Students get an A for skepticism

When Howard Zinn spoke out against the war in Iraq to a largely sympathetic audience at Newton South High School last week, he told the students to question authority. And after the presentation, some of them did. They questioned Zinn's.

''I had one kid come up after Dr. Zinn's talk," said history teacher James Bair, 25. ''He said, 'I agreed with this, I didn't agree with that, and where do I go with this?' "

''With Zinn, you can't just accept what he has to say," said Floryn Honnet, 16, after the author, social activist, and Boston University professor emeritus spoke to the group about the war and military recruiting in high schools. ''But that doesn't mean you can believe everything the government says, either."

Such skepticism is just what the teachers say they want to hear as they encourage their students to think critically: to learn how to analyze, synthesize, and challenge ideas; to recognize that information is only as good as the sources on which it is based.

''I was really excited to hear from several students that they didn't agree with everything, because it means that they're hearing correctly," said Newton South history teacher James Rinaldi, 26, who called critical thinking a core value of the school's educational approach.

Zinn's appearance was part of an effort by Newton South and the Social Justice Academy, one of three small Boston public schools at the former Hyde Park High School, to bring in speakers with opposing views. Academy students -- who had invited Newton's Social Awareness Club to attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations at their school and expect to meet with them twice more before the end of the school year -- also attended Zinn's talk.

Rinaldi said students are urged to seek multiple and alternative sources of information. The academy, for example, uses as a textbook Zinn's ''A People's History of the United States," which takes a bottom-up view of history, focusing on the viewpoint of the poor, minorities, women, and workers.

''You're not here to reflect back the text, you're here to form an opinion. . . . It's taking thinking to the next step," said academy teacher Manakawa Onifade, 36, who said she bases grades as much on a student's ability to analyze as to comprehend material.

Bair said he was heartened that students did not just accept what Zinn had to say as validation of their own opinions.

''A lot of kids said that while they agreed with what Dr. Zinn said, they still picked up on the fact that he had a bias," he said. ''They found something that confirmed what they believed -- and adults would have looked at that as confirmation -- but the kids would have liked to have seen the other side of the story."

The practice in critical thinking -- which is tested on the English portion of the MCAS exam -- ''differentiates between 'I didn't enjoy that presentation, and I didn't agree with that,' " said Michelle Kellaway, 17, of Newton South. ''If you don't agree with it, don't like it, you might actually learn more."

''When you're asking questions, sometimes somebody gives an answer that's really surprising to you," said Carlyle Mason, 16, of the academy. ''You get a better understanding."

The students said both the emphasis on critical thinking and the growing relationship between their two schools -- less than 10 miles apart, but in vastly different communities -- have made them more open to opposing points of view. Their teachers met at a Zinn lecture in Waltham last November, shortly after Bair and Rinaldi became faculty advisers for South's new Social Awareness Club.

''We were all anxious to have [Zinn] come to our schools," said Onifade. After Zinn agreed -- he said he tries to accept all invitations from high schools -- ''we started wondering why we should have these social/political conversations separately, when in order to focus on social change we'd like to have these young people interact together," she said.

Since then, academy students and club members have visited one another's schools.

Nina Loeterman, 15, of Newton South, said the exchange was ''eye-opening."

''A lot of us thought that Massachusetts in general was the liberal state and everybody agreed with what we all think, and we were all proved wrong," Loeterman said, noting that she was surprised by some academy students' conservative position on abortion.

''Critical thinking helps us push aside our differences," said academy student Gabriella Zapata, 16. ''When we understand where the person's coming from, we look at it from their shoes . . . then their opinion mixes with ours.

''Going in, I thought we're too different . . . but just because they have what they have and we don't, it doesn't mean anything. We go through the same things and talk about the same topics. We're more alike than I thought we were."

The teachers said they hope the training helps students develop habits of thinking that will last into adulthood -- and said it is a lesson some of their elders could learn.

''A lot of adults pick up political stands and views almost as a Red Sox-Yankees kind of thing. You can't walk downtown and have a discussion about politics the way you can, you know, 'Jeter's a pretty good shortstop,' " said Bair. ''I try to get kids away from this idea that you should believe something just because."

It's a lesson Honnet seems to have learned.

''I can back up my responses," she said. ''If you just say things to say things, then they don't really have any meaning."