Loving your child's mind: Francisco and I discuss Alana on fantasy stories

Good now.

Great. Yeah, how did you like the conversation with Lana this morning on fantasy?

I think it was great. It's a very important topic, the real versus not real.

Yeah, I would say, you know, sometimes I talk about concept teaching where we have example, concept, concept, concept, you know, examples of them and then non-examples, borderline. And for me, I see that as a pretty clear, I won't quite say algorithm, but heuristic for coming up with Socratic conversations with young children. And, you know, in this case, yeah, what does she think counts as a fantasy? What doesn't count as a fantasy? And it was very interesting to see how, you know, Charlotte's Web, at first she sort of thought it was a fantasy, then she decided it wasn't. Kind of an interesting borderline case for her. Any other thoughts on the kind of mapping of concept teaching or concept learning onto this example of a Socratic conversation with a child?

Sure, yeah. How about we talk more about the heuristic then? Because I noticed you, the way you move from concept to concept was through a very particular use of contradictions. So reacting from her answer, and if there was something contradictory, you pointed it out as a question and then moved to the next concept from there. Is that part of the heuristic, would you say?

Oh, that intuitively strikes me as spot on, and I don't remember exactly what I did that was of that nature. So do you have a particular example you can recall for me?

Yeah, when she brought up Charlotte's Web for the first time, After a little bit, she said that it wasn't a fantasy because they had very traditional human elements, real elements, and she said that maybe it's a real-life story. But then before, she had said that animals speaking was not part of the real world, that animals did not speak. Speak like humans spoke. So you pointed that out as a contradiction. And I think that led to the line of questioning where she was thinking about the ways in which animals might or might not communicate with each other and to other animals. So that was very interesting to see that movement.

Yeah, I know that's a great example. And I think it's useful to highlight the perceived contradiction. One, I think a challenge I have in explaining what I do to other people is for me, Um, the whole goal of Socratic is both for ourselves and with others to come up with consistent, coherent worldviews, which is so simple and natural, a driver of all of my questioning that I'm almost unaware of it. But, uh, an implicit aspect of that is if I perceive a contradiction, that is something that's not consistent and coherent, then of course immediately I ask about, wait, I thought you were saying this, but now you're saying that. How do those two, how do you reconcile those two? So that's exactly right. I think in some ways one needs to develop an ear for either contradictory perspectives and/or potentially contradictory perspectives. So, right, I'm listening very carefully. My mind is trying to figure out how she thinks about fantasy. And she started out pretty clearly, you know, monsters and magic and so forth. Got it. And I guess I was kind of the first impulse going back into the question driver is, okay, that's fantasy. My instinct was, and this is where you could say I had an agenda, but my instinct is for any story to be meaningful, it needs to relate to human. And so I was wondering, okay, she's calling out the fantasy part appropriately. That was the question. I think there's a human part. So then I would ask her, that's when I started going into the line of questioning about what if there's no character? What if there's no plot? And so forth. I was perceiving a contradiction in this case between my own perspective and her perspective. But instead of saying, you know, no, Alana, they have to have a human element, you know, I was gently questioning, okay, yeah, I get that part of the fantasy. Do you, Alana, in your worldview, Alana's worldview, do you need a human element plus a fantasy element? And she was a little bit reluctant, but not very. She pretty much agreed. And then we quickly got into plot and character and And she brought up dialogue, which I was delighted when she kind of added dialogue as an element. So that was a case where instead of calling out, as it were, or identifying her contradiction, I perceived a contradiction between my belief and her belief. And that drove me to ask a line of questions until we felt more aligned. And once she was on the same page with me in terms of, yeah, there should be a human element. I loved her language. It's not thrilling. If you don't have those things, it could still be a fantasy story, but it's not thrilling. Okay, good enough. We think stories should be thrilling. Yeah, and then it was a matter of exploring, right? What are the boundaries of that, of what counts? And that's what led us into Charlotte's Web and so forth.

