In the Passover seder, there is possibly no more controversial section than the Four Children. As the seder sets up a series of conversations and pedagogical devices around the Exodus story, the Four Children is the most explicit set of instructions for parents to teach their children how to internalize the preferred message. The four children – the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who does not know how to ask – each ask in their own way about the meaning of the story. The haggadah, the guidebook of the seder, then offers a set answer for each one. The controversy mostly surrounds the wicked child, whose phrasing “what does this story mean to you” seems largely innocuous and doesn’t seem to warrant the harsh response that, because the child has distanced themselves from the leader of the seder and the Biblical Israelites, they should in turn be distanced from the community. This call and response is particularly offensive to the analytical, inquisitive, and skeptical liberal Jew, and from that perspective I and almost everyone I’ve ever made a seder with has bemoaned this portion of the lesson. But this Passover I find myself drawn to the child who does not know how to ask.
The setup of the four children implies differences in both age and intelligence. And most haggadahs (fine, haggadot) will illustrate this section as children in descending age order, from early teen (the age of religious adulthood) to toddlerhood. That’s how I’ve always experienced it, especially since there were four children in my family when I was a kid, and, importantly, the wicked child mapped appropriately onto my impish second brother. The child who does not know how to ask is therefore often depicted as a pre-verbal or otherwise very young child who literally lacks the cognitive development to comprehend the basics of the story or to phrase a question. And so the response to simply repeat the most basic message of the story to this child (“this story has meaning because of what God did for us when They brought us out of Egypt”) seems both obvious and patronizing.
But as with every aspect of the seder, this setup is also a metaphor. And coming around to the end of my first year of teaching as a professor, I could easily call them the four students. Put that way, I’m thinking about this as a pedagogical framework, a way of fostering discourse and managing my classroom.
The reason that the child who does not know how to ask is drawing my attention is because I am faced for the first time in over a decade of teaching with students who exist passively in my classroom. Literally, children who do not know how to ask. Before, I encountered students who engaged in the material in its intended spirit, asking deeper questions about the specifics and the implications of the lesson (the wise child). Students who intentionally derailed the conversation with personal challenges, loaded questions with thinly veiled political agendas, or rude comments (the wicked child). Or, like the wicked child, students who had no genuine interest in what I laid before them, but only asked me for my interpretation so they could parrot it back, thinking that would get them the best grade. And of course students who requested extra repetition of the material in order to comprehend the basic facts and move towards a superficial interpretation (the simple child).
Although not all students actively speak in class, my experience was that they all communicated engagement that fell into one of these categories. Still stuck in the literal interpretation of the four children, a student who does not know how to ask would be a student who is so far below the level of the material that they cannot begin to experience their own reception of it critically – not only would they not know how to ask me, the instructor, a relevant question, they would not know how to ask themselves the basic self-assessment questions to gauge their own comprehension.
In the study of history, we don’t really believe that any material is beyond a student. We think there are methods of analysis that are complex and require some perspective to fully grasp, but ultimately all of these are accessible at any level, at least in part. In that vein, my public humanities project, The Medievalist Toolkit, has been experimenting with introducing students to medieval history through its uses and abuses – rather than starting with the time period itself and adding on critiques of its politicization in later classes, we tell students about how later peoples have imagined this time period from the start. This has been quite successful, because it’s not advanced material, it’s just more complex. We don’t always have to go from the simple to the complex if we trust our students to ask good questions.
So what is the student who does not know how to ask, and why am I encountering them for the first time this year?
My students who do not know how to ask are not incapable of comprehending the material, or even of checking their comprehension. They are disengaged. They are passive. They do the readings like they are lying at the edge of the ocean, letting it wash over them without trying to swim or even float. They wait for me to justify why the subject is interesting, entering the classroom without any drive of their own except the obligation of earning a degree. The student who does not know how to ask is passionless, uncritical, and impenetrable.
Any teacher working now can tell you exactly what is producing these students. It is the COVID-era cocktail of emotional burnout, stunted schooling, and a rapidly devalued education. It’s not that I haven’t had to justify the value of history to my students before – it’s history, half of the world’s most-hated subject. But that students who went through all of high school during COVID are on an educational conveyor belt that is constantly at risk of breaking. There’s little room in brains fogged by anxiety and taxed by traditional modalities for genuine interest in the subject matter.
This sounds too harsh, and I don’t mean that my students are dull. But I do see that as soon as they enter the classroom, the Zoom screen goes up over their eyes, and four years of passive education under strained circumstances take over.
And this is where I find myself surprisingly drawn to the haggadah’s answer for how to approach this student: just teach them anyway. Explain the material, tell them the meaning of the story as I understand it. Offer them an answer to a question they didn’t ask. It’s a harder job than the haggadah makes it out to be, since I have to bring all the energy to the room, and smile through weary sighs and blank faces, and offer extra engaging tidbits that would normally come from the Wise or the Wicked or even the Simple students in the room. It’s even more of a one-woman show than teaching is under “normal” circumstances.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention what the story of Passover means to me. Passover is not about the land or even the time of suffering. It is about building community through stories, conversation, and food. It is about taking on the pain of another person in order to fight against injustice. It is a course in experimental pedagogy. On Passover I focus on the suffering that is inflicted in my name and work to end it. Especially while I am teaching my course Landscapes of Medieval Mediterranean Religion, “next year in Jerusalem” is a state of mind, a vision to restore the historical pluralism of a place and to achieve a reality in which everyone has a deeply rooted home.