The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus by Robin Meyers
Author:Robin Meyers [Meyers, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Religion, Christian Life
ISBN: 9781118061596
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Published: 2012-01-12T07:22:21+00:00
The Fertility of Trust
In the late 1960s, a controversial educational study took place called the Oak School experiment. It figured prominently in an equally controversial book, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. I read that book in college as part of my preparation to become a high school English teacher, before taking a different path. At the time I remember thinking that the Pygmalion phenomenon, as it is called, was no big deal, just another social scientific proof for what common sense can deliver. Looking back, I realize that those findings were as remarkable as they were unsettling for one simple reason: truth doesn’t just enlighten us; it obligates us.
In this famous experiment, teachers were led to believe that certain students (who in fact were selected at random) were exceptional. They were likely to show signs of a spurt in intellectual growth and development. They were “tagged,” if you will, so that when the teacher looked at those students, she saw “great potential.” At the end of the year, the students so identified showed significantly greater gains in intellectual development than did those in the “control group” (those who had not been identified as exceptional). In some cases, the gain in IQ was twice as high as among those not identified as gifted. 6 In short, the teacher’s belief in the exceptional capacity of some students became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became a form of radically embodied trust.
One can only imagine what happened throughout the year. The exceptional students must have been called on more often and given more challenging tasks to do; in classroom exercises and discussions, they felt those various forms of validation that a teacher telegraphs to a “favorite student.” This is how it works. When the hard questions are asked and no answer is forthcoming, teachers have a fallback plan—a default setting that involves a handful of the best students. Those students can be trusted to “get it,” and over time they begin to thrive on that expectation. Meanwhile, the other students “get it” (that they don’t get it) too. We quickly learn that we are all located somewhere in the great hierarchy, ranked in so many ways by the messages we receive from a world of authority figures.
The most interesting response to this experiment, however, was the resistance to it by some in the educational establishment. Perhaps there was (and is) something truly frightening about realizing that we are all constantly creating one another. By the choice of a single word, by a glance, by finding one lost face in the crowd and recognizing it, by saying something that is encouraging, we project our evaluations of the worthiness (or lack thereof) on every human being we come into contact with. Those projections have real results, from crippling to empowering. As it turns out, this was not just another educational experiment with results to be read at a conference and discussed in break-out groups. Instead what was discovered constituted an uncomfortable but profound moral imperative.
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