It’s very hard to give students the scaffolding to answer difficult questions instead of simply answering the questions myself.
Here was the big question I tried to get my students to answer today: “What are the limits of critical thinking?”
We tried to answer it using Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver’s Travels turns its satirical gaze to the act of satire itself. In Gulliver’s misanthropy we see a critique of satire unhooked from the belief that we are made in the image of God which would make the purpose of all satire to draw us nearer to that original image. Gulliver can only see man’s fallen nature, and in that state, he finds us disgusting.
I didn’t simply lead with that big thesis. We started with Samuel Johnson’s famous quotation (famous to me, at least, since it’s the epigraph to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Since by the end of Gulliver’s, the title character fancies himself a horse, Johnson’s quotation is particularly apropos.
Next, we analyzed one of Swift’s ubiquitous lists which inevitably includes items that don’t belong. We discovered that Gulliver had grown sick of pride and didn’t care if people were respectable or disreputable: human pride in either case is completely ill-founded.
This opened up a larger discussion of what exactly Swift was satirizing in Part 4: the Yahoos, the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver, or all three.
The discussion was rich, students were intuitively using moral reason in their attempts to figure out the object of Swift’s satire, and even when they faltered, those mistakes were instructive.
Perhaps most satisfying was that the entire lesson was a continuation of what I had done during the previous class.
For their writing assignment on Friday, I had asked students to give me a positive spin on some aspect of American society and then give me the cynical spin. My students had no trouble being “haters,” and having realized how easy it was to be cynical, they were ready to hear me when I showed them where Gulliver’s cynicism led.