Our Wildwood, Volume 52

students process what they learn. Our classroom, this special place that we share for a couple hundred days a year, becomes a Petri dish for the statesmen of tomorrow. The New York Times columnist and author David Brooks also identified the lack of overt instruction around holding space for perspectives different from our own in schools in his book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen , which was Wildwood’s 2024 summer faculty read. Brooks writes: “Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their face with loving respect and acceptance. It’s that we lack practical knowledge about how to give each other the kind of rich attention we desire.” That’s why we shift the classroom furniture to be able to see eye-to-eye in the debates, to provide the “rich attention” that often gets lost by shifting attention spans. I agree with David Brooks. In-person learning, even arguments, can be more visceral and palpable than online. So, double-down on live learning. Moderated, structured discussions can help overcome apathy, decreased attention spans, and rampant polarization. From candy debates we ratchet up to more intense political topics. Reimagining what education can become can start with looking at a public speaking and debate sequence where first graders debate apples vs. oranges, middle schoolers debate the merits of their favorite All-American candies, then high schoolers argue about whether humans should colonize, not eat, Mars. The goal for students of all ages would be to have them develop their own opinions via structured arguments and listening protocols that emphasize compromise and perspective-holding. This might not be what sells on social media, but it would help stabilize a society. My students offered a clue about how and where young people could start from an earlier age to feel like they belong to a classroom, city, state, even a nation. With more analog learning, tomorrow’s rhetorical warriors might just emerge from America’s classrooms with the skills needed to defeat the invisible algorithms of anger and disconnection. What’s next for democracy? Follow the candy. W

Phillips Exeter Academy, founded in 1781, decided to shift to a more democratic model of learning in the 1930s by adding oval-shaped tables designed for a teacher and up to twelve students. Many teachers throughout the United States use this so-called “Harkness method” by shifting the chairs and tables around to imitate this shape to have more engaging discussions on novels and primary documents. Students also feel they have more voice and agency in their learning. That’s why some middle school teachers call Harkness the “spiderweb” because of the way it connects students, while making them literally feel seen and heard. New approaches, like the Microlabs protocol, have also emerged to “democratize participation.” This approach has students move their chairs into clusters of three. Each student then takes one minute to answer a reading question while the other two classmates listen. Listening, after all, is a key part of civic engagement; it must be cultivated the same way educators emphasize rhetoric. In their candy battles, my students did what many adults don’t do today: They talked across differences. They listened to each other develop arguments for each round for up to two minutes–all uninterrupted. Our debrief held space to praise powerful arguments on both sides. In other words, they were not wrong and they were not enemies. Reimagining classroom spaces as one for both teacher and student empowerment would create more space for disagreements and the possibility of changing one’s mind. Coming of age into a deeply polarized society requires a form of in-person de-sensitivity training. It begins with learning to not take all arguments personally, and it is cultivated over time through coursework and also in those critical moments between lessons where

OWW WINTER 2025

29