To Learn We Need To Give People The Space To Speak

First published on November 23, 2018

I've never been very good at speaking out when I disagree with people. I don't know exactly when it started or why, but I remember arriving at university to find a bunch of people who spoke incredibly confidently about things, so confidently that I didn't disagree. I was neveras sure about anything as they were. There were too many other perspectives I knew I hadn't seen, and there was too much knowledge in the world that I didn't know. They must have just seen more perspectives, I thought, or have learned more. They probably had, in some cases, but later I realised that wasn't necessarily true. Sometimes, they just knew how to speak with self-assuredness, even about things which they knew very little. On one occasion, an incredibly self-assured friend of mine didn't know that there were any selective schools in the UK as we discussed education. She was so self assured that I almost didn't correct her, and so self assured that when she at first denied it, I doubted myself. Despite the fact that there were two selective secondary schools in the next school district over from the one I grew up in!

There's nothing inherently bad about this self-assuredness: it's a useful tool - especially as many of us often find ourselves outside our comfort zone - to be able to sound more confident than you feel. But this period at university was the first time I remember it feeling oppressive. I didn't want to speak up to friends like that one, because I would be shouted down, and the argument wouldn't be worth having: I wouldn't know the answer for sure, and they would think they did, so what was the point? I wasn't up for the fight. This might be out of a fear of being wrong, or a fear of losing an argument, or something different altogether. But the feeling was oppressive.

I've been thinking about that again recently. I've spent a lot of time this week in the company of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. His work - on our political and moral make up, and now on what he calls 'the coddling of the American mind' - is so interesting that I went to three events he was speaking at this week. One of the things he is talking about, in his talks and in his latest book, is a 'call out' culture developing in American universities. It seems, from the questions at the events, that something similar is happening over here in universities. And I have felt it outside them, too.

What this is, as I understand it, is a culture where if someone uses the wrong word (often a word that might be offensive to some), or makes a mistake, or phrases something wrong, or says something, for example, racist, then they are called out. But the atmosphere as this is done is not one of learning. It is not one of 'did you perhaps make a mistake there?' or 'did you know someone might find that word offensive?' It is one of oppression. It is one where the call out involves labelling the person. Perhaps they are labelled a racist, whether they actually are or not, and often then they are clearly not. One woman at an event I was at this week was - in advance of a lecture she was giving at King's College London - accused in a petition of being opposed to the wellbeing and survival of among other groups, women.

Stories like this remind me of that feeling of oppression I used to feel at university. I've felt it more recently, too. Times when friends or colleagues or people at an event say something which I feel is wrong. 'But,' I think, 'it's not worth saying anything here. I might be called out. I might be labelled as something.' It's really, really unpleasant to be labelled as something you are not, especially something about which your values are very much set against.

Why am I writing about this? What's the problem here? Well, the problem with that university culture, which may be spreading out more broadly, is the same as my conversation with my friend about school systems. If you create a dynamic and an environment where people feel it's not worth sharing their views because they might be shouted down, then learning can't occur. Whether that's shouted down by a slightly-too-self-assured and slightly-too-good-at-arguing friend, or by the kind of people who try to hound speakers off campus by essentially slandering them with baseless (and quite ridiculous) accusations. Either way, it stops learning. It stops developing understanding. It stops us finding the truth.

To learn - and we all need to learn about each other in this connected world we live in - we have to give everyone the space and environment where they can share the truth, as they see it.