Yeah, I think it's very helpful that you describe it that way because I noticed thinking about the ways, listening to the ways you were using contradiction and then thinking about the way contradictions can be used. I noticed that, like you were saying, contradictions in a conversation can be used first to kind of get right what each participant in a conversation actually thinks. So just, ah, okay, this is what you think, this is what I think, this is what you think, this is what I think. A good encounter between the different ideas. And the rest is to really explore what caused the contradiction. Like in this case with Alana, when she was confronted with this contradiction of saying Charlotte's Web is real, but then having had admitted that animals don't talk like humans do, it wasn't used as contradiction is often used as a gotcha moment, trying to lead her into saying, Oh yeah, I guess idea A or idea B, but it was actually a gateway to discovery to find out that Alana is really thinking about language in very different ways, that she does imagine right now insects and animals and all these things having a very complex communication life. So that was, you know, a way to discover that she actually thought that instead of just gotcha moments.

Well, exactly. This goes back to earlier, you brought up the idea of a principle of charity and steel-manning an argument. You know, many people think of Socrates, the historical character, as kind of a bully, an intellectual bully who's all gotcha all the time. I've certainly introduced young teens to Socratic dialogue, and some, and I would say especially male, often get into an aggressive gotcha style of Socratic reasoning. Of course, I think that's part of why Socrates was put to death, as I imagine all these young Athenians walking around doing gotcha moments with all the older respected people. But no, no, I'm very much more coming from a principle of charity. I try to make sense, whether it's Ilana or any interlocutor, how can their perspective make sense? And so before, as it were, aggressively question them, I first try to figure out, is there a way in which this makes sense? And then I ask my questions from that where maybe if they go here, then it will seem less contradictory to me. And so I'm kind of looking for the kind of adjacent perspective from within their world that would make it— their perspective makes sense for me. Does that make sense? Is that a bit convoluted?

It does make sense. And I wonder if it's— I mean, partly having this principle of charity stems out of the goal that you as an educator enter in a conversation in that You are that maybe one of the goals is to facilitate the forming of a coherent system of ideas, of beliefs, et cetera. So I said, I will do whatever it takes to help you achieve coherence. And that means pointing contradictions, et cetera. But I'm just helping in that instead of trying to get her to adopt a system of belief or ideas.

Of course, the Socratic metaphor of Socrates as a midwife is perfect for that. I hadn't thought of this, but, you know, my sense is 90, 95, maybe 99% of readers of Plato regard Socrates as an intellectual bully. But that reading, that exclusive— and sometimes, of course, to certain interlocutors, you know, Callicles, he goes all out and good for him. But, you know, that simple image of Socrates as an intellectual bully is inconsistent with Socrates as an intellectual midwife. And I think he takes— he, Plato, and presumably he, Socrates, I imagine it's a combination of the two— take this notion of being an intellectual midwife very seriously. And, you know, my sense of midwife is obviously the midwife wants to make sure the birth goes smoothly. The midwife is— well, she may kind of coach a woman She's on the whole supportive and gentle. And you want to bring the new life into the world in a healthy way. So I think that's exactly right, that I want to nurture their perspective to the point where their perspective is coherent, consistent and coherent from their point of view, so that they give a stronger, healthier intellectual perspective into the world. Even if I completely disagree with some of their premises, this goes to how we coach student writing, for instance. I can imagine either of us could read a student essay where they have a premise in the essay that's, for whatever reason, bonkers to us. But given that premise, they unfold the argument beautifully and rigorously and eloquently and wonderful. Let's coach it so they produce a fabulous essay. And then given that premise, the rest of this flows from it. Go ahead.

Yeah, I wanted then if we could explore more that you said. Even if I disagree with that idea. And I think that's a very interesting point because you obviously probably have thought about fantasy and real and not real and what makes the story good and what makes the story have human element. You've thought about these things yourselves and you have, you probably have ideas that you like, that you hold dear and that you would be happy to share with people. But in a sense, you have decided to let a lot of these ideas that you hold personally go for the sake of the student. And that's, that's not a common or, or perhaps easy thing to do. Have you talked about how you have managed to do that and how you would encourage others to do that as well?

