In this episode, Professor Sarah Stitzlein discusses the importance of teaching honesty in democracy, exploring how truth-seeking habits can combat misinformation and political polarization. She advocates for educational approaches that encourage critical thinking, emotional awareness, and collaborative problem-solving, emphasizing honesty as a crucial skill for developing engaged and responsible citizens in a populist Era.
In this compelling episode of the Conversations4Citizenship podcast, host Kamille Beye speaks with Professor Sarah Stitzlein, an education and philosophy expert from the University of Cincinnati, about her groundbreaking work on honesty in citizenship education. Dr. Stitzlein explores the critical role of truth-telling in democratic societies, particularly in our current post-truth and populist era.
Drawing from her pragmatist philosophical perspective, Stitzlein argues that honesty is more than a personal virtue—it's a social practice essential for democratic problem-solving. She emphasizes the importance of teaching honesty not through mere fact transmission, but by developing habits of truth-seeking and truth-telling among students.
The discussion delves into complex challenges facing modern democracy, including political polarization, misinformation, and the impact of digital technologies like generative AI. Sarah provides nuanced insights into how educators can help students critically examine information, understand emotional responses to news, and develop an informed approach to trust in democratic institutions.
By highlighting real-world examples, such as the recent controversy in Springfield, Ohio, Dr. Stitzlein demonstrates how dishonesty can have profound civic consequences, underscoring the urgent need for honest civic engagement.
This episode is hosted by Dr. Kamille Beye. Please subscribe to the podcast through Apple, Google, Spotify, or Amazon Music. You may also follow @c4c_ed on Twitter. We look forward to hearing your feedback. If you would like to explore participating in our podcast and submit your blog post to the C4C, do not hesitate to reach out through the online participation form or email us at conversations4citizenship@gmail.com
Kamille Beye 00:15
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the conversations4citizenship podcast. I'm your host. Kamille Beye from University College London, Institute of Education. Today, we are diving into some of the critical issues shaping our democratic societies, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Professor Sarah Stitzlein, a leading expert on civic education and democracy. Professor Stitzlein's latest book, teaching honesty in a populist era, emphasizing truth in the education of citizens offers a timely and insightful look at the role of honesty in civic life, especially as we navigate the challenges of populism and post truth politics. Her research on hope dissent and civic responsibility in education provides an excellent foundation for exploring why teaching honesty is not just important, it is essential for the health of our democracy today. Dr Stitzlein, how are you doing?
Sarah Stitzlein 01:12
I am doing great. Delighted to be here today.
Kamille Beye 01:15
I'm really excited to dive into your insights on why honesty is more crucial than ever in our polarized world, and how educators can foster truth and truth telling habits and students. Let's dive in. So first, Dr.Stitzlein, can you introduce yourself and why you're interested in education, democracy and philosophy?
Sarah Stitzlein 01:37
Sure. So. I am a professor of education and Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio in the United States, and I grew up in the Midwest. I'm a Midwest farmer's daughter. I grew up in a livestock farm, and from an early age, I was that annoying child who was constantly asking, why about everything, the one who is filled with questions. And I think it didn't surprise my parents at all when I wanted to study philosophy in college because I was just that big picture question asker all the time. And when I found myself starting my academic journey in philosophy, I found myself asking the big picture questions about democracy, how does our civic and political life work? And that then led me to questions of education, and how do we prepare citizens who can maintain and improve our democracy together? So a lot of my research and my work today is really about how we develop the sorts of citizens we need to combat some of our struggles we're facing in democracy today to improve the way that we live together. And I look at schooling as a place where we can practice democracy. I don't just see it as something we hold off until people are adults, something that happens after graduation, but rather something that even young children can can do together. So when we look outside around us right now, we see a lot of struggles in American democracy and in democracies abroad as well. A lot of growing partisanship, a lot of rancor across those partisan lines, polarization, growing support for authoritarian rulers, and growing doubts and cynicism among citizens that they can even make a difference in democracy, that their voices can be heard, that they can matter. So to address those sorts of problems in improved democracy, I encourage citizens to take up what I see as the fundamental civic question, and that is, what should we do? What should we do to solve this problem, to figure out how to live together? And as a result, I encourage teachers schools to take up real problems, to figure out with children, what should we do to solve them? So I see this as a way to actually do democracy in our schools, not just talk about it as an abstract in the future.
