Bringing out our Worst Selves

Many people believe that the key to effective teaching, particularly at the secondary level, depends primarily on a deep level of content knowledge.  In fact, in many ways it was that perspective that drove me to the field - I had very little background in formal teacher training, and banked my science teaching career on a physics undergraduate degree from a respected institution.  As it turned out, that was enough to get my foot in the door, but I didn't really become halfway decent at my job until I accepted the fact that understanding the way developing minds was AT LEAST as important as content specialization, if not more so.

I spent much of my first few years on the job learning the ends and outs of pedagogy: how to manage a classroom, how to break down concepts in different ways, how to create experiences that help diverse groups of young people connect the dots in their own ways, and so on.  In other words, I learned how to lead a herd of horses to water and talk them into drinking it.  That was crucial, because I assumed when I was a teacher that the horses would drink the water on their own once I told them all where to find the oasis.

Basically, I've grown to believe that a huge part of the teaching profession is facilitating that cognitive development that helps young people bridge the gap between actions and consequences.  The kids that are the most successful (and pleasant to be around) are the ones that learn these lessons quickly.  And on the flip side of that coin, the students that fail the most consistently and spectacularly are pretty much always fixated on a mission to find someone else to blame for their predicament (and in almost all cases do so with the vigorous backing of their enabling parents).

It's the eerie consistency of this pattern that has me thinking about a dark side to the technological golden age in which we currently find ourselves.  Many technologies are designed to protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices; many experts are banking on technological advancements to resolve the impacts of climate change, for instance, and many others are so convinced that we'll be able to come up with clever fixes for whatever messes we make that the idea of considering consequences seems laughable.

Given how many problems have actually been solved by technological advancements, one might be tempted to dismiss such concerns as paranoia, but I think there are at least two reasons to be concerned about the way that our own ingenuity is warping our worldview:

First, there will always be a very real chance that we'll make a mess that we won't be able to clean up.

And second, living a life where we constantly push our pleasure buttons and assume we can clean up the negative repercussions later (even if we're right about that) turns us into crappy people, on an individual and cultural level.  Self-control, thoughtful consideration, stewardship of the world around us, these are values that serve a social good above and beyond the immediate consequences that they steer us away from.  Ask yourself if you want to live in a world where these virtues will become obsolete before you put an unconditional stamp of approval on the unimpeded march of progress.