Helping America’s Children Understand What “Two Sides to a Story” Really Means
By Kent Pekel, Ed.D., Search Institute President and CEO
At a press conference on Tuesday (8/15/17), the President of the United States said for the second time that “both sides” were to blame for the violent events that occurred at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend. He argued that there were “two sides to a story” that ended in one woman’s death and injuries to many others.
As I listened to the President’s remarks, I thought back to the years I spent as a high school social studies teacher at the start of my career in education and youth development. When I entered South Boston High School for the first time as a student teacher, twenty-five years ago this fall, one of my stated objectives was to help young people understand that, to quote the President, “there are two sides to every story.” I tried to do that by helping my students at Southie (as that school is called in Boston and elsewhere) understand both sides of the battle that had made their school ground zero in the national war over school busing two decades earlier.
The following fall, when I started teaching global studies at a high school in Minnesota, I worked even harder to help my students understand both sides of the stories we studied. One of my favorite ways to do that was to ask students to role play people who had differing perspectives on what should be done at critical moments in history and current events. I created fairly elaborate scenarios within which students studied and pretended to be people who disagreed on issues of war and peace, race and culture, poverty and affluence, environmental protection and economic growth, and other big issues of the past and present.
The role plays I created were effective ways to help students learn about and become interested in the subjects we were studying. As a new teacher, I thought that was a solid achievement because it got a wide range of students actively engaged in reading history and watching current events.
I also learned, however, that the classroom role plays I worked so hard to construct often devolved into shouting matches or ended in stalemates.
In some cases, those stalemates were appropriate because there were no clear or quick solutions to the problems we were trying to solve. In other cases, however, the stalemates were evidence that I had not adequately enabled my students to tell right from wrong.
That happened most memorably when my class was studying apartheid in South Africa. I asked students to participate in a role play that asked decision makers to decide if the South African government should free Nelson Mandela from jail. I will never forget how the group of students charged with arguing the position of the South African government became so convinced that Nelson Mandela should stay in jail that they seemed to forget that our role play was a historical one and Mandela had actually been freed four years earlier and had just become the president of the nation that had imprisoned him for decades (which was why I was teaching the role play in the first place).
Over time, I learned that the role plays I taught as a new teacher were creating false equivalence in situations where none existed. In an effort to deepen my students’ understanding of the complexity of the issues we were studying, I was unintentionally setting up situations in which students were reaching stalemates in what they saw as battles between right and right when they should have been presented with opportunities to choose between right and wrong.
I tried to fix this design flaw in the role plays I taught in a number of ways, from asking each of the opposing sides to put themselves in the shoes of their opponents (i.e. to practice empathy) to creating a separate group of students who would serve as observers and final judges of the debates being role played. Those efforts mitigated but did not resolve the false equivalencies I was unintentionally teaching.
This discussion of false equivalencies brings me back, of course, to President Trump’s statements today and in recent days. The false equivalence he found between people who proactively planned a rally for racism in Charlottesville and people who showed up in that city to resist their subjugation and the subjugation of others is wrong first because it lets the people who incited and inflicted violence off the hook and suggests that the victims of that violence are to blame for the injustice they experienced.
The President’s assertion of equivalence in Charlottesville is also wrong because it suggests to young people that nothing is ever objectively right or wrong. It suggests that as long as some people embrace an idea, that idea is valid and must be respected.
As someone who has studied and taught history, it is amazing to me that we are discussing and debating these questions in 2017. And yet, as someone who has studied and taught history, I should not be surprised about that at all.
History will repeat itself unless and until we choose to break from the path that history seems destined to repeat. The first and the best thing we can do to depart from that presumed path is to teach our children to understand all sides of a story while also recognizing that one side can be fundamentally (if not entirely) right and one side can be equally (if not entirely) wrong.
In recent days the President of the United States has deeply confused right and wrong, and I hope that every parent, educator, and youth worker who cares about kids will help them understand and move beyond the President’s false equivalence to develop the capacity to recognize right from wrong in the world in which they will live their lives.
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