[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:16] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest today is Sarah Stitzlein, professor of education and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. We’ll be discussing her recently published book, “Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era: Emphasizing Truth in the Education of Citizens.” Welcome, Sarah.
[00:00:37] Sarah S: Thanks. Delighted to be here with you today.
[00:00:41] Jon M: What spurred you to write the book, and why did you pick that title?
[00:00:46] Sarah S: Well, a few years back, I was commissioned to write a report for the National Academy of Education about civic discourse and reasoning because there was a lot of concern in the country that we weren’t doing it very well, frankly. We were really struggling to talk with each other, to come to solutions, to agree. And so I wrote this report where I made all these recommendations about what we needed to do, how we could collaborate, how we could compromise.
But what I realized, after it was all done and submitted, was that I really had made some problematic presumptions. I assumed that people would engage in honest behavior when they were in dialogue together, that they were committed to seeking and telling the truth. But increasingly, I think that’s a pretty bad assumption. We can’t really assume that’s always the case in our more post-truth era, if you will. So I set out to write the book to help me understand what was going on in our political context where truth and honesty seemed increasingly at risk and yet important so that we could come together to make shared decisions and engage what I call the fundamental civic question: What should we do? And so this book really tries to help me make sense of that and so we can figure out how we can do civic life better together.
[00:02:10] Jon M: How would you define populism?
[00:02:14] Sarah S: Yeah, so populism is really at the heart of our political moment right now. And so I start there in the book. I start with how people are enacting truth and honesty within a populist context. So I talk about populism in a really, we’ll call it a thin definition, where I’m primarily concerned with an “us versus them” mentality where the ‘us” tends to be the people and the “them” are the elite. So the elite of the academy, of Hollywood, of the wealthy, of the powerful, a group that is seen as corrupt or suspicious. They’re not aligned with the interests and the will of the people that are kind of inherently good or pure and desirable. So that kind of context sets up a space where truth is not always easily agreed upon, because it’s about whether it’s aligned with your tribe, your group, the “us” or the “them.”
[00:03:15] Jon M: You’re writing in the book mostly about right wing populism. Do your arguments apply also to progressive populists?
[00:03:23] Sarah S: Yeah, this is tough. So, right now, right populism is certainly the more dominant of the views or the ideologies. So I’m primarily concerned with right populism in the book and its impact. There are aspects of left populism that hold up here in terms of that kind of cordoning off of different groups within society, concerns about whether those who have power are listening to, caring about the interests of the people, but they tend to define the people and the powerful in different ways. So, for example, right populists tend to be more skeptical of, let’s say, academic experts, those with advanced credentials and degrees, than perhaps those on the left, who may turn to those experts as sources for information about, say, financial injustices in the world today. So I’m primarily looking at the right, but there are some aspects that carry over to the left.
[00:04:24] Amy H-L: You contrast populist and pragmatist notions of truth and honesty. Where do they overlap and where do they differ?
[00:04:34] Sarah S: Yeah, so when I really went into the project, I wanted to be as open as I could to learning from and seeing what was going on in populism. I recognized that there’s some true potential for democratization that populism brings because it brings forward the demands and frustrations of the people, of those who might not feel that their voices are always heard and recognized. And so I wanted to start with where those voices were and how they were enacting what they saw as true. And so I started to look at how they used truth.
And traditionally, in more philosophical accounts of truth, we tend to focus on accuracy, forthrightness, and sincerity, and so to be accurate, of course, is to reflect some actual state of affairs in the world. To be forthright is to give a full and comprehensive picture of the truth, not to hold back or withhold certain parts of information. And to be sincere is to say what one genuinely believes to be the case. What I saw when I was looking at populists is that they were either rejecting or kind of reworking some of those understandings of the components of truth. So, for example, sincerity became less about whether one really believed it to be the case, and more about whether one’s assertion of a claim aligned oneself with one’s political tribe, with the people or the elite.
