‘Education should involve some emotional discomfort,’ writes Cal Poly professor

In my religious studies courses, students are asked to read the lives of some of the great religious figures in history, such as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Lao Tzu and Siddhartha the Buddha. Their stories often involve struggle before revelation; some form of Golgotha usually precedes resurrection.

Recently, a student complained that I should attach a “trigger warning” to a particular reading I assign on the life of Siddhartha because the details about his experiment in extreme fasting 2,500 years ago might traumatize students today who struggle with eating disorders.

I can imagine conservatives citing this complaint as a perfect example of the Gen Z “snowflakes” falling back on a “woke” agenda infiltrating our schools.

But the same fear of creating emotional discomfort seems to be behind recent laws in Florida, which give people the right to sue schools and teachers based on student “discomfort” with the content of school lessons.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has not hidden that the intent of his “Stop Woke Act” is primarily to protect white students from feeling any guilt or disquiet from confronting the history of race, gender and religion.

I can imagine liberals citing this proposed law as a perfect example of white conservatives putting their heads in the ground, attempting to protect their diminishing status.

Many of us professors feel stuck between this cultural battle waged in surprisingly similar terms on the Left and the Right. Without appreciating the political subtext, one might legitimately have concern for the plight of today’s students. I, however, have more concerns about the future of education.

The fear of potential lawsuits grounded in the subjective perception of 19-year-olds — especially on topics that touch close to the skin, like religion — seems like perilous policy.

While I am (and should be) careful about my words, I cannot always control how they are received by an audience. It is not hard to imagine how such lawsuits could be weaponized to such a degree to create a chilling effect in the classroom.

I am also not certain how to be a responsible academic while avoiding topics that could cause discomfort. I like to accent the positive elements of the history of religion — the times when religion has provided personal inspiration, social transformation and communal solidarity — but any fair presentation of religious history also must share its uglier history; the times when the product of religion was not love and compassion but hate, scapegoating and violence. A responsible presentation of history requires engaging all of history.

But at a deeper level, I don’t want to protect my students from emotional discomfort, but rather the opposite. I want my students to feel some degree of emotional discomfort, for it is the gateway to change and growth. Discomfort is the internal clue that something has gone awry and is an important part of the process of striving to understand others, share in their pain, and imagine ways to improve the world.

I want my students to feel uncomfortable when they learn about the horrors of Shoa (the Holocaust) and I hope they are inspired by some of the Jewish theological reflections upon those horrors.

I want my students to feel uncomfortable when confronted with the role of Christianity in encouraging slavery in America and I hope they are inspired by the ways the same Christianity also inspired abolitionists.

I want my students to feel uncomfortable when confronting Buddhism’s role in the development of suicide bombing in Sri Lanka and I hope they are inspired by the ways the same Buddhism has inspired global movements of radical non-violence.

You see, some discomfort seems to me to be a prerequisite for growth. If we as a society aim to protect students from emotional discomfort, we will ultimately stymie their potential to grow in wisdom. If education promises to shape the next generation to brighten our world, we fail them when we don’t allow them to feel some discomfort along the way.

Instead of protecting students from discomfort, how about we give them tools to process it? Perhaps we should teach them how to transform the things that trouble them into motivation to change the world that created these problems. If we take anything from the lives of the great spiritual leaders like Siddhartha, perhaps it should be that there is always some struggle on the road to enlightenment.

Contributing columnist Stephen Lloyd-Moffett is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 6:00 AM.