Kamille Beye 04:18
That's so interesting, especially in this political climate in the United States, I have plenty of questions about questions about that later. What inspired you to write teaching honesty in a populist era, and why do you believe it's important now, I think you kind of touched on it a bit. But could you elaborate?
Sarah Stitzlein 04:32
Yeah, absolutely so in let's see 2020 and 2021 I was commissioned by the National Academy of Education and UNESCO to write two different pieces about the future of citizenship education. And when I was making my recommendations about how we should prepare good citizens, I found that I often presumed that citizens were going to be honest. Truthful. But that sort of behavior was a really bad assumption, and it resulted in some suggestions in my work that really weren't very useful because they relied on some presumptions about how people behave. We know that increasingly, in our post truth era, our populist context, that people are increasingly dishonest for a whole host of reasons, sometimes because a sort of political tribalism in our populist context pushes us more to look out for our own personal political group, our own tribe, if you will, rather than really caring whether the truths we proclaim are accurate or how they might impact others. So I was kind of pushed to have to think about, why is this happening today? Why are people being more dishonest? And how do we reorient our democracy around caring for truth and honesty again? So I tried to kind of respond to some of those problems in this book by asking, what is honesty? How is it connected to truth, why are both important but also at risk in our democracies today? And then, how do we teach them in schools?
Kamille Beye 06:31
Thank you. So then I just wanted to touch on something that you said, and I'm going to piggyback into this question about truth. So you talked about your presumption of people being honest when you were doing your research. And so I was thinking about one the idea of alternative facts and the US media. But then it goes into the next question that we want to talk about is, how do you define honesty from a pragmatist philosophical perspective, and keeping in mind these ideas about alternative facts and truths for the moment or for a convenient conversation.
Sarah Stitzlein 07:07
Yeah... so, you know, as I was kind of starting the work on this book, we were hearing a lot about fake news and alternative facts, right? That was all in the media, and so I was trying to kind of think about what those things mean and why they are concerning but also politically useful. Why do groups intentionally craft narratives to support themselves? So to kind of shift into how I look at it from a pragmatist framework, let me give you a little history of how honesty is typically understood in the kind of the philosophical tradition. So a traditional philosophical view of honesty looks at it as a virtue. It's a way of being forthright and sincere and accurate that's aligned with being good, and an honest person is one that we can count on that they earnestly seek and tell the truth that they're complete in the kinds of accounts that they give. And of course, all of this assumes an objective account of reality that we can know for certain, a real world around us. But this account of a virtuous, honest person is rather contextually naive. What I mean is it focuses just on the behavior of that one individual, rather than how that individual's actions impact others or are impacted by others. So instead, I start to talk about honesty in a more social context, where we're into interdependent on others, where we have to trust others as sources of information, as we work together to solve our problems. And I have found that, you know, we're often quick in our political world today to point fingers, especially at some of our political leaders, particularly Donald Trump, has faced this where we're quick to point and say that person is a liar, that they are some sort of moral failure because of the lies that they tell. And frankly, this isn't a very helpful way to get people to behave more honestly. So I'm trying to figure out, how do we encourage honesty by highlighting what's at stake when we're dishonest in our civic and political lives. So in other words, instead of focusing on moral reasons for being a good person, let's redirect our attention to some epistemic and civic reasons for being honest, because it's really our ability to thrive together in the world that depends on our ability to think and reason. Well, all of that requires honesty. So coming back to that pragmatist view, pragmatists give us a more. Social view of democracy, they consider how truth seeking and truth telling shape our interactions with each other, and then pragmatists focus on truth as what works for us. And I know you can't all see me, but I'm making the quotation marks here around what works for us. Those are beliefs that enable us to understand the world, to act in ways that serve our needs and those of others. So importantly, though, we don't just stop at our own personal needs in the moment, but rather, we have to look at the impact of our beliefs on other people and in the long run. So we figure out what works by experimenting with our beliefs, testing them in light of our lived realities to figure out if they work. And then as pragmatists, if they don't hold up to the evidence, if they no longer prove useful, then we have to discard them. They're no longer true. We leave them behind.
