Pedagogy in the Age of Hyperpolitics

Or, Creating a space for a politics not centered on venting

I have never attempted to hide my religious or political views in the classroom. Most students who take my class come to understand that I come from a very conservative Christian background but am no longer a believer, even though religion remains the focus of my scholarly research, and that I hold political preferences that are well to the left of anything the Democratic Party is likely to offer. I reveal this information — organically, as relevant to the situation — simply because part of my pedagogy is connecting with students as people and being honest about myself is essential to that. But I am also more than a little repelled by the claims of some professors (often of an older generation) to maintain a façade of total neutrality such that the students can never guess what their actual beliefs are. I doubt that they are ever as successful as they seem to believe — in fact, the stance strikes me as unattractively arrogant — but more than that, I don’t think it’s a desirable goal even if it were possible.

I would be lying, though, if I said I wasn’t being more circumspect than usual in light of recent events. Part of that is simple cowardice, but a cowardice leavened by a sense that “speaking out politically” in the classroom is unlikely to have any significant positive effect — certainly not enough to offset the risk. Students who need support and solidarity in the face of our political situation can approach me individually. For everyone else, what is the point of abusing my role as teacher to subject a captive audience to my political venting?

Note that my fear is not abusing my role to “indoctrinate” students, because that has never happened and absolutely never will. I have quite literally never known a student to adopt my view on any issue simply because it’s my view. Perhaps that’s because I lack charisma! But it’s also built into my pedagogy, which centers varied course materials rather than myself as the primary authority in the classroom. I try to get them to take all course materials — no matter what the political or religious orientation — seriously, to interpret them fairly on their own terms, to put understanding before critique.

In many cases, I wind up being in a position to defend texts with which I “disagree,” though I hate to even use that term in this context. If anything, I want them to be less opinionated, less concerned about whether they “agree” or “disagree” with an author, less “critical” in the sense of passing judgment and more truly critical in the Kantian sense of being able to inhabit other viewpoints and probe their implications from within. And to the extent that my work feeds into their understanding of contemporary political debates, I want them to see — regardless of which side they favor — how impoverished those debates are, how riddled with falsehood, how blinkered in their horizons, how inadequate to any legitimate human needs. In fact, I would love for them to reject the ideal of “debate” as such, because serious intellectual reflection is not something you can win or lose.

I don’t always live up to this ideal. Sometimes I probably do vent inappropriately. Sometimes my honest self-presentation probably intimidates the shy and immature students who mostly populate our classrooms. Nor do I deny that there is something self-serving about this ideal in the present context—not just in the narrow sense of trying not to get fired, but in the sense that I have leaned on the classroom as a space to disconnect from the endless influx of anger and disgust and anxiety so that I can recharge. Talking with My Esteemed Partner about my interactions with students the other day, I was surprised at how much I lit up, how animated and excited I was about those stories, how much energy I drew from them.

I need a space that isn’t just a constant all-encompassing doomscroll. But the thing is: so do my students. The single best pedagogical decision I ever made, I think, came on the morning after the 2016 election. Most of my students were shocked and upset, and clearly no one had done the reading—which happened, purely coincidentally, to be the opening pages of Dante’s Inferno. More or less spontaneously, I said that we would simply read the text out loud to each other, pausing occasionally to discuss. We would be asked to devote our attention in the coming years to many things that are not worthy of our attention, I said, and so we should not let anything take away the time we get to spend on things that are worthy of our attention.

What I worry about when I listen to the online social-justice “best practices” of making the classroom a political space, one where students can “process” the important events going on around them, is that they are asking me to make a bad trade — to exchange course materials and concepts of enduring value for stupid unproductive arguments or annoying monologues.

To the extent that the classroom — and here I am speaking of the classroom as such, regardless of the content the course addresses — has political relevance for the contemporary world, it is in creating the opportunity for an experience not conditioned by what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics.” The classroom at its best should represent the opposite of that endless churn of conflict where everything is “political” in the sense of calling for positioning and side-taking and denunciation but seemingly nothing is political in the authentic sense of helping us find ways to shape our collective lives in meaningful ways. In many cases, class materials will and should bear very directly on questions related to authentic politics. But students will not be in a position to engage with those important questions if they are encouraged to approach it through the framework of hyperpolitics.

Neither we nor they need more spaces to vent, much less to issue definitive statements on every news story or demand fealty to the somehow instantly-arrived-at “correct” answer. We need to hold open this one last precious space of focused attention, of careful deliberation, of understanding before criticizing—not just because we need those qualities now, but because we have always needed them and will always need them, even after the revolution. Inculcating those skills is not sufficient to change our world for the better. Nor is it an automatic but secret way to indoctrinate them, because students could well use the skills we give them think very carefully and open-mindedly about how to achieve goals we find irrelevant or even harmful. But it is necessary, and it is what we as teachers have the training and unique opportunity to do.