Proud midwife

Is it inappropriate to boast about my students? If what I were really doing was trying to take credit for them, certainly. But what makes this teaching thing so rewarding is the things you can't take credit for or, at most, take credit for having provided the occasion for. That's why Socratic midwifery is a model to which many of us aspire.

So let me boast! As you know, I've been teaching a first year seminar called "Secularism at the Crossroads." A dozen students from around the country and I have been reading texts from the "new atheists," classic texts by Freud and Weber, sociological critiques of secularization theory by Casanova and Berger, a speech by Jeffrey Stout, American Gods, etc., as well as visiting the Rubin Museum of Art. Well, today's was the last class before the students give presentations on their final research projects, so it was time to bring things together. We read a post the anthropologist Saba Mahmood wrote for The Immanent Frame, an SSRC blog dedicated to very high-level discussion of topics relating to secularism, to which distinguished scholars from many fields have made many insightful contributions. Well, as of today, one of my students is part of the discussion - he wrote a response to Mahmood's essay, and it was posted by the moderator. How very exciting! Old fogey that I am, I'm less surprised that it was posted by the moderator than that a first year college student would have thought to submit it in the first place. Good on ya, Ben!

Other things happened in today's class discussion that were also great - what a good group we've become, articulate, respectful of diverse opinions, etc.! I was grateful particularly to the student who asked if there is "class privilege attached" to reading secularist texts and discussing them. Her hard-working family aren't church-going but believe in God; there's never time at home to discuss questions like religion vs. secularism. What does what we learn or conclude or decide in our discussions here mean for them? Have we any right to tell them what they do and believe is right or wrong? And even if we thought it wrong, shouldn't we be doing something about economic injustice in America rather than telling people to give up on what few resources are available to them? Good on ya, Rhiannon!

This connected back to a set of valuable questions to which we keep returning (which students keep on the table, not me: good on ya, Kendall!): whatever we conclude in our discussions, whatever we learn from our readings - what should we now do? Midwifery's doubtless important, but "education" can't be the answer to all questions, can it?