Kamille Beye 11:07
That's so interesting. Wait, Stella is jumping to get in here, so I'm going to transfer to Stella real quick. Stella, go ahead with your question.
Stella Micheong Cheong 11:15
Okay. And Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your book. And then I'd like to ask you about your argument. In your book, you argue that teaching honesty require more than just imparting fact, but also developing certain habit and disposition. Can you explain what you mean by that and provided some examples?
Sarah Stitzlein 11:43
yeah. So I think when we focus on honesty as just a personal virtue, we really kind of miss the point of democracy as a way of life, where we solve problems together through civic reasoning. So instead, we have to cultivate the kinds of habits and ways of life that support that sort of democratic living. And when I talk about habits, we tend to think of habits as these very dull routines, the same things we do in and out day after day. We do them without even thinking about them. But for pragmatist philosophers, we have a more active sense of what habits are. We think of them as predispositions for how we act and also proclivities to act. So honesty as a way of acting entails how we verify truth with others, how we have a disposition to care about the way that our truth claims impact the lives of others. And of course, our habits are shaped by our environment. So if we're in a political context where we're surrounded by lying, misinformation, deceit, some of our habits are going to likely develop in bad ways. They might not serve our needs well. So efforts to change our habits through just direct instruction, like saying it, you know, you should be truthful, you should be honest. Those don't really help us, as we have to deal with that deep impact of a lying or deceitful environment around us. So where habits give us some kind of inlay, educationally, or inroads educationally is that they are things that can be reshaped, revised, reformed. We're not stuck forever in them. When we encounter a new environment that develops better patterns of behavior, we can develop better practices of democracy. And again, this is where schools come in. They can give us those communities, those communities of inquiry where students participate, and they witness that positive impact of truth seeking and truth telling, so they pursue that kind of behavior in the future.
Stella Micheong Cheong 14:13
Thank you so much for your your response. It's so powerful and in terms of a habit of truth seeking and truth telling. So I I'd like to listen more about this, the meaning of habit of truth seeking and truth telling. So do you believe that cultivating those habit among young people can encourage them to become more active citizen?
Sarah Stitzlein 14:47
Well, I'm not sure if it's going to make them more active citizens, but it's certainly going to make them citizens who are better prepared to contribute to the sort of civic reasoning and support. Problem solving that we need in our democracy right now, it's going to give them some of the skills and dispositions that they might need to take up that sort of civic work. And of course, engaging in truth seeking and truth telling is a very active process, so it's not a mere kind of passive route learning that we've seen in civics education in the past, it definitely is a more engaged taking up of ideas and practices. It's not just a bringing in or a learning facts and history and key figures and dates like we've seen in some of our civics courses previously. So while I'm hopeful that it would set students up for being more active citizens, I'm not sure if it actually is a direct correlation that leads to more active citizenship.
Stella Micheong Cheong 15:52
Okay, yeah, all right, so let's move on another topic, because in your book, you mentioned a lot about the digital technology, digital information, how to handle this digital information, but nowadays, as we are witnessing, that generative AI technology conquer the world, including School. So how generative AI technology affecting the students attitude toward truth, yeah, and their willingness to speak honestly?
Sarah Stitzlein 16:29
Yeah. So I'm definitely not an expert when it comes to talking about technology in particular, but I certainly can say that artificial intelligence is presenting a lot of challenges when it comes to being able to discern what's true. We know there's deep fakes. We know that there's hallucinations. We know AI has all kinds of problems when it comes to accuracy and truth, and that makes it hard for us to detect, to detect when things are fake or inaccurate, and sometimes we just fall prey to presuming that they're legitimate, without even asking questions about their legitimacy. Things we might see in social media, for example, or online on websites. So as is often the case with academic books, they're a long time in the making, right? So I was started writing this in in 2020, 2021, AI has really come to the fore in the time since I finished writing the book manuscript. Even though it just came out this fall, I don't really take up AI in particular much in the book, and I think that's an area that I'm going to have to move into in the future with my research because it's presenting these new challenges that just make it much more difficult, and we're going to have to equip our students with a lot more media savviness and skepticism so that they are more critical of the images, the voices, the memes, the videos that they come across in their online lives.