They also were kind of relinquishing the idea of accuracy as a correspondence to some objective reality. And this is kind of a fundamental philosophical idea. That really alerted me, like, hey, I’m seeing some overlap here to pragmatists. Pragmatism is another group of philosophers who have kind of let go of that idea of this objective mirroring of reality that we can know and pin down for sure, and Instead, truth is what works for us, what helps us navigate the world and make sense of it and respond to it in ways that meet our needs and enable us to flourish.
And so what I was seeing in populism was some similar behaviors with how truth works and yet it was struggling. A lot of populists weren’t getting their voices heard and uptaken into policy change, etc. So I wanted to kind of supplement some of the problems that come about of populism, things like, in right populism recently, tendencies toward conspiracy theories and quick celebration of claims made by those on one side without really questioning or challenging them, and so I turn to pragmatism, which gives us some tools to expand more who we listen to as we triangulate and figure out truth together, to open it up to multiple perspectives, to urge us to slow down and consider the empirical evidence around us, and to engage in conversation with how those truth claims impact our lives and those of others to make sure that they genuinely help everyone flourish and not just particular people in political tribes.
[00:08:00] Amy H-L: So how would you define honesty? And perhaps you could tell us what that would look like in the context of a classroom.
[00:08:12] Sarah S: Sure. So we tend to talk about honesty as a virtue. So if I, you know, calling up my philosopher friends out there, they might chime in and say, well, honesty is a virtue. It’s aligned with the good. It’s something that we do because it’s inherently a good thing to do.
I move away from that sort of characterization of honesty. I’m looking instead in terms of how honesty enables us to answer that civic question: What should we do, how seeking and telling the truth helps us get at the answers we need to help us navigate the world around us. So to be honest is to show that commitment to being forthright and sincere and accurate, but to do so in ways that help us civically live together. So rather than making moral attacks, saying someone is immoral and maybe shaking, wagging our finger at them, which we see a lot of folks doing with President Trump and some other leaders who’ve really been questioned for their commitment to honesty. I’m saying that doesn’t really help us to just say you’re a bad person because you’re lying.
Instead, I want to highlight how not being honest risks our ability to solve social problems, to figure out, you know, how to live with COVID, how to solve climate change, how to tackle immigration reform, all of these big problems that we’re facing that require us to be committed to having shared facts and coming to reasonable solutions together.
[00:09:55] Jon M: You mentioned that, following on what you’ve just been saying, that rather than just thinking of it as a virtue, to think of it as a habit. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:10:05] Sarah S: Yeah, so here I’m building on, in American pragmatism, particularly the work of John Dewey, who’s done a lot on the role of habits. A lot of people think of habits as kind of dull routines, the same things we do day in and day out. We do them unthinkingly. They’re just kind of our humdrum ways of going about the world. Pragmatists suggest, however, that habits are predispositions to act and they’re proclivities for how we act. So they’re actually what ignite us, what generate action and activity. And so when I think of habit, a habit of honesty, I think about that bent or that inclination to seek empirical verification, to talk with others about the impact of claims on their lives, to see if they hold up to what one experiences in the world.
And so to develop that kind of habit means, in the classroom, cultivating real experiences where students test out knowledge claims and figure out what works for them, where they are actually trying out this kind of inquiry-based exploration of knowledge claims. Rather than just kind of like, for example, character education. Sometimes you’ll see honesty as maybe a character of the week in an early childhood classroom. I know my son, when he was in elementary, he’d come home with, you know, a flyer that would say responsibility is the trait of the week, or friendship is the trait of the week, and he would get one for honesty. That showed to me that they really weren’t conveying how honesty has to be an ongoing activity, an action that one does that shapes how one sees the world and interacts with others. And so that’s kind of why I really foreground understanding it as a habit, as something we do every day.
[00:11:59] Amy H-L: Is there a difference between truth and reality?
[00:12:05] Sarah S: Yeah, this is a little bit tricky. So this gets at that pragmatist understanding. Usually in philosophical circles, we talk about reality as this kind of objective world that exists independent of humans, and that our aim might be to figure out what that is, and to come up with propositions that correspond to or reflect that reality is carefully and closely as we can.
