Kids and Socrates

This was a great day.

So, two days after my free classroom set of Ayn Rand’s Anthem showed up in the mail, I’ve ventured into the text, and tried to bridge the major themes of the novel to the ideas of community and individuality from the poems we recently analyzed. When the kids came into the classroom they saw that I’d scrawled the phrase SOCRATIC CIRCLE on the board.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” they asked as the class started.

I’m glad you asked, I said, and jumped straight into the big ideas we’ll cover in the coming weeks and months.

We just finished analyzing two poems. We read and wrote about community and values with Gabriela Mistral’s “Fear,” and we discussed the need for individuality and how it creates personal strength with Julio Noboa’s “Identity.”

Coming up, we’ll read this novel called Anthem where a group of people live within a strong community with a strong sense of order, but the people of the community have no identities — they’re all the same.

I want to discuss today your idea of community, and what type of society we live in, and how those things shape our values.

“Why?”

Because once we finish this novel, we’ll start reading the play, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and the people in that story lived in a specific type of community. And it was a specific type of community that brought those people to that place.

I know your World History teacher has you researching another community — the one in Darfur…

“Oh, man! That stuff is messed up!”

Yes it is. Is that community, the one in Darfur, the type of community you’d like to live in?

“No way!”

Is that one you’d like to be in charge of?

“No way!”

Is it a type of community that needs to change?

“Hell yeah!”

Then let’s start talking about our place in society. Let’s start talking about the values of a society, and how those values change. Let’s talk about what makes for a good society, and what makes for a bad one. You’ll need just one sheet of paper today.

This lesson plan grew from the idea in the teaching guide supplied by the Ayn Rand Institute. The final pages of the guide suggest teaching relevant philosophical concepts and for using the Socratic method to elicit student ideas about the key philosophies found in the book. One page outlines these philosophies and correlates those ideas to quotes taken directly from the text of Anthem. Today we focused on Altruism and Conformity, and what the kids brought up in class was unbelievable.

I ran them through the idea of a Socratic Circle, how it operates, and what we should get out of it. We talked about taking turns in speaking, and sharing ideas. We talked about not putting people down and not calling people stupid, but to take those ideas we find faulty and work them into something more appealing.

A few of the kids were nodding off. A few kids started writing notes. A few kids whispered to each other as I ran them through the first few slides of the powerpoint I created specifically for today’s discussion. But they didn’t stay quiet long.

Slide One

The students didn’t have much to say about this. A few did connect the fact that Easter Philosophies are different.

Slide Two

The students asked what “welfare of their souls” meant, and we discussed Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, and that the greatest personal welfare comes from meeting every esteem level — that thinkers are likely meeting that highest, “self-actualization” level.

Slide Three

Here the students complained about how much they hate it when teachers answer questions qith questions.

For example: “How am I supposed to write this paper?”
I don’t know. How do you think you should write it?

Slide Four

All Iexplained here was that I wanted them to be polite and patient during the discussion. That when one person speaks, everyone else should listen. If you want to speak next, wait your turn. But since this was our first venture into the seminar, I had the students raise their hands, and I led the conversation from one student to another.

Slide Five

No? All right then. Here’s the first text we’ll discuss….

Slide Six

This is taken from page 18 of Anthem.

The students worked their way through this one and finally came up with a better, easier way to say it: “If you don’t serve a purpose, you’re not needed.” Most agreed with this idea, and they backed it up by saying that if you’re not willing to do things for others, then you should be around them; people don’t want to hang with people who are worthless.

Slide Seven

We moved directly to the whole idea behind the quote from the text — Altruism. The students had a field day with this one, talking about how it’s simply impossible to be completely altruistic. That no one does EVERYTHING for others. Every person has some personal gratification in mind, thus making altruism a problematic concept — even when you do things for benefit others, you’re probably doing it for the happiness you achieve by doing it.

We discussed two forms of our city wherein the people either went their own ways, or pulled inward to help others within the city. Neither seemd very feasible to the students and they answered the following question…

Slide Eight

…by saying: “Our society is a mix of both evil and good. We help each other, but we’re also very worried about our own desires.”

Slide Nine

the kids hated this idea. Right off the bat, they argued: “This is just wrong.” “It’s wrong” “It’s wrong to think that it’s bad to be different.” “If we’re not different, then we aren’t ourselves.” “If people weren’t differen’t, life would be boring.” “If we weren’t different, we wouldn’t really do anything. We’d just do what everyone else did.”

They did talk about the difference between similarity in beliefs and ideals, but the overall consensus was that difference is what makes us special.

Slide Ten

Here they thought a little deeper, explaining that “We can alll work toward the same goal without being the same people.”

Slide Eleven

And here they connected conformity and altruism:
“You can be completely altruistic, but that makes you completely conformist.”

“But if you’re all conformist, you’re worried about yourself, which makes you selfish, and that’s the root of all evil.”

“But a society can’t be completely evil, can it?”

“And if it is, then the person who says they’re all evil is an outsider.”

“And the outsider, who does nothing for the group, becomes a burden, and the burden needs to be taken off the earth.”

The kids ultimately decided that both ideas suck because they don’t allow for any grey area — they want a society where choice is allowed, where differences are respected, where people are allowed to speak their own mind and believe what they want to believe, and who are respected for being individuals while also being part of alarger group.

They decided that our society is a mixture of altruism and conformity and the ideals of both are interchangable and changing. Ebb and Flow.

Today was a phenominal day in the classroom, and this discussion did something for my classroom that hasn’t happened even once this year — it had every kid raising his/her hand. Even the quiet ones. Even the ones that always get made fun of for talking in class. Even the kids who hate each other spoke to each other in a kind way. The “smart kids” asked questions from the “dumb kids.” The “popular kids” agreed with “the loners.” The group worked together a coherent discussion that was neither offensive nor class-based, and they did it under the Socratic method.

Christian said that Anthem would bring the students’ ideas and voices roaring through the classroom, but I didn’t expect it would do so much before we even opened the book.

Slide Twelve

Imagine, then, the reponse from the students when I posed the following question — their grade for the day (totally stolen from graycie in the comments section of this post):

Slide Thirteen

Here’s one response:
I believe what my parents believe because they raised me with their beliefs. But when they did that they took away part of who I am, because, how can I be me when I think the same things as other people only cause they told me to think them?

High fives all around.