Kamille Beye 18:06
I wanted to ask you a question about this political leaders and people of influence. So we talk about this idea of trust and honesty, and many people look to leaders of their community, of course, the nation, to give them honest information. And so when you're looking at your local and national leaders and they're not being honest, how do you as an educator, try to instill these ideas of being honest, of course, in civic gate, civic engagement and discerning truth and younger people who don't have necessarily, maybe, made the critical thinking skills to fully analyze it at these higher levels, but also maybe just not even the information. So they are trusting people who they believe to have more to, you know, give them honest feedback. And so we talk about this idea of being honest, and how does that play into your research and how you teach civics to younger people?
Sarah Stitzlein 19:02
So this is this is hard, because on one hand, I want to encourage youth to be trustful of democratic institutions. And so I mean everything here, from things in the United States, like the NIH, our National Institute of Health, our Department of Education, but also things like the media, things that are democratic institutions, insofar as they support democracy and the free exchange of ideas. But at the same time, we also know that some of the folks leading those very sorts of organizations, those sorts of institutions, are not always honest and truthful, and some of our political candidates are particularly at fault for this, and that's hard to figure out how to not be naively trustful of organizations and institutions and leaders at the same time we recognize that we need those kinds of of. Resources to help us, especially when it's very specialized or technical knowledge that we might not have amongst the general population. We saw this, especially during the pandemic, where we relied more heavily on experts in medicine within our governmental institutions to help usher us through that challenge. I'll take up an example that's unfolding right in my local community. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is about an hour away from Springfield, Ohio, which has been in the news a lot in the last week or two, as President Trump and his vice president running mate, JD Vance, have been talking about Haitian immigrants in Springfield and sharing some allegations that folks living in Springfield from this immigrant community are harming animals, particularly domestic pets, cats, dogs and ducks, and consuming those animals. And our leaders have continued to utter this despite evidence to the contrary, local police asserting this is not happening. We're not getting reports of this. We're not seeing this, etc. And this is one of those moments where, rather than just pointing a finger and saying, you know, stop lying, or you know you're being bad to Vance or Trump. I want to direct our attention to the the outcomes of these sorts of lies on civic and political life. So today, our governor in the state of Ohio has sent dozens of extra state police forces to Springfield to help protect what have been at last count, I heard this morning, 33 bomb threats on schools and that local community, the children have been evacuated multiple times from the schools. This week, the university was shut down one day this week University in Springfield. And so what I want to draw attention is to when we share things like this that may be not just only lies, but harmful. We have to direct attention to what is the Civic outcome. So we see children who are losing the opportunity to learn this week, families who are in fear. We see growing distrust of an immigrant community, questioning their their legitimacy within Springfield. Those are the kinds of things that if I were in a classroom right now talking with students, I would draw their attention to why it matters to tell the truth and how do we sort out what's really happening in Springfield. How do we find out accurate information? You know, I would walk them through that process so that they, on one hand, should be listening to our political authorities, and at the same time, should be questioning, challenging and pushing back when the account given doesn't really match up with the other evidence presented.
Stella Micheong Cheong 23:02
Okay, so following up that point, I think that is really important. So because we are living in the accusation of fake news like this animal consuming. So how teacher or instructor teach the students discern what information sources and fact to truth.
