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Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.
Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat," and to whatever extent academics conflate the two, they ought to be called out and actively denigrated for it. The purpose of humanities education is to teach how to properly think through these moral truths (as well as other things), not what to properly conclude about these moral truths.
A sociology class that deems certain moral truths out of bounds isn't a sociology class, it's a religious sermon. Sociology can make claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it, and the teacher can even make the argument that these effects are bad, but once they cross the line into demanding that students conform to their own judgments of what's bad and good, they're taking on the role of preacher, not teacher. "Deleterious" and "wrong" are not synonyms.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
You're the one who brought us into Thought Experiment Land, though. The point of TEL is that it's analogous to the real thing we're talking about, and so I was simply explaining the analogous setup. All analogies are faulty, and so comparing Flat Earthism with racism/homophobia is also faulty, and the fact that Flat Earthism is obviously and absurdly wrong by empirical evidence is something we'd have to accept as a fault in the analogy and work around, so that the analogy makes sense, i.e. that it's entirely reasonable for someone to use best practices and best evidence to come to the conclusion of Flat Earth. This would be absurd in the real world, but, again, we're not in the real world, we're in Thought Experiment Land, by your own choice.
Hard disagree. The point of humanities is, in part, to learn to argue for squishy things like morals or politics or ideologies, and that's done in a large part by having students actually make arguments in favor of these things with the understanding that their grading isn't based on the "correctness" of their conclusions, but rather the quality of the arguments they make. This was pretty standard fair when I was in school, where, in history class, we did roleplaying to argue in favor of and against things like slavery, democracy, monarchy, and the like. Sometimes we were assigned roles, other times we chose roles based on our own preferences, and either way, the education occurred through our thinking through these arguments and we were graded on the quality of those arguments. I think this is a good thing and useful for students to learn. This goes double for concepts and ideas that are well outside the Overton window and specifically ones that people in authority find offensive or dangerous.
Right, if the history teacher is assuming this to be true, in good faith, that speaks to a truly horrific level of incompetence and bias by the history teacher, in terms of epistemic certainty about history or sociology or the humanities in general. There are very few things in reality that are as well demonstrated as "the Earth is round," and any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar. Anyone with any appreciation for academia, and especially one whose role is to teach students, ought to be aware of this. Especially if we're considering a case where the history teacher is judging the veracity of claims like "Europe is more successful than Africa because [XYZ]" based on the fact that [XYZ] was deemed to be racist, rather than on the specific scientific claims of [XYZ] and the empirical evidence surrounding it, which seemed to be the implication in the original situation and is certainly the case in most such cases I've observed both in and outside of academic settings.
The point of my thought experiment was to demonstrate that in principle there can be cases where it's correct for a humanities teacher to mark down a student based on the positions they hold, and not just the quality of the argument. I'm not convinced that "any non-trivial question in the humanities will simply fall far far below that bar". Perhaps bringing HBD into it confused the issue - suppose a student handed in a paper arguing that the pyramids were built by Atlantean aliens from Planet Theta. Wouldn't that be pretty analogous to the flat-earther geology student? Wouldn't you want a serious history teacher to mark down the paper relative to an equally-eloquent one that presented a basically sane theory of the pyramids' origin?
This is probably the crux of our differing views on the history-teacher thought experiment. The way I see it, for better or for worse, "HBD is noxious pseudoscience on par with flat-Earth and ancient aliens" has been successfully taught to a vast majority of the population. That is, in fact, what HBD advocates complain about. So long as it's the case, it's not a random humanities teacher's responsibility to buck against that. We can't expect him to know that all mainstream geneticists in the country are participating in a vast conspiracy to suppress a genuine controversy, any more than it's his job to guess whether NASA is faking space imagery of the round Earth. If there is blame to be assigned, it goes to the architects of the conspiracy, not to people in unrelated fields who go by the mainstream scientific consensus. And if you go by the mainstream scientific consensus, then "racism explains Africa's subpar development" is trivially false and dangerous misinformation, in the same way as "the Earth is flat".
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