Answer-oriented education as a barrier to intellectual humility
I have argued that the education system is answer-oriented.What, if any, effect does this have on students' intellectual character and, in particular, on their willingness and ability to be intellectually humble? I argue that the answer-oriented education system presents a barrier to intellectual humility.
More specifically, it prevents students from practising and refining a key form of intellectual humility, namely questioning. The discussion in Section 37.3 has already gone some way towards establishing this. We have seen that educational theory and practice consistently places students in the position of answerers, as opposed to questioners. Responding to this, students quickly adopt the role of answerers in the classroom and learn to practice and refine their answering, as opposed to questioning skills. As a result, students are observed to ask very few questions. The answer-oriented education system is a barrier to student questioning.In order to show that answer-oriented education presents a barrier to intellectual humility, however, I need to establish the sense in which student questioning functions as a form of intellectual humility. By ‘form' of intellectual humility I mean that student questioning is one way in which intellectual humility is expressed. This can also be said of other modes of expression, such as assertions, actions, and answers. All of these can be expressions, or forms, of intellectual humility. Moreover, none of these, including questions, are necessary for intellectual humility nor will they always be intellectually humble. Questions can be arrogant or servile, for example. Nonetheless, I argue that in the context of an answer-oriented (or perhaps more precisely, answer-dominated) education system, student answers operate as a barrier to intellectual humility, while student questions can function as a powerful expression of intellectual humility.
As such, student questions represent a potentially rich pedagogical resource for cultivating students' willingness and ability to be intellectually humble.37.4.1 Questioning and intellectual humility
A significant body of research on the nature and value of intellectual humility has emerged in recent years, particularly within virtue epistemology (Roberts and Wood 2007; Hazlett 2012; Kidd 2015;Whitcomb et al. 2017). Scales for measuring and assessing intellectual humility have been developed in conjunction with this literature (Alfano et al. 2017; Haggard et al. 2018). One of the most prominent recent accounts of intellectual humility is the Limits-Owning account developed by Dennis Whitcomb et al. (2017), along with the associated Limits-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale, developed by Haggard et al. (2018). On this account, intellectual humility “consists in proper attentiveness to, and owning of, one's intellectual limitations” (2017, p.520).This characterisation of intellectual humility offers a particularly clear insight into the relationship between intellectual humility and questioning.
Firstly, questions often, if not typically, represent a gap in the questioner’s knowledge or information; their ignorance about a certain thing. Whether that’s the price of milk, the speed of light, or who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Thus, in order to ask a question based on one’s ignorance, one must first notice that one is lacking the information that one needs or wants; that one is indeed ignorant about this or that. If we think of ignorance, at least in some more or less descriptive sense, as an intellectual limitation, the questioner, much like the intellectually humble person, exhibits “a disposition to be aware (even if just implicitly) of [her] limitations” (2017, p.516).As such, questioning frequently involves the questioner in a key aspect of intellectual humility: attentiveness to intellectual limitations.
Secondly, questioning often, if not typically, involves an interpersonal interaction.
By asking a question, the questioner exposes her ignorance to others. Just as “in owning her intellectual limitations, the person with IH is disposed to admit them to others, and more generally, to act as the context demands” (2017, pp.517—518), so too the questioner publicly admits to and acts upon her ignorance. Indeed, arguably the act of asking a question neatly captures the sense in which a person ‘owns’ her intellectual limitations, according to the Whitcomb et al. account. One might nod in agreement when a colleague asserts that ‘the author of Huckleberry Finn’ was an excellent writer but an unfortunate entrepreneur. Or one might ask ‘who was the author of Huckleberry Finn’. Acknowledging privately to oneself that one doesn’t know who the author of Huckleberry Finn is will not suffice for intellectual humility on the Limits-Owning account. Rather, it is by asking the question, as in the second instance, that one owns one’s ignorance and so exercises intellectual humility. As such, questioning frequently involves the questioner in a second key aspect of intellectual humility: owning her intellectual limitations.The questioner both attends to and owns her intellectual limitations by identifying a gap in her knowledge and attempting to fill it. She can be counted among the “people who easily accept or expose their ignorance rather than deny or cover it up” (2017, p.510).There is a close alignment between questioning and intellectual humility.5
37.4.2 Student questions as a form of intellectual humility
A close conceptual alignment between questioning and intellectual humility is significant, but not sufficient for my central claim. The context of a question is also central to understanding whether and in what sense it expresses intellectual humility. Whether a question is intellectually humble depends, at least in part, on the pre-existing power relations in operation in the context in which it is asked. In any number of situations where there exists a real or perceived expectation that one already does know this or that, exposing the fact that one does not, by asking a question, can be considered an expression of intellectual humility.
This is especially so when one is operating under a system that values knowing things highly. One in which knowledge is power. The answer-oriented education system is a system like this; one in which knowledge is power. My claim, therefore, is that the context in which students are placed is one in which the pre-existing power relations mean that student questions can and often do express intellectual humility. At the same time, however, these power relations — manifested in the answer-orientation of the education system — act as a barrier to student questioning, and so to intellectual humility.Indeed, the relationship between questioning and intellectual humility is, I think, particularly clear in the classroom. Rightly or wrongly, students often feel under pressure to have the ‘right answers’ at their immediate disposal, and can be especially unwilling to expose the fact that they do not know or understand something to their teachers or peers.This is, at least in part, a result of the expectations placed on students in their position as answerers and their ensuing lack of familiarity with the process of asking questions. One teacher expressed this well in an online discussion forum which I took part in, as part of a Harvard School of Education course aimed at helping teachers to teach student questioning:
I think there can be a pride element, almost, that prevents us from asking Qs; some of my 6th graders said in their reflections that they were initially afraid to disclose some Qs for fear of the Qs being weak in some way with the result that this could reflect something not good about themselves.
(Rich Pierog, Technology and Design teacher, Daegu International School, South Korea)
As this teacher puts it, the students in his class were ‘afraid’ of asking questions for fear of ‘being weak'. If a student is afraid that asking a question will expose her as weak — or, in the LimitsOwning vernacular, expose her limitations — and she asks it anyway, I think that it is correct to say that the student expresses intellectual humility (as well as a not-insignificant degree of intellectual courage).When students are systematically placed in the position of answerers, however, they are denied such rich opportunities to expose, and become comfortable with exposing, their limitations in this way. As such, students are denied the opportunity to practice and refine intellectual humility. The answer-oriented education system is a barrier to intellectual humility in the classroom.
37.5