Sarah Stitzlein 23:28
Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to know who and what to trust. But I'm really glad that you're drawing attention to that idea of trust, because part of how we figure out or determine what is true is often it's a matter of trust, whether we trust the person or the source of that information. So part of teaching that emphasizes truth also requires emphasizing trust, and part of what then we have to do in our classrooms is help students learn the role of democratic institutions, like the courts, like the media, like health organizations, and why and when they are worthy of trust. So we want to show them, historically, their contributions to our democracy, how they have provided helpful information. But also that's not to say we want to hide the times that they have made mistakes either. Certainly, if you come back to the matter of health, we know that there have been communities who've been harmfully targeted. I'm thinking of the syphilis experiments, for example, in the United States. Those are examples that we should be sharing with students to kind of plant a little seed of questioning and criticality about those institutions, but across the lifespan of our democracy and many elsewhere, we see the importance of those institutions for finding information, for making sense of what's going on in the world, and for having experts to process that information and share it with the public right. Yeah. So part of what we want to do then is help those students develop not naive trust, but an informed trust about why those leaders and those institutions matter. But when we look particularly at fake news and alternative facts, part of what's going on here has to do not so much with really even an account of reality, but with emotions and with their affective impact on how we feel about the information that we receive. So part of what we want to help students do is detect how does that news story ring about an embodied emotional reaction in the listener. So, for example, what's going on here in Springfield? I would talk with students about, why are people upset about an allegation that immigrants are eating pets? You know, for young children, this might mean talking about, well, I love my cat, and my dog, I would be terrified if someone took my cat and dog. So we talk about how a story like this really gets at us emotionally because we feel affection for domestic pets. Then with older students, I might move into talking about what is happening here in terms of feelings about large immigrant groups moving into small towns. So about a quarter of the population of Springfield now is made up of these Haitian immigrants. So we talk about what kinds of fears might we be targeting about large influxes of new folks? What's that mean for schools that may be struggling to provide language translation. What's it mean for local jobs and the economy? Because what I want them to understand is how a story like this is not just about is this really happening? Are they eating cats and dogs, but it's also about an account of what matters to us, what gets us angry, what gets us active, what leads us to take political action? You know, does it upset us and so learning to discern truth from fake news is helping students learn not just that emotional reactions matter, but learning how to question how emotions matter in the way that we determine truth.
Stella Micheong Cheong 27:27
Yeah, I completely agree those kind of empathetic or emotional approach is really important. And then I'm also read your another work on hope. So I'm very impressed. So I'd like to talk about this issue on hope and democracy. So how does your work on hope and democracy connect to your idea of honest education. Yeah. Can you share?
Sarah Stitzlein 28:03
Sure, thanks. I appreciate kind of stepping back into some of my previous work here. So I published a book. It's an open access book, so which means it's free for everyone on hope in education and democracy. And what I'm talking about there was the real swings we have seen between hope and despair amongst the citizenry in the United States following the last several presidential elections. And I mean it's gone full circle, back and forth from 2008 with Barack Obama again in 12, but then over in 16, to President Trump and back to Biden, and a lot of citizens were feeling just this kind of wave of emotions, but also a feeling of cynicism. When we look at the World Value Survey, it is a survey given that looks at how democracy is experienced in the US and in democracies abroad. And we saw that people were increasingly turning to authoritarian alternatives to democracy. They were feeling that they had less influence in their local democracy, and they were really just cynical about the role of democracy. And so my effort in that book was to try to talk about, how do we foster hope in these partisan times where folks, a lot of folks, were feeling that sort of cynicism, cynicism. So in that book, I talk about hope is not just something that we have or we hold. It's not like an object that we grasp or that kind of like lives on us. Rather, it's something that we do in a democracy, and so I talk about hope is like a verb. It's a doing, it's an action, and what it entails is working together to improve our life conditions, and it often means gaging at some sort of problem solving or inquiry into them, to. Figure out how we make them better together. And of course, that's where you're going to start to see that connection to my work on inquiry and truth because in those moments of working together across political groups, across political divisions, we have to rely on truth seeking and truth telling in order for those inquiries to be successful if we're going to come up with better solutions that serve a wide swath of the citizens, we have to be honest. And so you start to see how if we're going to achieve hope, we have to have honesty working behind the scenes.
Stella Micheong Cheong 30:36
Oh, wow, I loved your ideas. Thank you so much for your answering. And then, you know, I was thinking of how to teach honesty or hope as well those kind of value. But in reality, most students and people are indifferent to this truth, I want to hear more about your thought or insight from the pragmatist educational thinkers like a John Dewey for revising democracy today, or the honesty education?
