Hidden Assumptions

I don't mean to imply that a word like hidden implies that anyone has done the hiding. I mean only that these assumptions don't emerge in our calculations. They are what Michael Polayni calls "tacit" assumptions.

Yesterday, I was teaching my 414 class about hidden assumptions. We were using Robert Reich's truly wonderful new book, Aftershock, as our case study. Reich makes the case that aggregate demand has to be increased if the current semi-recession is to be ended, and that aggregate demand will not be increased unless the people most likely to spend their income, get more income.

The economy has grown, Reich points out, and if the share of those new resources controlled by the bottom 90% of the population--I'm hoping that any readers of this post fall in that category--had stayed the way it was in the 1970s and earlier, they would have a lot more income to spend. Further, these people have seen "the good life" and aspire to it. That's what the maxed out credit cards and the multiple home mortgages are about, but those are not sources of revenue adequate to sustain their spending. They need a larger share of the produce of the economy.

The point Reich rejects, although he doesn't reject it explicitly, is that people might be expected to trim their expectations and their spending over this forty year training period so that they reduce their spending to what they can afford. Reich does make the point that it wouldn't be good for the economy if they did that, but he doesn't really consider the oft-made point that people should "learn to live within their means." He doesn't consider it because he doesn't want us to consider it.

So, although I would not say that he "hides" it, I do want to say that it remains "hidden" in his treatment. I, the master teacher, want to bring this hiddenness to my students and to enable them to search out such hiddennesses for themselves.

However.

At our previous class meeting, a number of students got up and walked out of class when the clock on the wall said we had ten minutes yet to go. And they didn't walk out apologetically, as students do sometimes when they have another appointment to keep. They walked out as students do when the class time is over. I thought I just passed it off, but I now think it must have irritated me a little. Here's why I think that.

One of the students said the clock was slow, but my watch had the same time as the clock. So at the next class period--that was yesterday--I introduced a new contract between me and the students. It featured the idea that if we were going to go by the clock, then we should start class at 11:50 rather than at noon. Then we could leave at 1:40 rather than at 1:50. Alternatively, if we started when the clock said it was noon, we would continue the class session until the clock said it was 2:00 p.m. "Fair is fair," I said to myself.

One of the students said, "Why don't we just set the clock?" And, in the dumbfounded silence I offered, proceeded to do so.

In that way, as it turned out, I offered my students a much better example of hidden assumptions than Reich offered us. I offered ME, proposing a substantial tinkering with the schedule, presuming that the clock was utterly unchangeable. I skated right by the simple and obvious--it's never obvious to you when you are hiding it from yourself--solution and I didn't need to do that and I shouldn't have done that.

But I think the reason I did had to do with the students leaving "early" last time. I think it irked me a little--although I didn't think so at the time--because I went directly to the renegotiation of the class times and held that little "Fair is fair" sentiment at the center of my own teacherly heart. And, I now think, that's why the option of resetting the clock was "hidden" from me.

Oh well. It was a great example of hidden assumptions and that IS what I was trying to do. I wish I could have done it in a way that didn't make me feel so foolish.