As a pragmatist, that is not an outlook that I endorse. I’m arguing not to say so much that reality doesn’t exist. That sounds kind of far out crazy. But more what I’m trying to say is that the way that we interact with reality is reflected in the way that we, over time, come to hold some propositions as true because they hold up, they stand up to the evidence, they play out in our everyday experience. So it’s not to deny reality, but rather to say what matters more is how those truth claims work for us as we navigate that world.
[00:13:13] Amy H-L: Would you give us an example of a truth claim in an educational context?
[00:13:19] Sarah S: That you would engage students with figuring out an inquiry together around?
[00:13:25] Amy H-L: Yes.
[00:13:26] Sarah S: Yeah. I’m trying to decide whether to go with something that’s more straightforward, like scientific, or something that’s more like of a social or political question.
[00:13:35] Amy H-L: Whatever makes sense to you. I think that when we’re talking about inquiry, you know, it’s very important for us to be able to define just what it is we’re inquiring about. Are we looking for the truth? Just what is it that we are looking for?
[00:13:52] Sarah S: Yeah, I think we’re looking for answers that can help us solve problems in our world. So if I’m going the more social and political issues, kind of those, those things we’re dealing with collectively as a society more, you know. Of course, we need children to learn the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and they can engage in an inquiry to figure that out. You know, we can take them outside and watch the sun rise and the sun set and measure where the sun is. We can do those sorts of inquiry experiments to come up with truth claims about the rising and setting sun.
But I’m more interested in the kinds of truth claims that are not always so easily pinned down with empirical evidence or data, the kind of truth claims that often get at values. You know, when we say, what should we do about our immigration struggles in this country, for example, there’s certainly going to be empirical claims we need to sort out. How many immigrants are coming? Where are they coming from? How are they getting here? Those kinds of, you know, nitty gritty, practical questions we need to ask.
[00:14:54] Jon M: But we also are asking questions about the humanness of others. What rights do others bear if they are not Americans and they’re on American soil? We’re asking questions about truth to sort out about who do we want to be as an America? Historically, we’ve defined ourselves as a place of immigrants, as a place of refuge, as a place where those seeking a better life came to our country. And so when we’re talking about coming up with understanding the truth of immigration or immigration reform, we’re looking at something much bigger than just those kind of empirical numbers and measurements.
What I’m hearing is that you’re thinking of honesty and truth almost as verbs, you know, with the idea being that you’re approaching inquiry, which seems to be the key word here, that you have to approach inquiry with an openness and transparency and a desire to try to figure out what feels true. And that this isn’t, as you’re saying, this isn’t simply a question of what’s objective reality, that yes, indeed, the sun does what it does, but something that fundamentally that you’re constructing in a lot of ways. Is that what you’re saying?
[00:16:28] Sarah S: Yeah, I think you’re certainly right on with the idea of a constructing of truth, but especially with your claim that it’s doing honesty is a verb. It’s an ongoing activity. It’s not just a behavior that’s a one and done, nor is it a character trait that you just carry with you. It has to be enacted in ongoing ways.
[00:16:49] Amy H-L: How is it different to seek truth than to seek solutions? And is this something that we do as individuals or as groups, or communities? Society perhaps?
[00:17:03] Sarah S: Yeah, this is an interesting distinction you’re raising. So I do think that there is a difference between truth and solutions. Often we need truth as kind of read as facts in order to make wise decisions or so we arrive at solutions that work for us. But as a pragmatist, I’m kind of wanting to collapse some of those distinctions because what works for us is often that solution. So it becomes true because it works for us.
