Cum Laude Address Deliberation

By Lauren Jared, History Instructor

Good morning! I am happy and honored to be with you today, as we celebrate your many achievements and thoughtful contributions to our Cate community.

I have spent almost my entire professional life here at Cate. In that time, I have endeavored to teach skills that I find essential to creating a love of learning but also a meaningful life.

Inquiry is such a great place to start: What do I notice? What do I wonder about what I notice? What might it all mean?

Analyzing for PIES (Political, Intellectual, Economic, Social) is useful for all sorts of things. With any culture we encounter, whether past or present, we can examine its political leadership, laws, and government; its intellectual outlook and values; its economic status and occupations; and its social structures that can bring folks together or divide them.

Then there’s TEAC (Topic, Evidence, Analysis, Conclusion), of course, a great way to develop and organize our thinking and learning, and to support our oral or written arguments with compelling evidence and analysis.

But my favorite approach to learning, an approach I’ve long worked to teach and refine is deliberation. Not debate. But deliberation. With debate, as you’ll recall, the purpose is to take a side, defend it, and win the argument. This can be an important skill. At its best it encourages us to examine our arguments and to understand that there are two sides to every story. But I believe that debate’s emphasis on winning can often become a defensive process, one that leads to entrenched thinking and an unwillingness to change one’s mind or to consider what may in fact be better alternatives.

One of the things I love about deliberation is that it gives us a way to explore issues that are multidimensional and complex – as is much of life – whether these be historical, contemporary, or personal issues. Deliberation provides opportunities to test our assumptions, to rethink and deepen our ideas, to become curious about what we think, and to change our minds for the better. In these ways, everyone can win.

Do you remember your earliest deliberations in Humanities? In the Athens unit, our deliberations centered on two different questions: Should the Melians ally with Athens or fight? And, was Antigone, Socrates, or Snowden the hero? As 9th graders, you were often so we become curious to discover not just what we think but also what others think, what they believe, and why. Even in our earliest Humanities deliberations, some of you became really good at reading the room to elicit the views of those who had not yet joined in the discussion, inviting them to enter the conversation to offer their additional perspectives, and making them feel validated and valuable. thoughtful in your responses, weighing definitions, evidence and arguments, as well as your own assumptions. By grappling with your classmates’ ideas and exploring the complexities of the evidence more deeply, we all built a greater knowledge and understanding of historical developments, their significance, their relevance, and even their impact on our own personal views.

This interpersonal, collaborative aspect of deliberation is what makes it powerful. But we have to practice our deliberation skills – and our deliberative stance. Those of you who were in my Humanities class may recall that our very first deliberation devolved into a shouting match. That was the one in which we asked ourselves which civic responsibility was most important. It can be hard to move from a defensive position to a more open one in which we want to learn just as much about other people’s opinions as we desire to promote our own.

Another thing I love about deliberation is that it is a collaborative process. In deliberating issues, we learn not to defend at all costs, but rather to share and develop our ideas, to ask other people questions with a sincere desire to understand their thoughts and feelings. We reach out to others to include them in the conversation. When we engage honestly and openly in deliberation,

There is mounting empirical and psychological evidence to suggest that when we stridently defend our own position we alienate others, blocking them from changing their minds, especially when they find their opponents shouting down their views. Jean Guerrero’s column in this week’s Los Angeles Times, argues that when people feel verbally attacked, they also feel victimized and persecuted. They defend themselves by doubling down on their own position. From our perspective such a response makes no sense – especially when we believe our evidence is unassailable. In the end, the emotional component of the experience holds greater sway than the facts. Guerrero concludes that we can “reinforce [our opponents’] belief by ridiculing it, or [we] can defuse it with careful words rooted in compassion.”

When done well, deliberation can help build humility and empathy through compassion for each other. It can help build bridges, even with those whose ideas are diametrically opposed to ours. It can even change minds. A few years ago, I read Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow, which chronicles how Dan Black left behind his extreme right-wing ideology. His journey was a slow one, involving his friends’ companionship, as well as their patient deliberations of evidence with him over the course of two years in college. In changing his mind, Dan Black came not only to reject the ideology shared by all of his family and childhood friends but also to publicly disavow it.

But what about changing our own minds? Do you remember how our Humanities deliberations ended? Often we asked you to respond to the writing prompt: “I did think…. Now I think…” As 9th graders many of you remained firmly in favor of the position you’d prepared. After all, you’d invested a whole homework session in developing that position. Yet some of you acknowledged changes in your thinking – or you even changed your mind. Prior to the deliberation most of you thought the Melians were fools to fight against the mighty Athenians. But after deliberating, you appreciated why the Melians’ sense of honor and pride impelled them to defend themselves against Athenian invasion and subjugation.

Perhaps you at first thought Edward Snowden was the hero because you could relate to his modern-day concerns with internet privacy. But after deliberating, you may have come away leaning more toward Antigone because of her stance as a young woman against the prevailing powers of patriarchy, or toward Socrates because of his profound, centuries’ long impact on civil disobedience.

As 9th graders, your learning at Cate was in its earliest stages. So even with deliberation, your willingness to change your mind was much more limited –as were the conclusions you reached. Since then you’ve deliberated weightier matters, such as the ins-and outs of Supreme Court rulings, the relationship between feminism and intersectionality, the ancient wisdom of the world’s religions, and so many more. I invite you to consider how much more context you have now built from your classroom learning, your service in this community, and your growing care and compassion for each other and the world around you – a larger context which allows you to reach conclusions that are all the more sound and defensible.

Does that mean you no longer need to change your mind and can now simply defend what you have come to know and believe? In some ways, I think, yes. Your current views are certainly wellinformed, well-warranted, and hard won based on your extensive learning and experience to date. I truly hope and expect that each of you knows much more about who you are and what you stand for. Such self-understanding is essential to living a meaningful, productive, and fulfilling life.

But that self-understanding is not yet complete. In Ken Burns’ documentary on Vietnam, he tells the story of the controversial design of the Vietnam

Memorial. One woman recalls her days as an activist war protester. In the 1960s she was so certain in her views, chanting “horrible things” to returning vets, calling them “baby-killers and worse.” But now at this much later point in her life, having visited the memorial many times, she reports feeling “deeply grieved.” All she can say is that she was young back then –just like the soldiers themselves – and in thinking about them now, she can only tearfully repeat, “I am so sorry.”

So I’d like to make a pitch for the ongoing value of deliberation. As you head off toward college and your life’s journey into adulthood, as you continue to learn, grow, and change, I hope you will continue to practice and strengthen your deliberation skills. Your openness to changing your mind can foster your academic growth in college, as well as your lifelong curiosity and learning. Your willingness to listen to others, without insisting they agree with you, can help nurture your relationships with others, while allowing you to become even more compassionate individuals and community members. Having traveled at least some of this Cate journey with you, I have faith in your capacity to live out these generous principles of deliberation. When we meet again, I hope we can talk about all of the additional ways in which you might answer the prompt: I did think… now I think.

More immediately, though, I wish you much joy, deep satisfaction, and a whole lot of fun as you move through the remainder of this graduation weekend and all that it brings.

Thank you.