Sarah Stitzlein 31:24
Yeah, so I guess, to get more practical and specific, like in terms of teaching this, we have to start with the fact that in most schools, and here I'm speaking largely in the context of United States, honesty is notin the curriculum. This isn't something that we teach. It might appear very briefly in elementary schools. We might have like a character of the week. I remember my son coming home, and he would be like, you know, from kindergarten. He'd say, it's Kindness week, or it's responsibility week, and for that week, they would talk about some virtue. So sometimes honesty pops up there. Sometimes it pops up in high school or in college as part of an honor code that you might have to sign to say I'm not going to cheat on my exam or whatever it might be. But that's about it. It's not really in our social studies curriculum. It's just not there. So at base level, part of what I'm arguing for is that we need a much more sustained teaching of honesty if we're going to address and confront these kinds of problems that we're seeing in our current political context. How does that look in the classroom? It might start with directly teaching stories or examples that display honesty at work. I mean, that's kind of the most simple way, a direct instruction way, or maybe having teachers model honesty, or they might talk about how they figured out what's happening in Springfield, or how they came to some sort of truth claim, but that's not a particularly effective way to teach honesty when we think about honesty as a set of habits that we want children to develop. So instead, we have to set up environments where students practice honesty themselves. In other words, we should give them some genuine opportunities to try out truth seeking and truth telling so that they can learn how honesty leads to better personal and civic outcomes. So a key place to begin is engaging students in classroom, community of inquiry that take up real and pressing social problems, things that matter in the everyday lives of those students, so in their local communities, in their homes, in their parks, etc. Students should then start with what are their opinions and personal experiences about those problems, about those issues, but they then also have to learn how to investigate their predicament by taking information in. Now I say that because in our populist context, there's a lot of pushing of information out. We're quick to assert our opinions, our experience, without really taking enough information in about the experiences, evidence, etc, of others before we reach some sort of conclusion. So within those communities of inquiry, as we're taking up those problems, teachers want to guide students through. How do they gather empirical data experiences from other citizens? How do they check those in light of conflicting evidence? What happens when what one person says doesn't match up with another person's account or with evidence. And in the midst of that sort of inquiry, I think an important role of the teacher is sometimes to slow things down. We live in the age of Google knowing right? Kids want an answer like this. They expect you just to be able to say, you know, Google, tell me the answer. Siri, what's this, and they want quick information, and so part of a teacher's role here is to detect when there's kind of a rush to conclusions or maybe some unchecked assumptions at work, to slow down, to call those students into doubt, to introduce some nuance to just an alternative view. We want to push students toward more careful, slower inquiry. So couple ways to do this. You might ask your students, What makes you say that? You know, if they reach a hasty conclusion, what makes you say that? Or how might you be wrong? How might you be wrong? Another one of my favorite prompts is I used to think, but now I think I like this one because it really fosters an awareness of how ideas change, and that can involve good reflection on the role of emotion or affect. It also can cultivate some intellectual humility that you know what I was wrong, and I learned some new evidence, or I had a conversation with someone else, and I realized that what I used to think wasn't accurate or wasn't a good view of the world. So all of that helps students understand not just what they believe, but how they think, including how emotions and politics influence that process. And then finally, in these little communities of inquiry in schools, I would encourage teachers to actually let children try out the solutions they come up with to those problems, let them implement them, because part of an important part of determining truthfulness is assessing the impact of those solutions. Do they work on the lives of people, and then they have to keep checking back to make sure that they're serving those folks well others are benefiting. It's a kind of a focus on the shared fate of the outcomes of that inquiry together?
Stella Micheong Cheong 37:04
Wow, yes. Thank you so much for response. And also, I think my colleague, Adam and Kamille, again, the Camille, they have another question, so I'm going to pass over the Adam and Kamille.
Adam Peter Lang 37:16
Thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah, that's excellent. Really interesting to hear about what's going on as we speak in your country? I just wondered very a couple of quick questions, but do you think dishonesty, anger, hate, in the United States, but elsewhere? Do you think in the discourse it's been normalized now, is that accepted? Do you think, and what you're encouraging us to do as educators is push back against that. Is it gone that far? What do you think?