And, you know, I’m kind of going back in my head, too, to some of the conversations that I’ve had with students where we’ve been engaging in an inquiry together. And I’m thinking about an example that was particularly powerful and unfolded in a very different way than I thought it might. So maybe I’ll share that with you. I was working with a group of first grade students in my city of Cincinnati when several years ago, we had a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man at a routine traffic stop. And when I showed up to teach the kids the next day, our city was understandably quite worked up and upset. There were people in the streets. There was a lot of questions about whether this a justified killing? Was this a murder? What did this mean for our city? What did it mean for race relations? And all of that is in the air as these six and seven year olds came into the classroom and they were asking questions about, “Can I trust the police? Will they hurt me?” There was a child in the classroom who had a father who was a police officer who was saying, “you know, my, my dad’s a great guy, you know,” and kind of arguing to seeing this as a personal attack against his family for those who were questioning the police. And I started with, it’s one tiny point that was quite significant to these young students, and that was the white police officer had been wearing at the time of the killing, and I can call it a murder now. He has been convicted. He was found guilty of this crime. I wouldn’t have used that term the day afterwards, but he was wearing a T shirt that had a Confederate flag on it. And this was a particularly ripe fact to talk about with my students, to talk about why does a Confederate flag matter in a race-related shooting? And so we learned all about the history of the Confederate flag, what it has symbolized for different groups over time, how it might impact different people in different ways, why some might celebrate it, others might abhor it. And what this did was we were inquiring into the significance of a cultural symbol, but we were also helping to make sense of what’s going on in our community and what should we do about it.
And for these six year olds who, you know, weren’t going to engage in major police reform policies and they weren’t going to march down to the town hall in some sort of protest, what they could do in their classroom was talk about how dress and appearance and symbols that are used create an environment of hostility or openness or kindness and support in the classroom. And so the students decided that that was one way in which they wanted to act on this very unclear situation that was unfolding by talking about whether or not they would allow Confederate flags to be worn or displayed in their classroom. And as I look back on this many years later, that feels rather small and insignificant. But what I saw was six year olds dealing with some really big, tough questions as they had to sort out what was happening in our community and how do we move forward in ways that were age appropriate, that reflected an understanding of care for others and kindness of others, while at the same time they were having to figure out historical facts about the representation of symbols and of trauma in our country.
[00:21:15] Jon M: You know, a number of years ago, the first Trump administration was talking about alternative facts, um, which obviously, you know, could be easy to think of as just, “What are you talking about?” But what do you think they were talking about? What do you think they meant by it? And how does that fit in with the conversation?
[00:21:40] Sarah S: It certainly fits in with the conversation around populism, where truth seems to be these kind of competing camps, where folks in one camp see the world in a different way than folks in another camp. And so the competing facts are relative to one’s perspective from each of those camps. So within one, they might look out at the world and, you know, we think about some big political issues that tend to be fairly divided. So, right populists, there’s a lot more skepticism, for example, around man-made climate change. So when they’re looking at evidence or data coming around, science, weather, et cetera, they may see a different set of facts than those in a competing tribe who read that information differently. And so, what I think was valuable here is to recognize how truth in that regard can be something that’s upheld by different groups in different ways, but what it also exposed to us is we’re going to get nowhere if we can’t agree on basic facts of reality or facts of the, of the situation.
So what that kind of exposed for us is that we were at an impasse in that unless we’re able to come up with ways of doing inquiry together to kind of sort out working facts that we can agree on together, we’re not going to be able to solve pressing problems or even sort out if something like climate change is indeed a worrisome situation we need to address.
[00:23:20] Amy H-L: Your book spans the fields of political philosophy, ethics, and education. I guess we’ve been speaking about all those topics now. I’m just not sure how they all tie together.
[00:23:31] Sarah S: Yeah. Yeah, I think in part what my work kind of reveals is that the divisions of political life often raise ethical questions about what kinds of behavior are just and desired in our shared community spaces. And so what I’m revealing is that without a commitment to seeking and telling the truth, behaving honestly, then our political and civic lives begin to crumble because we’re struggling to arrive at workable solutions to that “what should we do” question. Where politics and civic life start to stumble, I’m turning to ethics and ethical action via honesty to help support that sort of political endeavor.