Yeah, I mean, it's— I would say it is, uh, to some extent just by nature not very intrusive. But again, it is ultimately a deep commitment to, uh, wanting to respect their worldview and, uh, You know, a coach— suppose somebody, you know, is a painter— mixing metaphors a bit— but, you know, say a mentor for an artist. The artist should have their own style. At some point, the art teacher may, you know, support the development of certain skills, you know, drawing skills. Representational drawing is a useful skill even if one does non-representational art. But ultimately, it's up to the artist to develop their own style and not simply to be, you know, imitative. And so I think any good art teacher would support the development of individual style. And this is a different sort of thing, but I think similarly, I want Alana or Ethan or whomever to develop their own intellectual style and worldview. And I think at some point, part of it is I just have become fascinated with how people think and how, in some ways, rather than The fact is people disagree. People have disagreed forever. They'll disagree forever. Disagreement is real. I don't fancy dominating the world with my ideas. I just don't think it's going to happen. And that's okay. So I think there's a way in which we just all need to give up on intellectual imperialism, as it were. And, you know, there are issues where we don't want things that we believe will cause harm to ourselves or others. And there's another realm for doing that. But certainly as an educator, I want to help them give birth to their own consistent and coherent worldview. Even if, if there are occasions I'll go, I've had teenagers argue that it's okay, say, to kill people or to allow others to kill people. And this is where I, if necessary, I will tell them that I think that's wrong. I prefer to have a group where 9 times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100, if a teenager takes a morally outrageous position— and sometimes teenagers, as part of being a teenager, they like to be provocative and outrageous and so forth and test ideas. It's also, I think, legitimately useful to test ideas.

What if we—

nihilism, I'm very much against nihilism, but I think it may be useful for a teenager to go to the edge of nihilism and think about it a little bit. And think through the implications. And one of the implications is if you're an honest nihilist, most people will have a very negative reaction to your view. So I guess I would rather have somebody, if they're going to be a nihilist, be an honest nihilist, than to have students be kind of carelessly relativistic, kind of fading into nihilism, which is, I think, de facto where most teens are, simply because they never have an opportunity to develop their ideas. And so they don't— they never have the either opportunity or even the obligation. And I would say we have an obligation to— if we really believe all morality is relative, it's a scary place to go. But I think, you know, those who want to develop that should develop that. So I've kind of gone beyond your question of how to be sympathetic, but one of the reasons I wanted to is because, say, a nihilist who says it should be okay to kill people, that that's a hard thing to be sympathetic to. But instead of just shutting it down, my inclination is to, okay, what are the implications? And I guess I have enough confidence in the process of freedom of thought and the interchange of ideas that somebody who is, say, an honest nihilist will experience significant feedback. And then if they're going to go there, well, let's watch this person. It makes sense.

Yeah, I think it does make sense, especially your emphasis on process, because I think I agree that that's the, that, that's the key to this. If a person is gonna, is gonna develop their, their, their worldview and change their mind possibly later, uh, then they have to know what they think before they change their mind, right? And that is not something that you should take for granted, that someone knows what they think. In many cases, people don't know what they think until they're forced to lay it out. So it's an emphasis on process that in order for this person to continue their process of making sense of the world, I'm going to help them first discover what they think. And then maybe if there's— if we've achieved some ground on that, there's a process so we can talk about persuasion and changing minds and developing, etc.

No, absolutely. And we kind of need to wrap up, but kind of one more point on the nihilism piece, which is far from where we started, but I think an important point. I actually think that teenagers who really thought about nihilism are more apt to have serious moral convictions than teenagers who have not thought about nihilism. That is, going back to your process point, the process of considering really seriously a world without any kind of moral perspective I think shocks even most teens into, well, no, there are things, there are moral boundaries. And, you know, they can differ on what those are. But until, you know, one of my pet peeves is pervasive relativism in our culture as the norm. I would say our educational culture indoctrinates that as the norm. So I think in that particular case, yeah, let's see, do you have moral convictions or not? And it's a process. It can take months or years before they realize, no, I'll put a stop right there. Now we cannot go there. So super deep topic that we'll return to again in the future. But to keep these reasonable time, I want to thank you again, Francisco. And actually till this afternoon on another note, we'll see you.

Well, see you soon.