Education Week - September 14, 2022 - 29

and spoke out in opposition to the bill. He selfpublished
an opinion piece that made, among
other points, this one: " Teaching students the
truth of the foundation of our country, highlighting
the systems that perpetuated slavery, genocide,
and sexism, and creating space for students to
address their lingering impacts are components
of true patriotism. Unlike blind nationalism, true
patriotism seeks to actually improve the lives of
those who inhabit this land. "
In a Republican-controlled legislature, the
bill never made it out of the House education
committee. Dier chalks up the bill's failure to
educators speaking up publicly.
" Students are much more open to have these
discussions, " Dier told me. " They are more willing
to engage in difficult conversations. "
Yet, it is not just the adults and legislators on
the far right of the political spectrum who are
making these conversations difficult to have. John
McWhorter, a Columbia University associate
professor of English and comparative literature
who is Black, cites a " prosecutorial mood on the
left " in his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion
Has Betrayed Black America. White people, he says,
are branded as racists and sometimes lose their jobs
or have their reputations tarnished simply because
they ask honest questions about the value of certain
policies or practices, such as anti-racism curricula or
diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
That environment, McWhorter and others
suggest, has silenced many of the more moderate
voices on the left and right in K-12 schools, on
college campuses, and in the public square, leaving
the far right and far left to battle it out with insults,
threats, and vitriol on social media. And it " makes
people left of center wonder just when and why
they started being classified as backward, " he
writes in the book, " and leaves millions of innocent
people scared to pieces of winding up in the sights
of a zealous brand of inquisition that seems to
hover over almost any statement, ambition, or
achievement in modern society. "
That leads us to a concept in social psychology
called " fundamental attribution error. " It is why
people mistakenly assign the root cause of an
observed behavior to the person's character or
personality, rather than something about their
circumstances or a mix of their personality and
circumstances. That explains the widespread use
of personal attacks by extremists on social media or
why people of opposing viewpoints can't debate an
issue without flinging personal insults at each other.
Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology
at the University of Pennsylvania and the author
of the popular book Grit: The Power of Passion and
Perseverance, shared an unpublished manuscript
with me in which she outlines how fundamental
attribution error can play out in education.
(Duckworth is also the author of an opinion blog
hosted on edweek.org.)
A few years ago, a large urban school district
asked for her advice in designing a program to
help students build personal grit and invited her to
observe classrooms. During one visit, a 6th grade
teacher rolled in a cart of laptops, and students
picked theirs off the cart and returned to their
desks. Most students were working on the assigned
activity during the observation. But two boys were
just sitting at their desks, doing nothing, their
laptops unopened.
Duckworth points out that if she had walked in
just a moment later than she did and was asked
to assess the willingness of these two students
to work on challenging tasks, she might have
concluded that they lacked work ethic. In fact,
they simply (and unknowingly) chose laptops
that were not working. They did not lack grit, she
points out-they were just unlucky in their choice,
unlucky to attend a school that couldn't afford
enough working laptops, and unlucky to have a
teacher who didn't think to ask students to pair up
and share laptops.
It was not their personalities or character traits
that were barriers to their engagement-it was their
" situation, " Duckworth emphasizes.
Herein lies the problem: When we engage in
fundamental attribution error that focuses too
heavily on a person's character or personality-
without engaging in " slow " thinking to consider
their situations or circumstances-it is much easier
to get frustrated and angry with that person. And
that's when the pointless name-calling starts at
school board meetings and on Twitter, Facebook,
and other social media.
That's a big reason why Chris Wejr-the principal
of Shortreed Elementary School in British
Columbia, Canada-scaled back his personal use
of Twitter after being a heavy user for years. It's
simply become too binary and too mean, he says.
He recalls how COVID masking quickly devolved
into a divisive, nasty issue in Canada during the
height of the pandemic, much like it did in the
United States. That ugliness played out on social
media. " There was no room for real discussions, "
he recalls. Wejr said it divided families, ruined
friendships, and created divisions among
educators. Fortunately, he said, his school was
spared the ugliness.
What is interesting is that Wejr kind of
foreshadowed the rise of this dichotomous
thinking and behaving before the pandemic even
started. In January 2018, he wrote a blog item titled
" Avoid Binary Thinking. Go to the Grey. "
It begins: " Much of what we do in education falls
into grey areas. Yet, many of the conversations
we have regarding education seem to use black
and white statements and fall into the category of
BIG IDEAS | 29
"
We need to listen
more and talk less.
It is that simple.
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Education Week - September 14, 2022

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