As a small business owner, I depend on the relationships I have with my community and my clients to survive. This means that I normally do not mix my business with my politics, especially in this age of snap judgments and sound bites. However, I cannot help but reflect on my experiences this summer scoring the AP English Language Exam.
The question that I scored was the Argument portion of the exam. This portion requires that students pose a claim and defend that claim with evidence and reasoning. The question asked about disobedience and whether or not it led to social progress -- a simple question with several possible answers and that allowed for many kinds of evidence. One would think that students would generally be able to answer the question clearly, if shallowly.
Not. At. All. Almost all of the essays that I read (over 1.5K) that week contained deeply flawed logic and inconsistency of position.
Most of these students seemed to assume that disobedience meant civil disobedience -- ok, fair enough. Then these same students would turn around and talk about the American Revolution, a violent affair if ever there was one. Other students, who also assumed that disobedience referred to civil disobedience, argued that it was fine to disobey as long as you didn't break any laws. Huh?
Those students completely miss the point of disobedience -- to ignore a rule established by a person or institution of power.
Several students wrote about the Civil War, arguing that the South disobeyed popular opinion (abolitionists, I presume), causing the war and leading to the Emancipation Proclamation.
These students missed the other part of disobedience -- the power dynamic.
Between equals, disobedience is impossible. Both parties must understand and agree to the power differential for disobedience to make sense. Regardless of the various reasons prompting the Civil War, the crux of the matter was whether or not the federal government had the power to dictate matters of what Southern states considered to be local concern. It can only be considered disobedience through the historical lens of a Union victory.
Perhaps more importantly, these student conflate correlation with causation. The facts of emancipation after the Civil War and the subsequent (uneven) progress towards racial equality were the opposite of what the Confederacy was trying to accomplish. Can we then attribute their initial disobedience as causing social progress? Perhaps. However, it is probably more accurate to describe their actions as a backlash to the disobedience of those abolitionists who opposed the culturally agreed upon "natural order" of things. At best, their argument rests on the assumption that chaos generally (not just disobedience, which has a goal in mind) creates progress. Again, perhaps.
Still others missed the mark so completely that they misidentified social progress. These students wrote essays about disregarding the advice of their elders and making mistakes (I swear, every child in America has apparently touched a hot stove). They then claimed that they learned from their mistakes and became better, more obedient people, which increased their progress in gaining social status. Also, huh?
These students miss the point of society -- a group of people who share a cultural and institutional life.
The question was not about movement within a structure. It was about movement of the structure. These students wrote based on the assumption that the structure was fixed and immovable and that their purpose in life is to rise as high within it as possible. Sigh.
Now, I do not bring all of this up to make fun of these young people. Truly, I wrote some ridiculous things when I was young and still learning how to formulate an argument. In fact, I look back at some of my earlier writing and cringe. That self-reflection is what makes me an effective and compassionate tutor.
However, these gaps in logic are especially troubling given the rhetoric and content of many of the current arguments by and about our president-elect.
For example, I see constant critiques of protests, marches, and other forms of resistance to the results of the election. I have no problem with people critiquing these things; there has yet to be a perfect protest. However, I do have a problem with people forgetting the history of this country and misusing historical facts to argue that protests are inherently unAmerican. The right to protest is written into the Bill of Rights, and the idea that recent protests are somehow worse than previous protests only attests to the myopia of American memory.
Furthermore, I am deeply troubled by the idea expressed by these young people that obedience to a strong authority figure is the greatest and noblest of all goals. To me, this smacks of fascism and might makes right. The existence of the power structure does not justify the continuation of that power structure.
Obedience to good is good. Obedience to evil is evil. Disobedience to good is evil. Disobedience to evil is good. Neither obedience nor disobedience is inherently right and moral.
Now, of course, just like everyone, I have my opinions about the best, most effective path towards the best version of America. I still believe that many people on the other side of the political spectrum share my goals even when we disagree on the strategies for accomplishing those goals. We all (I hope) want America to live up to its promise.
What I worry about is these children, the ones who wrote about the beauty and nobility of obedience to the state, the ones who were only tolerant of discomfort and disruption through historical distance, and the ones who believed that chaos for its own sake is enough.
Students! Being safe is important, but being comfortable is intellectual laziness. I challenge all of you to think about the heroes of civil and uncivil disobedience and what it might have been like to live as their contemporary. It might feel more familiar than you think.
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