In her latest column ("See You in Hell," Feb. 6), Lucy Stonehill '10 vents her frustration after listening to a classmate use his religious views when crafting an argument about the Genesis story during class. Stonehill rightly argues that religious zeal can sometimes handicap progressive learning, however, she mistakenly turns her academic encounter into a larger issue -- the role of religion in the classroom.
Stonehill's experience is a reminder of one of the most fundamental challenges of a liberal arts education: Confronting the biases of others -- in curricula, class lectures and regular conversations -- in order to better recognize your own biases.
Stonehill states that "one can perform critical, insightful analysis only by placing one's personal creeds on the backburner." In calling her classmate's arguments "memorized snippets of Sunday School 'fact,'" Stonehill herself becomes guilty of subjectivity -- which is completely understandable. Though students might strive for objectivity in academic pursuits, it is only natural to use one's experiences in order to make sense of unfamiliar knowledge. If, as Stonehill states, the student is a "self-professed" priest-in-training, his classmates could not have been too surprised by his biases; to his credit, in fact, he has given them fair warning.
The same can't be said for the rest of us. Usually when we claim to be objective, we are furtively trying to earn more legitimacy for our personal beliefs. Perhaps the worst offenders, oddly enough, are those we trust the most in our education: Our professors.
Having attended a French school before Dartmouth -- an educational system that explicitly forbids religion in the classroom -- I often faced anti-American comments in class from teachers as well as students. Lectures on globalization remained impartial enough until an irrelevant potshot was taken at "McDonald's-loving, obese Americans."
For the longest time, I myself was guilty of the same biased reasoning; although I am still critical of many aspects of America (mostly its foreign policy), it is my time at Dartmouth -- the first time I've ever been surrounded by so many "real Americans" -- that has allowed me to become more informed and fair in my judgments about Americans themselves. After my exposure to such prejudiced perceptions in high school, I am now more aware of even the slightest hint of bias -- something I couldn't have learned without that exposure.
Subjectivity can be much more subtle than the priest-to-be or my anti-American encounters in high school. Anyone taking professor Christesen's course Antiquity Today (Classics 1) has not only lamented their dwindling Greenprint finances but has also rigorously examined the impact that culture has had in shaping people's cognitive processes. Any Dartmouth professor (including Christesen) prepares a lecture based on what he or she thinks is important to discuss -- which probably has something to do with what their own professors considered important. A lecture in International Politics (Government 5) may not smack of a religious sermon, but students should still question the limits of its "impartiality," as well as the so-called objectivity of any essay, opinion column or news anchor.
Experiences like mine and Stonehill's, albeit "random," are an invaluable part of a small liberal arts college like Dartmouth because they give us the opportunity to learn through the exposure to different ways of thinking in order to be better informed.
Ultimately, biases will always "infiltrate" our education system, as Stonehill puts it. But our ability to recognize different variations of bias, religious or otherwise, can only foster an open, more self-aware exchange of ideas. Not only will this enhance our debate skills in the long run, it will allow us to hold up a mirror to ourselves -- self-examination can be the most valuable learning experience of all.
