Tags
America, American History, Cognitive Bias, Education, History, Myth, Myth-Busting, Note-taking, Puritans, Study-Habits, teaching
I still remember my first real object-lesson in teaching. I had just started as a teaching assistant and they had me working in a class on early American History. The professor spent a good deal of time on the Puritan colonists that semester. By “spent a good deal of time on” I mean he railed on about this particular subject for hours while we slowly fell behind the syllabus, …which was fine with me actually, but quite a few students balked at this approach.
The professor did his best to debunk one common misconception about the Puritans; the notion that they came to America for religious liberty. In his view, it would have been more fair to describe the Puritans as coming to America because their efforts to oppress others had been thwarted in England and Holland. He could go on in great detail about various things they did which were wholly inconsistent with the notion of religious freedom. The very idea was as foreign to them as it was to any of their supposed oppressors.
This message found its way into several lectures that semester. The textbook was a little less emphatic on the subject, but it certainly did nothing to undermine the message my Professor had been working so hard to get across. Whenever I had a chance to talk to the students I was right on the message. Hell I loved that argument, and I was happy to have a go at it whenever I got a chance. With three separate sources providing re-enforcement for the same message, I was pretty confident that it would get through. If the students in that course had learned nothing else, surely I thought they would have learned that the Puritans did not really come to America seeking anything we would recognize as religious liberty.
So, you can imagine my surprise when well over half the class turned in midterm exams with essays going on at length about how the Puritans had come here to find religious liberty and establish democracy! I actually had to ask the instructor to go over the subject one more time, just for me, because I was convinced I must have misunderstood something. But no, his take on the subject was exactly as I had remembered it.
I looked for signs of conscious disagreement. Were these students showing spine? Could they be fighting back (I hoped)? No. I didn’t see that either; no-one fielded a counter to the specific points made in class. Not one essay fielded any new ideas or information. They were simply repeating the same platitudes the teacher had been at pains to refute as if they had no reason to suspect anything was wrong with those notions. Near as I could tell, these students were telling a story they simply took for granted, a story the truth of which they had no call to question at ll. It wasn’t absenteeism either; many of those hitting this theme had been present virtually every day of class. Judging by the essays, only a handful of the seventy or so students in that class had picked up on the actual lesson. Most were completely unaware that they were telling us the exact opposite of what we had been telling them for over a month.
Why?
It was a complete mystery to me, but I red-inked the Hell out of the tests, assigned grades with a touch of mercy, and we both set about explaining the subject one more time.
Over the next few weeks I came up with a theory. I never had a chance to test this explanation, but it remains my guess as to how the whole thing happened. I watched carefully to see how the students were taking notes, and in most cases the pattern was pretty clear. When the instructor announced the general topic for a stretch of his lectures, the students I could see wrote down down that topic and then sat back to listen to what he had to say about it (or perhaps to drift off to think of something else while appearing as though they were listening). As each each major sub-theme came down, they would write down a single word or phrase underneath the major topic and continue listening. The end-result was something that looked a lot like the outline for a speech or paper. So, when it came time to study for the midterm, a lot of the notebooks must have ended up with a section that looked something like this:
Puritans
– Religious Freedom
– Democracy
Assuming I am right about the note-taking, I can just see the students looking down at their notes when it came time to study for that exam and seeing a simple list of topics. Lacking any of the details from the actual lecture, the students must have simply filled in the gaps with their own preconceptions about the topic, preconceptions that had been re-enforced by years of K-12 lessons and countless pop-cultural references.
All the instructor had managed for all his railing against the notion was to underscore the importance of the very message he had set out to refute. All I had done was to help him underscore that very message.
I try keep this in mind whenever I feel like indulging in a spat of myth-busting.
northierthanthou 
Been reading a bit about witch-trials lately (Salem and others). The Puritans were a fear-mongering and superstitious people; it’s an not an attitude conducive either to democracy or religious freedom. There was a definite relationship between the prevalence of Calvinism/Puritanism and witch-hunting. And a lot of examples of only observing what meets your preconceived notions, which I think is the point you are driving at (one of them, anyway).
Re. the lecturing issue — having gone to school in the good old days before powerpoint, I remember that it was often challenging to listen at the same time you were writing down what the prof. said, so I have some sympathy for being in the moment and just listening. But of course, you have to retain what you heard.
There was a note taking service (Blue Light, I think they were called) at Cal when I was there; most profs hated it because they felt that students would just buy the notes in lieu of going to the lecture. I had one terrific prof who embraced them — he told us to sit and listen without notetaking, and then buy the notes from Blue Light afterwards. Worked like a charm — if you read the notes afterwards….
Ah, our wonderful Listening Skills!!
And aided by years of information hammered into our skulls, what could one expect?
Sadly, regurgitation or the semblance of it! LOL
It would have been much more exciting had they been standing up and defending all those years of Puritan History 😉
Your professor was right, of course. Your story is a good example of the difficulty of changing well-established notions. I suspect that one might apply the lesson to the upcoming national election and related topics.
Great points! True learning occurs with integration – otherwise it just stays in short term memory until after the exam!!! We are complex!
Thaaaank you! God, I’ve been thinking this for years, how the Puritans established a fundamentalist theocracy in England and then were ousted, hence why they fled to the Americas. It was all about escaping retribution for their many years of religious-fueled intolerance. Hence why it’s always bothered me when people say “our ancestors came here for religious freedom”. If by freedom you mean the right to establish a Taliban-style theocracy over others, then sure.
That note-taking technique was how I listened and studied in Australia for exams too. I guess it is the same the world over.
