Can the Whole World Really Be Wrong?
Mark Twain said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” That’s good advice. The opposite is also generally good advice: Whenever you find yourself against the majority, it’s worth considering if there’s something you got wrong that everyone else figured out better than you. After all, what’s more likely? That everyone in the world is dead wrong about something commonly thought about or practiced? Or that you, one lone and fallible human, made a mistake in your assessment of this particular issue?
Yet, progress, by its very nature, requires some individuals to be among the first to consciously go against the majority-accepted way of doing something. First-movers must be confident enough in their outlying assessment of something to stand against common wisdom and norms. The pressure working against them to conform is enormous, so they must feel passionately enough about asserting their rightness to speak out and act anyway. Then, maybe, others who are not quite as headstrong or forward-thinking can begin to come around too and accept that having a divergent take on something the world is already sure about might be okay.
This is one of the main themes that runs through my new book, Our Global Lingua Franca: An Educator’s Guide to Spreading English Where EFL Doesn’t Work. In it, I deliberately challenge the methods that the whole world of foreign English education seems to have accepted as valid for spreading English fluency.
I must be pretty arrogant to think I know better than every professional teacher, linguist, and pedagogist the world over. How dare I voice my own opinions and share my experiences and assessments in this field without first seeking their permission?
Can the whole world really be wrong about this? It sounds insane. Yet, as I bring up throughout the book, certain obvious errors about the way we teach English seem to pop up over and over in virtually every country one is willing to look in. I know this because I have shared the book with learners in many countries. So far, not a single one has disagreed with my depiction of how backward and counterproductive the sanctioned English-learning process is or was for them as foreign speakers. We might expect certain flaws or habits to proliferate in a particular part of the world. It is mind-blowing to see that people everywhere can independently arrive at the same faulty conclusions and continue implementing them for generations, seemingly no one ever noticing or speaking out about it.
Better question: Can the whole world really be insane?
That’s a fairly easy question to answer. All we have to do is look for past examples of times the whole world has been insane. Has there ever been a time in history when virtually everyone’s paradigm of causality was demonstrably wrong, but they failed to amend it anyway?
For centuries, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was at the center of the universe, with all celestial bodies, including the sun and planets, revolving around it. It was also widely believed that the Earth was flat. It was once believed that life spontaneously arose from non-living matter and that diseases were caused by "bad air" or miasma. Doctors used to fail to realize that washing their hands between surgeries would be a good idea.
During the Early Modern period in Europe, a widespread belief in witchcraft led to witch hunts and trials. Thousands of people, mostly women, were accused of witchcraft (i.e., imaginary magic) and subjected to torture and execution based on superstitious beliefs and fear. The Crusades, a series of holy wars launched by European Christians against Muslims in the Middle East, resulted in the torture and/or murder of five million innocent lives. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition led to the persecution, torture, and execution of thousands on the grounds of not having faith in the correct deity. In many cultures, non-consensual human sacrifice was accepted as necessary to appease supernatural entities who might bless them with common natural phenomena. Infant genital mutilation is still common in many parts of the world and leads to lifelong physical and psychological trauma for its victims.
How could masses of people support such actions (sometimes for centuries or millennia) that seem so obviously wrong from our modern, enlightened perspective? What do you suppose prevented the people who thought those ways from seeing what was wrong with them at the time? And what do you suppose the social reaction to those few who saw what was wrong with them and spoke out must have been?
People often look at most displays of pride or self-confidence as inherently bad things. Arrogance is certainly bad, but I would define arrogance as an arbitrarily inflated sense of pride based on nothing real. Racism or nationalism is arrogance. Any kind of group identification is. Racism can make you proud of things that other people with the same skin color as you have done. That's arrogance. It has nothing to do with you. It's not something you've accomplished. It's not something you've built and developed about yourself from your own knowledge, skills, and experience.
Any human being with a functioning mind can observe reality. They can notice principles and form their own values and opinions. This is the scientific approach to figuring out how life works. You observe. You generalize. You extrapolate and predict what will happen based on your budding understanding. You check to see if you’re right. If not, you adjust and try again.
But to those who think bureaucratically and authoritatively, truth does not come from reality itself and our ability to observe and think about it; truth comes from on high. Some person or organization in a position of authority tells the rest of us how everything works. We're allowed only a small variance of opinions surrounding what they have dictated to be true and what we are meant to accept and integrate into our paradigms. “Who told you it's okay for you to think that way?” is their mantra.
In the case of the subject of my new book, how to teach English to foreign learners and help them acquire working fluency, most people will ask, “What does the local Board of Education say about how we should be teaching English? What do their tests and homework check for? What will universities look for as proof of their qualifications in speaking English? How dare you have a different opinion than them and try to tell the world that they should be doing something differently when they obviously already know what they are doing. Who do you think you are?”
This intuitive sense of trust in custom and authority can come from anywhere. The sources tend to be arbitrary. It can be government, religion, parental figures, or even just blind adherence to tradition with no central figure guiding it. “It's the way we've done it for thousands of years. That must mean it’s the best or only way to do it. The order of our whole society depends on us continuing to do it this way. No, it doesn’t matter to me how well you can show that the way we do it doesn’t work, or even that’s actively harmful to us and counterproductive to our stated goals.”
The most valuable cultural trait is the encouragement of individual discovery, that people be willing to question everything and figure out through their own exploration and judgment what established rules are worth following in life. They have to learn to trust themselves as authorities. Everyone with a functioning mind has their own ability to make inferences and deductions and determine what is right and wrong, even if it seems like the whole world disagrees with them. When they repeatedly observe that the way they are told to do things doesn’t work or is actively harmful and counterproductive, they will be the first ones to call attention to this fact and start (slowly) to change things for everyone who comes after.
If we extend our imaginations into the future, generations from now, it’s not terribly hard to picture what our descendants will look back at as globally insane about our time. It’s the things that we should know better about but don’t, for some reason. Our ancestors, even with their limited scientific knowledge and technology, should have been able to surmise that witchcraft was not the cause of all their problems and that even if it was, murdering anyone even suspected of it without some rational process for determining if it was true was barbarous. We, too, even if we lack precise answers for how to do everything we care about, should be capable of noticing and speaking out when it is obvious that some mass-implemented course of action doesn’t yield the results we are after. And if we are exceptionally self-confident and good at articulating our thoughts, we can even write books for other ways to spread what we have noticed about the whole being wrong about something.
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
Thomas Paine
If you’d like to learn how the whole world can be wrong about teaching people how to speak English and reap its benefits, read my new book, Our Global Lingua Franca: An Educator’s Guide to Spreading English Where EFL Doesn’t Work. Get it on Amazon at one of the links below:
USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGMZ878T
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CGMZ878T
France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B0CGMZ878T
Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B0CGMZ878T