[00:24:22] Amy H-L: And how do we get from honesty in education or honesty in the classroom to honesty in the larger world?
[00:24:32] Sarah S: Yeah, this is a hard one, right? It’s a little bit of a chicken or the egg. I suppose I’m starting with children, hoping that at a young age when we develop that commitment to seeking and telling the truth, that it’s something that will carry on well beyond their K 12 days into their life as adults, and something that they can engage with their parents and their adult community members to model and emphasize and demonstrate for them as well.
I find that this is the sort of project that works best when starting small and starting local. And when you’re in classroom spaces in particular, you have a population that often, by virtue of growing up in the similar neighborhoods, being on sports teams together, and clubs together, there’s already a shared basis for care and concern that goes beyond the kind of political divisions that adults tend to camp themselves into.
So when you’re beginning with children who play together, who care about each other, who are tied together in these non- political ways, there’s a right space there to assert the value of honesty, Before political entrenchment in camps has become so strong as it is for adults that it can be hard to undo or overcome. So I’m starting with the kids, hoping that moving forward will help the rest of us as well.
[00:25:58] Amy H-L: How would that be scaled?
[00:26:00] Sarah S: Yeah, that’s hard. Do you mean scale beyond the K-12 classroom or scaled from across K-12 classrooms?
[00:26:06] Amy H-L: Across K-12 classrooms. So I could see this being implemented in some lab schools, for example, but then how would you scale it?
[00:26:17] Sarah S: Yeah, well, it’s certainly going to require a good deal of teacher training and preparation. Like, this is tough work, especially when it’s bringing up some controversial issues that a lot of teachers might be afraid to take on right now because of the political environment that they are in. So it’s going to have to start with some support for the teachers in terms of preparing them for how to lead these sorts of inquiries. It’s going to require some support from administrators to say, you know, I’ve got your back when teachers are taking on this tough work. And in terms of really going on a larger scale, I recognize this requires a lot of time, time when a school day is already quite full of content and skills building and state standards, that it can be difficult to carve out this sort of space.
And so to scale well, it’s going to have to go across the curriculum, not just be kind of reserved for a one off or, you know, 20 minutes a week or something like that, but it’s got to go kind of throughout the day, throughout the content. And it’s, it’s a big challenge. I’m not going to say that there’s. There’s certainly a lot in, that could be holding it up right now as we talk about large scaling, but I’m hopeful that with the small successes, we can show that that sort of work is worthwhile and get others on board to trying it out.
[00:27:42] Amy H-L: I was going to say that this honesty education overlaps, but isn’t the same as civic education, right? And civic education itself has been sort of backburnered for the most part. We tend to look at civic education less as process and more as ethics. And I’m wondering how you see sort of civic education with some sort of ethical bent best being incorporated into curricula.
[00:28:18] Sarah S: I would say that my approach is more aligned with what you just described of a more ethical outlook on civics rather than process or especially as content. We tend to hear of, of civics as learning the, the history, the facts, the people, the how government works sort of stuff. And while that is important, I think it needs to be done in the service of how do we live our lives together? And that’s where the ethical questions come in for civics. What does it mean to cooperate, to have political friendship, to bear sacrifices and struggles together? Those sorts of questions are, I feel, more important in our civics classrooms than perhaps they might appear in state standards or in guiding documents on the content of what’s being taught in civics, if it’s being taught at all.
Certainly, we know that. The amount of time spent on civics education, largely within social studies classrooms, has been dramatically slashed in recent decades as more time and money has been spent on our highly tested subjects of English language arts, mathematics, et cetera.
[00:29:30] Jon M: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve mentioned that it’s not just something for, you know, a social studies class or whatever it might be, but really, the issues you’re raising really are part of a question of an overall assessment of what are schools for, and are schools really committed to inquiry, coming back to inquiry. Because inquiry is subversive by its very nature, because you’re saying we’re going to set out to try to find something and we don’t necessarily know the answers and it seems as though it’s very related to that whole question of whether, you know, education is the banking model of education where you’re sort of pouring facts, whatever they may be into kids’ heads or whether you’re trying to encourage students to really think analytically.