Sarah Stitzlein 37:47
So I don't want to make it over generalization here, but I will share with you on my social media. This was just happened yesterday, so this is very fresh. I am friends with a state senator, and he's a Republican. He's a strong supporter of Trump, and he made two different comments yesterday that caught my attention, and one was he was concerned about people hating each other, and he said we need to stop hating each other. Now, just a few days ago, President Trump tweeted out, I hate Taylor Swift in all capital letters, and this came out right after she endorsed Kamala Harris. And so, okay, so something's going on here about how we hate political figures and is it normalized? And you know, I appreciated that the state senator was trying to dial that back and say, you know, we don't want to hate each other, and it seems to be happening on both sides of the aisles. You know, some Democrats hating Trump and vice versa. The other thing that came out was he was talking about, oh, I just drew a blank. What were they saying? He was talking about hate and
Adam Peter Lang 39:06
Anger?
Sarah Stitzlein 39:08
yes, oh, I know what it was with with President Trump. He said, You know Trump, we've all just gotten used to his his overstatements, his hyperbole, his bravado way of speaking that kind of over does things, and he says, we don't take that seriously. But that doesn't mean that he's not a good leader. And I kind of scratched my head at this because I thought, well, what does that mean? Then have we normalized people making not just hyperbole in terms of overstatements, but factually incorrect statements, and we just kind of brush it aside like, well, that's just inconsequential. That's just how he speaks. That's how he is.That does worry me, Adam, if that's becoming a norm for how we justify that pattern of behavior? That's just his tendency to to over speak or to to hyperbole. That's not something I want to normalize. And so I think in our social media spaces, in our conversations with friends, especially across the aisle, we should be pushing it back against that sort of behavior. To say it's it's not okay to speak that way, even if that's his tendency, we need to push back on that tendency.
Adam Peter Lang 40:24
Yes. I mean, I'm mindful. I was listening to Hanif Kureishi speak the other night, quite a famous Londoner, actually, of mixed race background, and he was saying that he thinks liberal democracy has been too weak in recent years in defending itself. And that's interesting because we had a in season two of the podcast. We have a discussion with an academic from UCL who's talking about aspects of illiberal liberalism, you know, in policy. So you get bits of that or whatever, in a small way. Do you think that education, teachers I've got a obviously, got an important role to play in that. But what's your reflections on that?
Sarah Stitzlein 41:07
Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned this. Adam, this is actually some of my my new work that I'm working on now is kind of taking up this post liberalism. What does it look like to be illiberal, to no longer celebrate and practice liberal democracy in the way that we did. I do think that there's a space here for teachers and education, and perhaps almost an obligation or responsibility if we want to maintain liberal democracy. And I say if, because I don't want to just presume that that's the case, but if we find that that is the sort of democracy that we want to celebrate and cherish, then, indeed, we have a responsibility to help students appreciate the foundations of liberal democracy, the values underpinning it, things like pluralism, of course, liberty and freedom, but not just liberty from but also liberty to those sorts of conversations need to be happening in school so that children appreciate why those things are of value, especially when we see tendencies toward authoritarianism growing in America and abroad, we have to figure out how to help students become more skeptical and critical of those sorts of shifts, why they're a Problem, helping them see what they jeopardize in liberal democracy as we shift toward those strong man type leaders,
Adam Peter Lang 42:27
just quickly coming back on that, because I know others have got questions, but again, in one of our previous podcasts, we interviewed some citizenship trainee teachers in London, and they were talking about the very much what you're talking about here, but about teaching controversial issues, and sometimes how difficult that was, and sometimes people would shy away from that often, but there was a sense that I were talking about giving young people. Maybe we need to give it to adults as well. This idea of what you're saying very strongly about critical thinking that seems to me. Is it possible to do that? Do you think within our education systems?
Sarah Stitzlein 43:08
I do think it's possible. It's very challenging, and it's a very difficult moment for teachers to do that hard work. I come from a family of farmers and teachers, and my father, my grandmother, two of my sisters, my nephew, all teachers. And so, I see, and have seen them struggling in the classroom with those sorts of conversations around controversial issues and the political minefield it that is talking about them, and it often because they're afraid of pushback from parents in particular, but we know that parents value honesty, no matter their political orientation, so teachers, I think, in response, have to foreground that they're emphasizing finding and telling the truth about some of the most important issues of Our D-Day, even if they are politically contentious. So I think we have to support and encourage those teachers who are doing that hard work. Administrators in our schools, principals and headmaster headmasters need to be giving those teachers the tools, the space, the time and support they need to do that hard work and to have their backs to say, you know, if a parent raises a fuss, that you're going to be there to support that teacher and as a community, to do that, also to empower our teachers to have those difficult conversations.
