We’ve all been lied to. The lie is one of binary thinking. I blame computer scientists. Well I don’t really, but it would be nice to have an easy answer like that, wouldn’t it? That’s part of the lie.

There are:
conservatives and progressives
rich and poor
teachers and students
ones and zeros
educated and uneducated
smart and dumb
fat and skinny
ugly and pretty
musicians and listeners
normal and odd
farming and foraging
takers and makers
fact and fiction
us and them

These are just a few of the dichotomous lies we tell ourselves. As Dylan (Bob, not Thomas) said, I contain multitudes.

Where are your multitudes and where are you stuck in the lie of binary thinking? Maybe lie is the wrong word. Lie and truth. Another binary choice that maybe isn’t so simple. Maybe it’s more like a trap. A trapping of what Daniel Quinn would call Mother Culture–a voice in our ear telling us this is how it has always been and how it will always be.

This isn’t a post modernism way of thinking that there is no truth. This is actually old knowledge. Food hasn’t always been under lock and key. Haves didn’t always have most with have-nots toiling for and competing with one another for a taste and dream of the good life. Teachers didn’t always simply dispense with students passively listening and memorizing.

What are the binary thinking traps you find yourself caught in in your personal life, in your professional life? There’s another one: personal life and professional life. That’s maybe a gateway drug to “it’s just business” being a free pass to cruelty.

One that has a hold on my profession like a sprung bear trap is the accountability movement in educating resulting in now a generation of skill-based subject standards and standardized testing. Within a generation, this has become the accepted norm in education.

The result has been disastrous. It has resulted in over politicization of education and made the profession a lumbering giant unable to learn, adjust, and shift thinking and methods based on societal needs and research. I don’t think that was the intention.

The trap was teachers and schools were failing because they didn’t know what to teach. Out of the political process we got standards. And when that wasn’t the magic fix, we re-wrote the standards (assuming we had to have them) and added standardized testing. And when that hasn’t worked we said the kids were broken by things like poverty, a pandemic, bad parenting, etc., while refusing to look at the standardized system we created.

But we contain multitudes. Maybe we could instead focus on getting our best deep thinkers with the ability to see connections between subjects to apply thinking of one subject to another in our classrooms. Individuals with creativity to express ideas in a multitude of ways, and most importantly, lead students to ask questions and to discover multitudes and connections. In my time in education I’ve come across a handful of teachers that can do this. Let me restate that. I’ve come across a handful of teachers who do this, despite the pressure to simply check off a list of standards. I know many who could do this given license to do so.

Of course standards or no standards is another trap of binary thinking. We had them before in other forms: textbooks, accepted knowledge, even mythology. Maybe the difference was that it was more organic and evolved as culture and society evolved. Once codified into law, the standards become a checklist to do, devoid of context, creativity, inquiry and discovery–something to be “covered” or else. I don’t think it has to be this way. It is when oversight is so rigid and perilous that a fear of failure and doing it wrong shuts down creativity. Learning should be playful and joyful. In this setting it rarely can be. For many teachers that’s the world they live in.

Where in your world are you trapped in binary thinking? How might you change your story to embrace multitudes?