Classroom Advocacy Bad! Well, Unless it's the Right Kind of Advocacy. For the Right Reasons. Duh.

So a friend of mine forwarded me a post that's been making the rounds on a mailing list frequented by the thinky folks in the education world.  No, not the people who actually DO the educating; the people who think about how the people who do the educating should go about educating other people.  Yeah.  Those people.

The article deals with the oh-so-topical-and-touchy subject of "advocacy in the classroom."  Short summary?  See title of post above.

Anyway, the article, she is long, so I'm doing the excerpt thing here. Follow the link above for the whole article.  First, I'll give you the paragraph wherein the authors defend advocacy over neutrality: 

"While such advocacy has costs and risks, we give it a conditional defense.  First, for the educator to take a neutral stance on such issues would tend to give students the relativistic message that no answers are better or closer to the truth than any others regarding moral, political, and religious questions.  This is to promote a dubious
doctrine that students are too ready to embrace out of laziness, defensiveness, and postmodern cultural  influences.  A neutral instructor could try to preempt this relativistic implication by notifying students that her own refusal to advocate a position is due to the neutrality required by her role and not because of personal indifference or the lack of objectively correct answers.  Yet such an explicated neutrality still has the disadvantage of failing to model a concerned but responsible defense of a position.  Such modeling may contribute to the educational goal of creating engaged and independent citizens.  A professor who never advocates conclusions can model critical reasoning but not commitment.  The neutral professor might try to further close this "commitment gap" by giving examples of sincere engagement by other intellectuals and activists.  For example Pope John Paul II's opposition
to abortion could be contrasted with the arguments and stories of feminists defending abortion rights- thereby giving students models of  engagement to choose from.  However, such pedagogy still has a cost.  Students would not encounter flesh and blood individuals taking a stand on contemporary issues- commitment would only exist on paper or in classroom videos, not in professors."

So if a professor doesn't take a stand, students believe that there is no answer? Couldn't a professor say, "Here are the arguments for and against.  Pick one and defend it." And students are incapable of dealing with ideas unless they are physically embodied inside the classroom by a professor? Curious argument, and somewhat revealing in terms of what the authors think about the mental capacity of students.

It goes on in this vein. Perhaps sensing that their article might be considered long and rambling, the authors helpfully summarized their ideas in a numbered list, which I will produce here (my comments in bold):

"Our discussion of advocacy yields the following proposal:

1)  Professors should avoid indoctrination in their advocacy.  In particular professors should not:
* Attempt to influence students to believe things without regard for the evidence
* Coerce student agreement or silence to secure the prevalence of their own views
* Lie about or distort material
Sounds good so far! How's that working in reality?

2) Professors must support independent intellectual inquiry.  In particular they should:
* Make clear that different views and questions are welcome
* Present a balanced discussion of reasonable alternatives and relevant considerations regarding issues discussed
Okey-dokey. 

3) Professors should avoid advocacy which prevents the accomplishment of course goals.
Sure. Note to former professor who I shall refer to only as Grendel girl (explanation to follow) - PAY ATTENTION TO THIS ONE!

4) Professors should only advocate positions which they have good reason to believe are correct.
Um, okay?  Isn't this a bit subjective?  Some people apparently have good reason to believe that fire can't melt steel...or that the earth is flat...But okay, moving on.

5) Professors should only advocate when they have reason to believe advocacy will contribute to student development.  The value of advocacy may include:
* Fostering values necessary for education and inquiry
* Teaching basic humanitarian principles and virtues necessary for good citizenship
* Promoting views that are not taken sufficiently seriously by students
What are these values?  Who decides? No, really.  Who decides? Because this goes beyond a professor presenting pros and cons of particular items within the subject's purview. Plus, when people start talking about "virtues" and "good citizenship," I get that creepy feeling. Again, who decides?

6)  The pedagogical value of advocacy in item 5 should outweigh any costs of advocacy in class time or the unintentional alienation or intimidation of students."
Woah.  So advocacy is bad, unless it's for subjects that are self-evidently "correct," or that a teacher "is reasonably sure are correct," or that an instructor feels are "virtues," or items that "students aren't taking seriously," in which case: ADVOCATE!

Taken by itself, this seems a fairly innocuous list - the usual pablum about "challenging viewpoints," etc. And within the context of liberal arts/humanities education, this sometimes is useful. Particularly in literature, when you spend a lot of time making connections between past and present in terms of literary themes. But the reality is different, as anyone who's taken lit courses in the past decade or so knows. When Beowulf becomes a vehicle for discussing Palestinian liberation in every class, it's no longer about stimulating student reflection, unless you think Grendel authored the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And let's get serious about what sort of advocacy one is liable to encounter in today's academy, particularly on the humanities side. I'm at one of the more conservative universities in a pretty conservative state, and yet - Grendel!  Palestine! WTF!

As for neutrality, to this day I have no idea of the political persuasion of my MA thesis advisor, someone with whom I had a close enough personal relationship to invite her to my wedding. And yet, I somehow managed to read and understand both sides of the arguments I was presented with, and to utilize deductive reasoning within her classes, all without being exposed to Points Of View in The Flesh!

For me, this is about trust. I don't trust people who are overwhelmingly on one side of a debate to offer guidelines about advocacy, particularly when every example of advocacy within their article falls conveniently on that side of the debate. If the roles were reversed, I'm sure the authors would see the double-edged-ness of this particular sword.