Against Magical Beliefs About Language and Schools

I periodically run into claims about the role of language in thinking that are dangerously close to assuming that language has magical powers over the human mind. One recent example is from an article defending the need for classical liberal education by a philosophy professor named Chris Nadon in an article entitled “Against Lived Experience.”  In a paragraph that is constructing the straw man version of “student-centered” schools that he so valiantly slays with his argument, he said, “We cannot think without language.” 

If we decide to take this statement at face value we have to assume that deaf children who have not yet learned sign language are not thinking. We have to assume that all pre-verbal children are not yet thinking, either. We also have to assume that all animals are unthinking, as well. I live at a llama ranch and train llamas. The idea that they don’t think is utterly absurd. Or to be more precise, due to having a substantial basis in lived experience with pre-verbal children and other non-verbal animals, I can’t take seriously any definition of thinking that could be used to support that claim. 

An important question we need to ask is, What do we really know about thinking? For simplicity I will rely on probably the most famous authority on thinking today: the late Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In 2011 he wrote the best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is his review of how one conclusion about thinking has become pervasively accepted within psychology: we have two types of thought, a fast intuitive type of thinking and a slow deliberative type of thinking. It might be plausible to posit the idea that our slow deliberative type of thinking involves the substantial use of language; however the fast intuitive type of thinking is plainly not dependent on language. In order to take Nadon’s statement to be true either means that, because an estimated 90 to 99% of what occurs in our brains is in the fast intuitive category, we have to ignore the majority of our thoughts or we have to redefine the word “thinking” so radically that we reject the possibility that pre-verbal children and all animals even think at all. 

Why should we care about claims about the role of language in thinking? The problem is that when we misunderstand the role of language in thinking we put our focus on language; which usually leads us to ignore the more subtle aspects of thought that do most of the real work in determining our actions in the real world. 

In the case of someone like professor Nadon, he might be deceiving himself about the importance of language in educating children and as a consequence of being a school leader may be imposing requirements upon students and teachers that do psychological harm. His straw man argument against “student-centered classrooms” is premised on language having the magical property of restraining thought. Continuing from the prior quote, he said, “With limited words come limited thoughts.” This is a version of linguistic determinism which is typically stated as the idea that if Eskimos have more words for snow and we-who-are-not-Eskimos have less words for snow, we are unable to think the same kinds of thoughts about snow that the Eskimos have. A similar example is that if a language has terms for colors but does not include a word for, say purple, then the people who speak that language might not perceive that color. This hypothesis has been proven false. The ability to perceive gradations of color and properties of snow are not magically limited by the language that people speak and/or think with. The linguistically limited repertoire of words might make reasoning slower and communicating more difficult, but it does not limit the thinking that is possible. 

Language does influence thought. However, those influences are subtle and difficult to tease out. For a deeper understanding of how language is influenced by how our bodies exist in the world, I rely primarily on the works of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson. Their main work together is book called Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. The idea is that there are universal perceptual experiences that are wired into our brains starting in our pre-verbal younger lives and they determine some key aspects of how we construct our linguistic abilities and patterns of reasoning. A whole lot of thinking, shaped by bodily experiences of taking action and other perceptions, determines the development of language. This is the opposite of linguistic determinism. It is important to take this into account when we are thinking deeply about how language works in our minds and how our minds shape our actions. 

Nadon singles out in quotation marks the word “agency” which he implies is “[a]n immediate cause of our failure … [to] … demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books.” This is of personal interest because I have written a book called The Agentic Schools Manifesto which is about the importance of agency in educating children. Unfortunately, he must have relied on claims about agency and definitions of agency that are imprecise and poorly articulated given his portrayal of what he thinks it means and how it would be implemented. His portrayal of “student-centered” schooling seems like a cartoon version of how such schools are written about. Most writers who criticize that kind of school also create cartoon versions, therefore his version appears to me to be a cartoon of a cartoon with no basis in or connection to reality. 

Here’s the crux of the issue for me: taking language as the be all and end all of educating children has led to global systems of schooling that value the 3Rs of symbol manipulation (a.k.a. academics) to be their central defining feature. In the course of delivering all the knowledge, skills, and information out of the teachers heads into the heads of the children they have taken up institutional forms, policies, and practices that do psychological harm to children. But Nadon claims the classical academy approach would, rather than merely transfer information, “[turn] around … the whole soul.” I don’t buy his assertion because decades of research into the psychological needs, motivations, and engagement of schoolchildren in academically focused schools all over the world has consistently shown that they have their needs neglected (sometimes actively thwarted), their motivations are more controlled than autonomous, and their engagement is usually behavioral, not agentic. I mention the motivation and engagement to be thorough, but the most important causal piece is the needs. I know of no basis for claiming that the classical academies approach to academic schooling satisfies psychological needs any better than any other kind of academic approach. However, in my books I have presented an abundance of arguments and evidence to support the claim that schools that take agency as their focus do a better job of routinely satisfying psychological needs. 

You would not send your child to a school that starves, dehydrates, suffocates, or recklessly exposes your child to the elements. School personnel that did those things, or even allowed them, would be criminally prosecuted for negligence at the very least. That is because those are all physiological needs that can kill someone when they are neglected or thwarted. It is utterly mystifying to me that schools that routinely neglect the primary psychological needs of children and their teachers still dominate the industry. 

I don’t care if a school calls itself a classical academy, claims to be student-centered, or applies any other label to their school; what I do care about is that every school meets their obligation to provide the kind of psychological conditions that satisfy the needs of all the humans in the school. When they do anything less they are undermining their own educative goals and causing harm, too. The children and their teachers don’t usually die from this kind of neglect, but they are harmed, nonetheless. All schools can do better on this account. The words we apply to schools do not have the magical power of educating students. Words don’t limit our ability to think and act on behalf of children and their teachers.

Independent of the words we apply to schools, they need to be places where children are nurtured, where every child and every teacher has their primary psychological needs satisfied on a routine basis. School leaders can’t control whether or not their students’ and teachers' needs are satisfied in other places and times, but they can ensure that needs are met in their space and in their time. That is the least we should expect of them.