A couple of weeks ago, a former student of mine, now a high school teacher, asked her Facebook friends for the advice: “What advice would you give to a freshman in high school? Or what skills/habits/lessons do you think are important for high school freshmen to know?”
As the usual responses came in — learn how to budget, follow your passion, write concisely, get involved in something outside of class, don’t be a jerk (the word used was a little stronger than this), keep an open mind — I thought about what I could add. I finally decided on, “Avoid making assumptions: about other people, about yourself, about what is true.”
I had been thinking a lot about the assumptions we make, especially in this time of polarized opinions, “fake news” and information overload. When I was a professor, I would always ask students to question their assumptions. That is a scary thing to do, especially if you are a college or high school freshman. I will always remember one of my particularly bright students coming up to me and my co-teacher at the end of the first class and tell us that no one had asked him what he thought before. At that moment he realized that college was going to be a challenging experience, but perhaps also a liberating one.
Questioning assumptions about truths is particularly scary because we often have gained those assumptions based on sources we admire or respect. If someone has grown up in a family where assumptions are made about people based on race or gender or socio-economic status, those biases can be hard to shake. At the university, we talk a lot about unconscious biases that we carry, and we try to recognize those in ourselves. But these are just one subset of assumptions we may have.
Is that so? Why did I react that way? There are myriad questions we can ask ourselves to see through our assumptions, and make better decisions. When students come to college, we try to engage them in questions like this. We call it “critical” thinking, but it is not about criticizing people or things, but about serious reflection on ideas.
As hard as questioning assumptions about people and ideas may be, however, I find that the hardest assumptions to question are those about ourselves. As we welcome one of our largest freshmen classes ever to UH Hilo, I want to make sure our students are making the right kind of decisions about their future, and that often means challenging their assumptions about what they are capable of, especially if they are the first person in their family to go to college.
Throughout my career, I have seen far too many students who doubt their potential because they do not think they can aspire to bigger things. Just getting to college is an accomplishment that some do not think they really earned and enter our doors unsure of themselves and their potential for success. Some students assume college is for other people. At UH Hilo, we are working hard on equity issues, so that every student can take advantage of what a college education has to offer.
We do this through what we call asset-based thinking. For too long, higher education would look at what students could not do rather than what they could. Those attitudes can permeate a campus, sink into students’ minds and undermine their confidence.
Now, we look at the assets they bring. A student who has had to help care for their siblings or who has had to take a part time job while in high school knows a lot about time management and discipline. A student whose family lost a home to lava knows a lot about resilience. We teach them that the strength that they drew on in that crisis will also help them succeed in college. A student who is a single parent knows a lot about empathy and responsibility, which will help them navigate a group assignment or a community service project.
Thus, when I see our new students coming onto campus or entering a Zoom room, I do not make assumptions about what they cannot do, but what they can.
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.