FOOD for THOUGHT PROGRAMME - Blog 2: Devils Advocate

Over the coming weeks, this blog will explore various different strands of the Food for Thought programme, why they are important, and how as parents we can help embed these intellectual skills at home. This week, the focus will be the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ strand.

‘The challenge,’ opined the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, between affectionate strokes of his pet poodle, ‘The challenge is not so much to see what nobody has seen before. The challenge is to think, concerning those things that everybody sees, what nobody has thought before.’

The poodle got up, stretched itself lazily, yawned, and lay back down by the fire (I speculate – but the poodle was real).

Despite the probable reaction of his pet dog, old Arthur’s point is a good one (Disclaimer: not all his points were good ones…).

Education should not be – cannot be – merely a series of facts presented to us one after the other, like your great uncle’s holiday slideshow.

Even more so, it mustn’t be a series of (allegedly) universally accepted perspectives: ‘Here are the facts, and here’s what anyone sensible thinks about them’.

The aim of the Devil’s Advocate strand of the Food for Thought Programme is to confront children with the reality that there is almost always an intelligent argument to be made for any particular viewpoint - even technically ‘incorrect’ ones, where such a thing is possible. That’s not to say, necessarily, that everything is true or that nothing is true – although you could construct an intelligent argument for that viewpoint too.

The point is that great breakthroughs, great inventions, great works of art, are usually less the product of stumbling upon some new piece of information than of seeing the same old things from a different angle.

As parents, we can stretch our children’s ability to get to grips with this world-changing concept in two general ways:

a. Proactively - As we chat at the dinner table, if a topic from the news or current affairs comes up, we can ask ourselves, what are the 'assumed' positions within our society at the current time and what case could be constructed on other premises? This may lead to ‘edgy’ conversations, trying to justify outlandish positions, but there is no better place to ask those edgy questions than within the safety and support of the home (or the classroom). How are what we might call ‘counter-cultural’ arguments actually constructed?

There are perhaps those who would say that some such questions should not even be asked – and it is interesting to examine their arguments as to why that should be the case. But I respectfully disagree. The focus is not really the position itself but the argumentative structures by which it is justified. This can in turn lead to critical thinking about the weaknesses of certain arguments: critical thinking about the sound-seeming arguments for positions we may not agree with; and critical thinking about the bad arguments that are sometimes made for positions that we do agree with, for other reasons. 

b. Reactively – As a parent, I know that one of the hardest things to learn, as one’s children grow up, is how to let them disagree with you. This is true, of course, not just in terms of one’s opinions and world views, but in terms of whether they should do that piece of prep now or later, or whether they have time for one more race on MarioKart. What about, when they give a 'wrong' answer from our point of view, instead of spending the next few minutes gently leading them (with steadily increasing volume) to find the 'right' answer in its place, actually running with their answer and trying to find all the reasons why it might be right, first (I stress the word ‘first’!).

As an English teacher, I know that pupils often suggest 'wrong' readings of a text, based on a simple, factual misreading (e.g. not knowing what a particular word denotes). The temptation is to correct the vocabulary mistake, thus correcting the reading, and move on. But before doing that, it’s actually very productive to park the error and try to find all the other evidence that might be used to support it - i.e. if we had​ to justify that answer, how would we do it? To do so often leads to a realisation on the part of the pupil of the flimsiness of the position they were proposing – and sometimes it even leads to a realisation on my part that there is something going on in the passage that I had not fully grasped myself.

It is a dangerous and highly restrictive myth that those who disagree with our views (our modern views, our Western views, our particular political views, whatever they may happen to be) have no good reasons for their own opinions. It can lead not only to the breakdown of mature discourse, but to our own philosophical entrapment within the so-called ‘echo chamber’ of what ‘all the right kind of people’ think.

Learning to dare to think what nobody else has thought, or to think through what those who disagree with us think, is incredibly liberating. So if our children are unafraid to think for themselves, then they will be nobody’s poodle – not even Schopenhauer’s!