Published: August 22, 2008 10:04 pm         

The expanding universe — moons, minds and morals

The Back Porch column

HUNTINGTON — We got mooned at the Chicken Shack. And the West Virginia Building.

I’m watching the second season of “The Big Valley,” the 1960s Western show, but they don’t come any bigger than what we saw during our sojourn to the State Fair of West Virginia.

The Mountain State ranks second in the nation in obesity behind — you guessed it, Mississippi, where they have the biggest behinds — according to a study released Tuesday by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

While the state’s expanding waistline is certainly an issue worthy of concern, the start of classes Monday at Marshall University has the campus more concerned about expanding something else — students’ minds.

And so bleary-eyed faculty gathered at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to hear from an expert on critical thinking, Dr. Linda Elder.

She tried in three hours to teach teachers how to think. That’s not easy. Teachers are notoriously poor audiences because they think they already know it all.

It’s a little like leading a horse to water but also holding the horse’s head under water for a few seconds and hoping when it comes up sputtering that maybe something from the pond of knowledge seeped into its mouth.

Elder led faculty through the eight intellectual traits or virtues. All but two in the list are preceded by the term “intellectual”: integrity, humility, confidence in reason, perseverance, fair-mindedness, courage, empathy and autonomy.

I suggested to my colleagues that in removing the word “intellectual” as a prefix and looking at the base words, the speaker was encouraging us to teach values.

“Not that I’m opposed to that,” I said. “My brainstorm is over. You can put away your umbrellas now.”

It’s amazing how things come back around re-packaged as the panacea for what ails the world when old-timers were doing it a century or two ago but didn’t have such clever labels attached.

My grandmother was teaching the above values in the 1930s in one-room schools across Monroe County. Of course, those were the days when school started with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer.

Now I don’t think we ought to legislate Christianity. The Lord doesn’t need that kind of help and neither does America, yet I can’t help but laugh at people who are scared to death that something from the Bible might be thought or uttered in school while at the same time the things they “preach” come right from that book.

They claim it as their own, copyright it and sell copies of it.

Elder indicated she believes the world will improve if people develop logical thinking. I agree that people ought to think and question more, but the idea sounds a little like the humanistic notion that somehow humans can evolve and attain perfection if they think hard enough. She encouraged us to spend 15 minutes each day with one of her handbooks to develop our minds.

If I return to my original premise that she is encouraging the teaching of values, I think people ought to spend 15 minutes a day developing character.

Humans have accomplished some amazing things that have nothing to do with logic and everything to do with character.

As a journalism instructor, I try to teach my students to understand, respect and care about humanity. Those kinds of people make the best journalists, I say.

They make some pretty decent people, too.

— Young is a Register-Herald columnist. E-mail: ynerissa@verizon.net

© 2008 by Nerissa Young