[00:30:32] Sarah S: Yeah, and I think that’s why, you know, as a philosopher of education, I’m very centrally concerned with that connection between democracy and education, how schools prepare the sorts of citizens who live our lives democratically. So I don’t just mean things like organizing our government or having good laws to govern us, but the way that we learn to behave and interact together as we engage in civic inquiry, as we have conversations across big points of difference. And I think that sort of work is indeed a task of schooling.
Increasingly, I hear folks, you know, who will say, get back to teaching the basics and they mean something like stay focused on math and reading. But I don’t want that to be at the expense of the sorts of behaviors and inclinations that children need to cultivate toward civic life, toward mutual understanding, toward caring for others in a democracy. And so I’m always trying to keep my work in that big picture context of those democratic educational aims.
[00:31:40] Jon M: What do you see as the impact of AI on schools’ efforts to instill habits of honesty.
[00:31:47] Sarah S: Yeah, so AI is so tricky and I have to admit, you know, it’s really exploded in the time, even since I started writing this book, there’s been so much more widespread use of AI and adaptations of spaces where it’s being used. And of course it presents all sorts of problems for detecting what is true. You know, we know of deep fakes and AI that is imitating voices and images and all sorts of things that make it increasingly hard for us to know what is indeed even the case. So I think, you know, if I were starting this book again, I’d have a much more challenging situation to address because of what AI introduces.
At the very least, AI suggests that we need to have more overt and extended digital media literacy going on in our schools, helping students to make sense of the impact of AI on shaping what we know and how we know it. How do we decide what is legitimate? How do we decide what is evidence, et cetera? And AI also, you know, is not just about the way we present facts or information, but it’s also the creation of new facts and information and how it builds and generates that from what It has gathered from large language models and other sources, and that starts to ask tough ethical questions about the, the passing on of bias and other worries that are baked deeply into our society right now.
[00:33:23] Jon M: You know, when I was thinking of the question, I was thinking of it, one of my sons is a high school teacher and he was just talking about sort of this game that is going on where students may be, you know, relying on AI and teachers may be trying to figure out if a student was, really wrote something or not. But, just on what you were just saying, it made me realize that, you know, that game’s probably going to be going on for quite some time. I mean, there’ve always been issues of plagiarism and so forth, and this is just another form of it. But a more fundamental question is, given that AI isn’t going anywhere, or not going away anywhere, that we’re really going to have to really think deeply, not just about the question of whether somebody actually is passing something off as their work when it really isn’t, but what you were just saying in terms of the larger questions of how do schools, in particular, since we’re talking about education, but society as general, how do we adapt ourselves to a situation where all of the rules have changed in terms of what’s real, what’s created, some of which can be very exciting in terms of what’s created, but some of which can also be very dangerous and harmful. So it’s not at all a sort of a technical question of how do we deal with the mechanics of it, but, but it . does strike to what kind of society do we want to, what kind of future do we want to try to build?
[00:35:03] Sarah S: Yeah, it is a very difficult time, and as you said, it’s not entirely new problems. These are questions that teachers have been considering with plagiarism and I remember back in my day when I was in high school, it was CliffsNotes, you were using CliffsNotes as kind of the shortcut way of avoiding doing your readings or whatever. But larger questions that really are questions of values and ethics and what we’re committed to in our society and how are we using AI in ways that are humane and ways that are aligned with goodness and flourishing and not just shortcuts or efficiency. And those are going to be some real challenges for us to sort out. Not to mention just educatively and how we talk about students, the risks of failing to learn by relying or over relying on AI in school spaces.
[00:35:56] Amy H-L: Thank you so much, Dr. Sarah Stitzlein of the University of Cincinnati.
[00:36:01] Sarah S: You’re welcome. Happy to be here. Thank you.
[00:36:03] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues.
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