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Law professor bans ‘ism’ words, tells students ‘isms prevent you from learning’

Adam MacLeod is an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama. And he deserves a standing ovation.

He has written a piece for The New Boston Post titled “Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials” that delves into the difficulties of teaching millennials and the classroom tactics he employs to actually get them to think and reason beyond using raw emotion.

“For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors,” MacLeod writes. “They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison.”

To that end, the professor goes on to explain how he laid down some ground rules in his Foundations of Law course for first-year law students a few weeks into the fall semester, right before a unit on legal reasoning. Among them, no “ism” words.

He told the students:

Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.

Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.

… First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.

In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden inside the box. …

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

It’s just one of the many gems in the piece. It’s worth a full read.

MORE — Student whistleblower: Diversity class presents multiple ‘isms’ as fact without allowing debate

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About the Author
Fix Editor
Jennifer Kabbany is editor-in-chief of The College Fix.