Storytellersunplugged

by George Guthridge

Two definitions from one of my students, an 18-year-old from a homestead on the Kandik River, 50 miles from Eagle, population about 250, the nearest town:

“Syllogistic thinking, based on literacy and sight, is common in urban culture. Such people usually think linearly, and better understand intangible concepts, like those found in microbiology or physics, because they abstract from everyday life and visualize objects they never see.

“Situational thinking is common in indigenous cultures. Alaska Natives consider issues holistically. When hunting, for example, Natives note every variable: wind direction, individual sounds and their meanings, the shapes of hiding animals.”

So what does this have to do with writing?

Some background: on one hand I am a fiction writer, but the bulk of my career has involved the teaching of writing, specially teaching Alaska Natives. Because of that latter interest, I have evolved what I think is a revolutionary way of viewing the discipline.

What most Natives do naturally is to look at precision in any situation. Then they go to school and learn how to be imprecise. That is not just a problem for Native Americans. My feeling is that it happens to all students. Only those who are talented survive it. The problem is just more transparent among Alaska Natives.

Since Aristotle (upon whose theories my work is heavily based) said that all enthymemes should be supported by examples, let’s take an example.

A group of hunters – all high-school age – are taking a skinboat across slush ice. It’s extremely dangerous, for if you go through the ice in some parts of the Bering Sea (where I lived for eight years), the current is so strong that you can be swept away under the ice and lost forever, even though your friends are only a few feet away.

The boys, however, handle the maneuver expertly. Why? They rely on a set of skills – a prior knowledge – passed down by several thousand years of ancestors moving the boat in almost exactly the same way. The boys merely make minor adjustments to that information to fit their current situation.

Then the boys go to school. A teacher (without our training) tells them, “Write about what success means to you.” The students dutifully start (as students nearly everywhere do), “Success means accomplishing our goals.” What results in a series of platitudes and an essay that is a waste of time for both writer and reader.

I know how to fix the problem – I have been doing that for 37 years. My greater interest, though, is in identifying the root cause of the problem and treating that.

Being inextricably meshed with syllogistic structure as a result of literacy, European cognition impels people to abstract. Doing so is the opposite of good writing, as anyone reading the columns in this website is well aware. By contrast, being inextricably meshed with situation, indigenous cognition impels people to communicate in terms of specifics. There is much less tendency to step back and summarize.

Each summer for the past 16 years I have taught the core courses of the Rural Alaska Honors Institute (RAHI), a six-week college preparatory course for 50 (this year 70) students from every corner of Alaska. Though we are now starting to have a lot of Caucasian students apply to the program, 97% of the kids have been Alaska Native – Indian, Aleut, or Eskimo. Right now we are finishing the fourth week.

Each summer we raise those kids’ reading levels one to four years and their writing levels three to six years. We do that by teaching students to identify variables involved in any given situation and then to select two variables (our system emphasizes the binary) for examination – using a formula I developed twenty years ago, one based on specificity and audience appeal. If at least one of the variables (or the interaction between them) constitutes New and Interesting Information, then the result is precision – and a high probability of audience appeal. We then teach the kids to combine that with the basic structure of European communication.

The result is a new type of communicator. Using that method, our students from RAHI have graduated from M.I.T., Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, Yale Law School, and West Point, to name just a few places. (In fact, considerable anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that RAHI is the nation’s most successful college preparatory for Native Americans.)

I will discuss this approach to teaching writing more in future columns. For now, I would like to share an essay exam I picked at random from among the stack that I just finished grading. It was written in 30 minutes and has a grade of “B.” It was in response to the question, “Why is the relationship between syllogistic and situational thinking important in subject selection?” The girl who wrote this is 17 years old, an Inupiat from the village of Kaktovik, which is well above the Arctic Circle. And yes there are historical inaccuracies and errors in pedagogy, but overlook those. Look at the change of attitude and the sense of newfound hope that lies BEHIND the prose. We are seeking to treat the illness and not just the symptoms.

“The relationship of the differences between situational and syllogistic cognition is important to subject selection because both types of thinking combined produce a higher level of writing.
Indigenous cultures, like that of the Native people of Alaska, have had written language and literacy for less than Western and other European-based cultures. Native cognition is based on nonlinear, realistic, and situational ways of thinking. They tend to think holistically, predicting every possible outcome for situations. Instead of removing themselves from a problem, people with a Native cognition keep themselves in the situation and try to solve its equation. All of their art, for example, which is a great amount of Native people’s culture, is drawn from real images of whales, owls, and belugas.

Western cognition has had centuries of literacy, dating back to the Babylonian era with the first cuneiform type of writing, to the Greeks’ true alphabet and to Socrates and this theories. This European-based cognition tends to result in thinking in a syllogistic manner. It is linear, abstract, and nonrealistic.
Because syllogistic reasoning is heavily based on the way the left side of the brain works, it is logical in the way that Europeans define logic. This logical sense of thinking makes Western cultures think in a step-by-step process, or linear, way. People of Western cultures think abstractly by removing themselves from the problems.
It is crucial to every individual who would like to succeed in writing to learn and understand both types of thinking. Situational and syllogistic cognition separate and have some properties that are better than the other. For instance, students in syllogistic cultures tend to exceed in writing and reading skills while those in situational cultures are better equipped with knowledge to solve dilemmas quickly. Combined, they create a unique way of thinking both abstractly and non-abstractly, linearly and nonlinearly, syllogistically and situationally. This new way of thinking generates a formula for higher writing levels that no one else in the world (except the talented) has naturally.

Before attending RAHI, I used a type of syllogistic cognition forced down by my school from a Western cognition. My ancestors passed down my natural cognition of situational thinking. The result was a bad mixture of what I wanted to do naturally and what I was taught to do by Western formulas. My writing suffered greatly. Since acceptance into RAHI, I have learned not to suppress my natural cognition, but to combine it with Western ways. The result I have attained is a more precise way of writing. This level would not have been possible if I had not combined situational and syllogistic cognition.
–Brittany Burns