Kent Lenci was a middle school history and social studies teacher for 20 years. He was always interested in politics, having interned on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and political polarization has been on his mind for 15 or so years.
About five years ago, he said, he “took the leap” and left the classroom. Not that he actually left teaching because that, in effect, is what he still does after starting Middle Ground School Solutions to help students and faculty understand the challenges of political polarization and the potential to overcome it.
On Friday, October 25, Mr. Lenci addressed Loomis Chaffee students, faculty, and staff at a convocation in the Olcott Center as part of the Hubbard Speaker Series, made possible by a gift from Robert P. Hubbard ’47. Part of Mr. Lenci’s message was about the “different levels of listening,” which included going through the motions — listening but not really hearing.
“[We] need to listen to the people we disagree with because at that point, when we feel we are heard, that is the only point at which our defenses lower and we are able to engage in conversation that might change our mind a little bit,” Mr. Lenci told those gathered.
He talked about trying “to rebuild trust and to have the desire to listen to each other.”
“For me political polarization is the sense that many of us have that we are estranged from people we don’t agree with politically,” Mr. Lenci said. “We think we really can’t connect. ... Political polarization is not just disagreement. It's great to disagree. The whole country was founded on disagreement. Learning to speak and disagree respectfully is great. Polarization, the sense we are estranged from and can’t understand them, that is not helpful.”
He encouraged his audience to ask themselves about messages they get from the media: Who is the source? What’s the intended purpose? What is omitted from the message? How might different people interpret the message?
At various points during his talk, Mr. Lenci showed research data, including discrepancies in how Democrats and Republicans perceive that people on the other side from them politically feel about certain issues and how those people actually feel about those issues. The perception and the reality were very different.
Mr. Lenci urged students to practice intellectual humility. He showed a long sentence and asked people to count how many letter f’s were in it. Oftentimes, people miss the correct answer. “Many of us,” he said, “are wrong about lots of things lots of times. We need to hold up a mirror sometimes and figure out if we have it all right ourselves.” Intellectual humility, he said, makes us more open to hearing other people’s views.
In an interview before the convocation, Mr. Lenci said what he hoped the students took from his message was “a sense of hope that despite our divisions as country that are real and formidable, there is a lot we can do to overcome those divisions.” He also said he hoped his message “plants seeds for students to have the desire to reach across the lines, to have a curiosity about people they think they don't agree with, and as time goes by to act on that.”
As he said in his convocation address, “Think about the potential we have if we get a bunch of people who are a little better at this than the adults are right now — the problems we could solve.”
Polarization is one of the topics being studied this fall by Loomis students in the College-Level Social Science Seminar: The U.S. Presidential Election, taught by Caitie Cotton. Among the readings for the class is Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein.
“Instead of asking questions that are inherently polarized and could divide the class, much of our work together has been in seeking why we are polarized to begin with,” Caitie said. “Additionally, our first unit of the class looked at the question of ‘how democratic is our democracy?’ — a very analytical question but not a partisan one, at face value. Much of the class is centered on trying to look beneath the pomp and circumstance of politics and media to see how it is molding society and our democracy.”