Why assume people are smart? And why does that matter? It’s a starting point for just about everything else I do as a sociologist. I learned people are smart by spending over a decade of my life studying what they do and why they do it (and a lot longer than that interacting with them). What I mean is that people have reasons for doing what they’re doing that are as complicated and well thought out as the reasons you have for doing what you’re doing. Because I am a pragmatist, this wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t some benefit to assuming people are smart, so I offer three rules, things to gain from assuming that People are Smart, and not the opposite, based on all this.

Mint chocolate chip ice cream is, in my opinion, the best flavor of ice cream. Maybe that isn’t a popular opinion to hold, or to express. I know lots of people prefer rocky road, or chocolate, or vanilla. But it’s an opinion I hold, and you may, or may not, hold the same opinion. No big deal, right? If I like mint chocolate chip ice cream, I can eat it, and if you don’t, you don’t have to. It is easy to have an opinion, express an opinion, and respect one another’s opinions. That’s what an opinion is…

Public trust must be earned and continually renewed for public education to continue to best function as a public good. To me, this means that I must show that I can be trusted not to unduly cross into other domains of social life in doing my job. In the words of literary critic Stanley Fish: do my job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do my job. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, this ideal should be upheld to retain public trust in scholarship and to ensure that people in a democracy can best make use of knowledge. In the words of Max Weber, a founding voice in sociology (as is DuBois) and an intellectual hero, the closer to politics our subject matter comes, the more we are obligated to avoid partisanship, to save that for outside the classroom, where criticism is possible and there is not the power imbalance.
More practically (and perhaps cynically) speaking, institutions don’t survive because they are built on some vision of how people ought to be; they must be resilient in the face of how people actually are…