Don’t agree or disagree, just learn – The Cougar

Social media forces us to think in polarities: we either “agree” (and maybe “like” or “love”) or “disagree” with what the algorithm sends our way. Carrying this kind of thinking forward into your academic lessons, while certainly challenging, must be resisted.

One of my mottos goes: remember to avoid “agreeing” or “disagreeing” with our material. This is especially important as I teach classes some find objectionable and controversial: women’s studies, queer studies, crip studies, film studies and religious studies.

When you “agree” or “disagree” with what you are learning — especially material you are encountering for the first time — your immediate evaluation becomes the focus, the lens that determines your subsequent engagement. 

Your possible learning and understanding are based on your personal experience and prior knowledge. A now-deleted tweet from Julian Shapiro on Oct. 8, 2020, and originally from Morgan Housel, appropriately captures why this is a concern: “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”

Additionally, when you’re hearing new information, know that you don’t need an opinion on everything you encounter and, importantly, you simply don’t know enough to agree or disagree. I know that can be hard to hear in a world where we’re all told everyone has a right to an opinion. 

Someone teaching a class — be it music or history or business or biology or political science or anthropology or engineering — has substantial experience in that area that you simply don’t have (yet). Since you’re taking college classes, it’s highly possible that you are being guided by someone who has created new knowledge. For example, I have coined numerous concepts, most significantly “cripnormativity,” and I have five academic degrees. And if there is a guest speaker — whether they are talking about adoption politics or queer theology or crip activism — they are also legitimate experts. 

More sophisticated forms of engagement than “agree” and “disagree” exist in the classroom. Ideally, we want to consider lots of different, different perspectives and think about how and why those ideas exist. If we give respect to the thoughts that various people offe r— and consider their intersectionalities and positionalities — we can learn and be more appreciative of the complex, beautiful world around us.

So instead of an agree or disagree binary, think about why the perspectives at hand exist and what hopes or fears they’re responding to. And we’d do well to extend this practice beyond physical and virtual classroom spaces. 

Andrew Joseph Pegoda is a professor at the University of Houston.