One thing I might add is that back in the the late 1960s when I was in High School, we had to learn and accept exactly what the teacher taught. There was no freedom to express your own opinion. Once, just once, I dared to put up my hand and disagree with the teacher’s point. I said something like……my English teacher was merely expressing his own opinion on the subject – that didn’t mean than his opinion was right (or wrong). I received a bad written report from that teacher that semester.
I learned my lesson. Never disagree with a teacher in class. Just shut up and listen.
I left high school not only with high honours in every subject (except science for which I had little interest), but I skipped the last year of high school and entered college on a scholarship that ranked me far above the other college students who had done the last year of high school.
I also had to keep my opinions to myself most of my working life (unless I had the good fortune to have a boss who was open to the possibilities when I expressed an idea ‘outside the square’).
Now in retirement, I have the freedom to be Me and say exactly what I like, when I like. I know this reply is slightly off topic. Just wanted to say my 2 cents worth. It took 56 years for me to find my own voice – shame about that.
It took 56 years for me to become what I might have been.
yep – propaganda is a powerful thing. Well done to the professor for trying to bring the truth to light, shame it fell on deaf ears…
But, but… David Barton, Glenn Beck, Fox News, the Tea Party, Michelle Bachmann… Was this one of those bearded college professors who needed to be gassed that George Wallace warned us about?
I clearly remember (it was just like yesterday) that Anne Hutchinson was a troublemaker who, along with John Cotton, John Wheelwright, and Henry Vane, started the Antinomian Heresy, claiming that God’s salvation comes from the covenant of grace rather than the covenant of works, as God unmistakably tells us. She spread her apostasy and sedition to other women in the colony, so what other choice was there other than to try her for two days, quoting scripture and received wisdom so effectively that Hutchinson finally had to claim divine revelation, which as everyone knows, is impossible for a heretic. She was banned from Massachusetts Bay, but she was held in gaol until the Church could try her too. She got off with excommunication, but she certainly deserved worse. She had to hire a moving van to take her on a six-day journey through the snow to Rhode Island colony. (Moving vans weren’t very fast back then.)
Lest you think this was harsh, Henry Vane returned to England and became a favorite of Oliver Cromwell, becoming Treasurer of the Royal Navy, a leader in Parliament, and Council of State — until he opened his mouth. Following the monarchy’s restoration, Vane was hanged, as well he should have been just for his heresy alone. This undeniably independently demonstrates that it was the disagreeable nature of Anne Hutchinson rather than any lack of freedom of religion that led to her demise.
Then the freedom deniers point to the cases of Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson, Mary Dyer, and William Leddra who were hanged by the neck until dead as examples of religious intolerance. But consider this — they were all Quakers and every bit as seditious as Anne Hutchinson. What would happen if poisonous beliefs like these were allowed to spread? Isn’t this the very reason we have the Sedition Act of 1918 to protect us? And to be fair, weren’t several other convictions commuted from hanging to merely being whipped and beaten? I mean — let’s be fair about this. Can you really continue to deny that complete freedom of religion was what was practiced in Massachusetts Bay Colony?
To add to the myth of religious intolerance, four years after Mary Dyer’s legitimate hanging (is that anything like “legitimate rape”) King Charles II revoked the Massachusetts charter and sent a royal governor, in part, using Dyer’s hanging as an excuse. To add insult to injury, Parliament passed the Toleration Act of 1689, heaping further credence to the idea of religious intolerance.
There. I’m glad we straightened that out. Thanks for giving me the chance to vie for supplanting David Barton as the Official Revisionist of U.S. History.. Maybe this will give me an opportunity to teach at the prestigious Glenn Beck University, or failing that, maybe Liberty University.
Thanks for a thought-provoking article.
Interesting analysis of how people don’t listen! I could never understand why this “religious liberty” explanation is so pervasive unless it had been explicitly taught, but you’ve provided an alternative reason.
The Puritans coming to America is one the founding myths everyone wants to believe, so politicians can repeat the lie without fear of being caught out. Anyone who disagrees obviously hates America.
Alas, their fundamentalist views are still permeating the culture….and gaining ground I fear.
*anna
Reblogged this on The Last Of The Millenniums and commented:
We ‘hear’ what we want to hear and all too often that is a preconceived notion.
Great post!
Great post. It’s incredibly hard to teach something old as if it were new and next to impossible to unteach something that’s been ground into every student’s head since elementary school. It’s like with anything, when they’re little you tell them only what a 6-year-old can understand, no more, no less. When they’re 12 you tell them a little more in a little more detail, but the idea is the same – ‘no more, no less’. And so on and so on. However once you get to the point where you have to explain that the world isn’t just made up of good guys and bad guys and how there’s a whole world in between, that’s when their little minds open up to possibilities they didn’t know possible.
How could the good guys do bad things and vice versa? It’s hard to explain this to kids, to anyone really. Well by the time they get to college-age they’re a mess. They’ve been taught all these years to only know certain limits of certain regulated facts. They were never taught to ask why. I guess they didn’t know they could ask. Maybe they did and the teachers didn’t know. Maybe the teachers tried and got in trouble for teaching outside of the state approved curricula. But good colleges continue to teach not only the whats, but the whys and the wherefores, too. And good teachers will see that these kids who’ve been burned out with 12 years of constant schooling only to find out everything they were taught previously was glossed over and/or fictionalized. It’s a hard pill to swallow. It took 12+ years to brainwash them, but with good teachers there’s hope. They want to learn by that age, especially the whys and the wherefores. It’s freeing. Their minds are finally being opened up one idea, one factoid, one notion at a time. And it’s about time really.
I’d love to hear what they had to say about the first Thanksgiving and what REALLY happened. That oughta really blow their minds. Thanks for another interesting blog.