February 27th, 2025

Enlightened Students - A Silent Salon Discussion

"I pledge allegiance to the republic..indivisible.. with liberty and justice for all."
A meme has circulated since the summer of 2020 that said:
Every day for 13 years we pledged allegiance and recited the words "with liberty and justice for all" - what did they think was going to happen?

In 2025 we still recite the pledge every single day at the high school where I teach. Students honestly don't recite it. They stand. They stop talking but no one says the words anymore. 
Yet some of those words seem so very important and meaningful to me as a world history teacher in 2025. You see, we've just finished studying the enlightenment and wow, those are some powerful ideas. They were revolutionary ideas about natural rights - which we now would call human rights. Locke's idea about liberty and the government deriving it's power to govern from the citizens truly they changed the world. Those ideas have stood as a foundation for America since our founding almost 250 years ago.
We are a republic and that means our form of democracy asks citizens to choose representatives to speak for them and fight for their rights at a federal level. 
But how do students feel about pledging their devotion to "liberty and justice for all?" Do the words ring true or do they sound hollow?
I was surprised to find that many students do hold these truths to be self evident when I gave them a chance to speak silently.

Silent Salon

The idea for our silent salon discussion grew out of a need - how to capture just how groundbreaking and exciting salon discussions were during the enlightenment? In my 6 months as a high school teacher I've learned just how hard it is to get students to have discussions or to participate in class in general. The free-flowing sharing of ideas is what made the enlightenment so exciting. 
I know students have ideas and if you get creative enough, they will happily share them.
The Lesson: 
I printed about 30 different questions on individual sheets of paper. These questions took the ideas of philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Mary Wollstonecraft and translated them for 21st century students. A few questions were:

• Is everyone a little evil?
• Is each person born with endless possibilities?
• How does life get better?
• Why do people need other people?
• Should our government help us or leave us alone?

I instructed each student to write their response to the question on the paper. (Or doodle response if the preferred.) After 2 minutes of writing and listening to Mozart, students passed their papers and wrote their response to a new question. They also had the option to respond to, or build on, someone else's response. For our next round students crumpled their paper into a ball and threw it into a bucket. 
Snowballed papers were then redistributed.
For round 4 we again crumpled papers, distributed and responded to questions. I collected all the papers when w were done.

Reconnecting to learning
I intended this activity as a warm up and an illustration of salon discussions, as well as an introduction to the big ideas of the enlightenment, but when I had time to read the responses from students I was pleasantly surprised at their thoughtfulness and empathy.
They want their rights respected and the government held accountability. They believe that being curious about other people is how we learn and that nugget was a delightful surprise.

When it was time to work on our enlightenment project - a poem, rap, or cartoon about one of the enlightenment philosophers, I used the students' own answers to create a mind map of key ideas I would include if I created a poem about the philosophy of the class of 2028.
​Questions are all here.

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