Talking Across Differences at the Dinner Table
Meet Sarah M. Stitzlein: Professor of Education and Affiliate Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati
Roberta Israeloff is PLATO’s co-founder and Board Secretary, and Executive Director of the Squire Family Foundation.
The Saturday session at the upcoming PLATO Conference will open with a panel discussion: “Embracing Difficult Conversations: The Intersection of Ethics and Civics Education.” Sarah Stitzlein will be one of five featured panelists. I had the pleasure of speaking with Sarah about how she found her way to philosophy, her work, and her hopes. Here are paraphrased excerpts from our conversation.
“I grew up on a midwestern hog and cattle farm. Even as a young child, I kept asking ‘Why?’ – challenging the very conservative rural mores permeating my young life, never accepting the status quo. When I told my parents that I wanted to major in philosophy, it didn’t go over well. They assumed I’d study something practical, like education or finance, so I could return to the farm and keep the books or maybe teach in a local high school like my father.
I knew about philosophy thanks to a book mobile that came to town from time to time. That’s where I found a tattered copy of The Great Philosophers of the World – at least that’s how I remember the title. I remember spending the summer reading in our yard under the strong midwestern sun and learning about the pre-Socratics, then about Socrates, and on to the great march through philosophy. I was amazed to learn that people could see the world so differently, who questioned how they thought and what their purpose was.
Richard Momeyer, my college philosophy professor, helped me see that I could live that kind of life. Besides teaching us philosophy, he talked about his activism in the civil rights movement; in fact, he helped to train the first Freedom Riders. I was intrigued by him – a White man a more rural part of the north had taken up the struggles of people who lived far away and whose lives were so different from his. He stood up for justice and helped me see that philosophy didn’t only take place in the ivory tower but could take on the weighty, significant issues of the day, of real life. Through him, I first glimpsed the connection between schools and democracy, that this was a way to prepare good citizens. You could draw a line from that experience to my book Teaching for Dissent: Citizenship Education and Political Activism (2013).
Around that time in college, I volunteered for a program called America Reads and began reading to young school children. From there I discovered the work of Matthew Lipman and started doing philosophy with children. Their depth of thinking, the way they engaged with ideas – and the simple joy of being with young children – guided me to ask questions about education from a philosophical and political perspective. I also read the work of John Dewey – at one point I was president of the John Dewey Society – and saw how he explicitly connected ideas of democracy to schooling, his belief that through school we could solve social problems.
And that led me to the very practical, boots-on-the-ground work I do today, writing about difference, and talking across difference.
Lately I am wrestling with how we encourage citizens to talk truthfully and honestly when our society is facing the pressures of populism. My most recent book deals with this: Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era (2024). It asks questions such as how do we seek the truth and tell the truth? Whom do we trust? Whom are we willing to believe, to work with? We think of many people who upset us, whom we can’t understand, and we find it alarming. What can we do about this? We face difficult decisions:
I myself traveled from one side of the political spectrum to the other. My own family embodies this divide: around our dinner table we’re Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians. I know there are good, sophisticated, funny, intelligent, patriotic people across our country, on all sides. asking themselves serious questions: Should we get vaccinated? What books should our kids read? Where should we get our news? When do we send young people to war? How can we come to honestly agree in such a divisive context, and when do we simply agree to disagree? How do we navigate the pendulum swings between hope and despair?
We need schools to make room for civics education, both factual and conceptual content. We’ve lost sight of the need for it, of its value. Civics education can happen in dedicated classes and if there is no room for it that way, we can teach it across disciplines. We need to be good science, history, and social science citizens in science so we can make decisions about our environment, for example. Civics takes place in communities, not just in classrooms. Young people can do projects in their communities, and through innovative programs not just in classrooms. In Cincinnati teens come together to play ‘Ethics and Dungeons’ a collaborative venture between the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Ethics and the public library system. Teens come together to discuss ethical issues that arise as they play role playing games.
I am also involved with the Cincinnati’s National High School Ethics Bowl program run by the Center. It hosts the nation’s largest Bowl; this past year we had 34 teams. Of all the students one young man stood out as very strong ethical thinker. After the event, learned that he was heading to college, and that he was wavering between studying philosophy and business, I approached the boy’s father. ‘Your son has very strong philosophical and ethical proclivities in this way of thinking,’ I began. I hope you will encourage him to pursue this.’ And to his credit and my surprise, the dad perked up, he heard me and wanted to know more about what having a career in philosophy could mean. He began to see the possibilities – that the boy could have a successful and practical career in philosophy.”
Our conversation ended here. Reviewing it and looking through Sarah’s extensive list of publications, I realized that I like the title of her 2019 book best: Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy Through our Schools and Civil Society (2019). I hope we learn to hope again.
