudity. We do avoid the most salacious classic texts.
5. We do work with students to develop and maintain mutually positive and supportive relationships with their families. In situations in which parents and children may have disagreements with respect to gender and sexuality (or any issue), we encourage constructive engagement between parents and students. Parent and school connectedness are two of the most potent predictors of adolescent well-being. We are acutely aware of the importance of maintaining connection and dialogue. We may encourage families to work in person with counselors or therapists in such situations, especially those in which the parent-child connection is at risk. We want to work with parents and children to ensure a positive relationship between parents and children.

A few comments on the broader commitments of our program:

1. We believe that adolescent wellbeing is based on connection, community, meaning and purpose. We seek to ground adolescent wellbeing on these fundamentals while respecting diverse approaches to these fundamentals.
2. Our general orientation is again towards positive, win-win solutions in the real world. Media has a focus on negativity. We have a strong commitment to encouraging young people to focus on the extraordinary progress that has taken place in the world in the past and on their potential role in continuing to contribute to progress in the future. We have had students work on global initiatives to accelerate prosperity through new city creation. We want students to envision and act upon a much more positive future.
3. In addition, a broader goal of a liberal arts education, which we provide, is to escape the parochialism of time and place. Thus while some educators feel an urgency to focus on current events and debates, we want our students to reflect on the profound civilizational differences between the Greco-Roman world, the Judeo-Christian world, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, various indigenous cultures, and other perspectives from around the world.
4. Modernity is an outlier compared to the wisdom traditions from around the world (see the literature on “Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies,” aka “WEIRD,” so named because modernity is weird by historical standards). How have other people across time and space understood the human condition? We believe that it is worthwhile to take the world’s wisdom traditions seriously.
5. Socratic inquiry is rooted in the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece. The Socrates of Plato is a particularly important figure. Here is a short essay explaining “The Moral and Intellectual Value of Western Civilization” based on Socratic norms of inquiry and dialogue. We are committed to maintaining Socratic norms of inquiry and dialogue.
6. Insofar as we do engage contemporary issues, the priority is rigorous reasoning based on solid evidence rather than allegiance with any particular political perspective. One of the reasons we respect prediction markets and reputational bets is because there is evidence that being held accountable for previous claims improves the epistemic quality of debates.
7. Finally, the constraint that our beliefs be supported and shaped by reason and evidence is a source of intellectual humility. As one begins to understand how difficult it is to provide adequate evidence for most beliefs, dogmatism becomes less likely. As one hears from other people how they support their beliefs through reason and evidence, one comes to understand that the evidence is rarely adequate to support most dogmatic opinions expressed in the public square. We seek to develop young people who are more thoughtful, and who can understand the reasoning behind diverse perspectives than is the norm in our society at large today.

Our students come to love warm intellectual dialogue with each other – so much so that they ask us to create additional dialogue sessions over the summer for fun and spontaneously create dialogue clubs outside of class on various issues. At the same time, they learn to love reading complex intellectual content because they learn that understanding the world and each other requires complexity to do each other’s beliefs justice.

When we have 9 year old children spontaneously engage in constructive, reflective conversations on the differences between Islam and Christianity, each coming from their own religious tradition, we know we are working towards a new generation that will be better suited to building a better world together than what we seem to be observe in the public square today.

For much more detail on my personal perspectives, see Michael Strong’s two books:

1. The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice
2. Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems.