Big boy questions

My college roommates and I grew up in the South, some deeper South than I. We entered school with an understanding of the world and knew how our questions became answers.  

Then classes started.  We were met with questions and stories that we’d never heard before.  Questions were raised and answers were sought: this is the purpose of education.  As students we were asked to wrestle with topics we never imagined, citing writers we never heard of, to grapple with ideologies we didn’t believe and argue with others from towns we’d never known.  Suddenly, our neat and tidy stories of how the world worked struggled to reconcile the arguments we heard in class.  Like many, we’d return home to seek assistance making sense of the new counter-argument.  

But what happens when we bring our big boy questions back to our hometown teachers?  We hope that the complexity of our questions are met with equally complex answers; that the subtlety of the cases reviewed are met with equally nuanced responses, respecting sound arguments and countering with equally sound counter-points.  

And yet, we’re often met with elementary answers; the argumentative equivalent of ‘because I said so.’  (To be clear, this is equally true of ‘because the Bible…’ and ‘because science…’). So what do we as seekers of an integrated truth do with our big boy questions?  We look for big boy answers.  But what do we do when our big boy questions are met with elementary answers?  Ask someone else? Go back to University and find a book with big words?  Go ask Granny?

Some throw out the 'baby with the bathwater' (a reference learned in this same college, for the record), discarding an entire ideology over a single point.  This is lazy thinking. Accepting ideologies without critical thinking is as bad as throwing out ideologies without critical thinking.  Reconciling discrepancies and gaps in an argument is the work of critical thinking.  This is what they were supposed to be teaching us in college.  

So what do we do…

We either give up on an integrated model and choose happy hour or we continue to wrestle.  We do the work, seeking big boy answers to our big boy questions.  Ultimately, we must understand that the world is not as simple as our elementary understanding.  If big questions had easy answers, there would be no need for education.  Or growing up.  

Don’t give up.  Please.  The world needs more critical thinkers.