Adam Peter Lang 44:35
Thank you very much. I'll pass over to Kamille on that.
Kamille Beye 44:37
I will ask one quick question with the conscious of time. So I want to go back to what you talked about, this idea of communities of inquiry, and obviously, teaching young people about social problems with this idea of having hope. But I was thinking more about not just hope, but empathy. And the reason I say empathy is I was thinking about there's a case in the US, and it's going all over the country where, um. So young people don't have money to pay for their school lunches, and they have these large debt accounts, and you have young people like making lemonade stands, et cetera, to help their fellow classmates. And so I was thinking about during COVID, when everyone had free lunch right after COVID. And so there was not this stigma attached to something like going to get your free lunch at school. And so I was thinking about how we as society can also be more empathetic. So we may not necessarily have the same issue as our neighbor, but we can be understanding so that we can use those situations as teachable moments to practice our civic engagement. And also, as you say, do hope as a verb? And so I was just wondering about like working with adults, not just young people or young adults, but like full grown adults, who obviously have lived, and have lived a life and know better. But how can we start re engaging with adults as well as young people to give them these ideas of empathy, but also using hope as a verb, so that we can also slow down our inquiry and take a moment to step back to see how we're looking at these, especially very, I say, toxic or touchy political issues, or even global issues, where we have points of view to see a wider view, or a different view from what we ourselves have.
46:19
Sarah Stitzlein 46:20
Well, I think part of what you hit on there is that we need to slow it down. And part of slowing down means listening more, talking less, listening more so being more open and receptive to hearing the stories, the struggles, the accounts of those who are different from us, and to give them some legitimacy to say that they matter, that they're worthy of pausing to listen. And then once we listen, to figure out, how do we respond? How do we act? When are, when is hearing someone's suffering, someone's struggle,and actually a call to action on our part? When is it require responsibility to do something? When is it just a moment of feeling connection to someone else, seeing the humanness, the humanity behind their suffering and their struggle. Part of that gets at the idea of shared fate that I talk a lot about as an educational outcome, so helping us see, you know, that kind of we're in this together, but that when one community or person is struggling, that it has impacts on others. So in a way, that's not a true empathetic response, because it's really also kind of looking from how does this impact me? But how do we develop that sense of an us? So it's not just that this person over here is struggling, but that we are impacted together as an us, as a community, as a citizenry.
Kamille Beye 47:49
Thank you so much. So I think we're getting close to the time the top of the hour. So Adam, could you please close this?
Adam Peter Lang 47:57
Yes, just very quickly. Sarah, thank you so much. I mean, is there anything else that you wanted to share with us that you haven't yet done so? And by the way, there's very much great opportunity. We will be putting all your books and your papers and everything on our website so people can see it. But is there anything that we've missed out that you desperately wanted to get across to us today?
Sarah Stitzlein 48:19
No nothing else that you add just but just to end with that spirit of hopefulness about democracy, that we can make this better, if we look at the long history of of democracy and its development over time, we know that we have struggles. We know that democracy is something we have to continually remake anew, and that it's up to us to keep it going, to improve it, to strengthen it, but that we can, we can do it together. And so I really would like to end on that more positive spirit.
Adam Peter Lang 48:51
Well, Sarah, thank you very much indeed for your time, and it's been a real pleasure hearing about your work, your research and ongoing work, and your personal story too. I've heard a number of things in here that last point, I just want to pick up on hopefulness. Many of our podcasters refer to that. And of course, you mentioned also talking less, listening more, and critical thinking as well. But there's so much there to reflect on. So thank you very much indeed. So I'm Adam Peter Lang, thank you for listening to conversations4citizenship. We hope you've all enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to conversations4citizenship and look for us out there on X @c4c_ed, a transcript of today's conversations with Professor Sarah can be found at www.conversations4citizenship.com. This episode of conversations4citizenship was produced by me, Adam Peter Lang, Kamille Bay and Stella Cheong recorded. And sound mix by Stella Cheong many thanks indeed. Take good care, everybody. Goodbye.