By Jill Szoo Wilson
At least once a semester in communication class, I bring up the name of a famous actor or actress from the 1990s, and the students have no idea who I’m talking about. I register my surprise, make a big deal about how they don’t know anything about the world, and then show them a clip from a movie featuring said actor or actress.
This is boots meeting the ground in education.
Last semester, the name that eluded them was Meg Ryan. Fortunately, when I showed them a scene from When Harry Met Sally, two of the students recognized her. It is also important to note that most of them had not seen the movie, and when one of them asked who the short guy in the scene was, I had a second reason to faint in despair.
Let us pause in remembrance of decades past.
Moments like this have become familiar. Each year introduces a slightly different horizon of reference, and a shifting boundary between what is assumed knowledge and what has already passed out of view.
Most of the time, these gaps remain at the level of shared culture. A film, a music reference, or a name that no longer carries immediate recognition. The loss is noticeable, though in all honesty, it rarely feels truly consequential.
This week, the gap carried a different kind of weight.
I mentioned the name Jordan Peterson, and again, the room was silent. No recognition. No point of entry.
To close the gap, I had to do more than show a clip.
Peterson’s work engages questions about the conditions of thought itself, particularly the role of language in shaping what can be known, examined, and understood. Across lectures, interviews, and public debates, he has returned repeatedly to a claim that carries significant implications for how human beings think and speak. People do not first arrive at a fully formed thought and then express it. Instead, we speak in order to find out what we think, and in doing so, begin to understand what we are actually trying to say.
Using this framework, speech is not only a means of delivering a finished idea. It becomes the place where the idea is formed. Most people are not walking around with fully developed positions waiting to be expressed, although social media can create that impression. Most honest people are working their ideas out as they go. They try something in language, hear it, adjust it, run into a contradiction they did not expect, and sometimes arrive somewhere they did not plan to go at all. Peterson himself often spoke this way in lectures, beginning with a premise and working through it in real time. That is a brave act to perform in front of a thousand people on some random Tuesday.
Peterson’s claim situates speech within a longer intellectual tradition. Lev Vygotsky described thought as developing through social interaction, with language serving as the primary tool through which internal reasoning takes shape. Ludwig Wittgenstein located meaning within use, suggesting that the limits of language and the limits of thought remain closely intertwined. Within this framework, speech operates as one of the conditions through which thinking becomes possible.
When considered in this light, the question of free speech acquires a different kind of weight. The issue extends beyond the circulation of opinions or the management of public discourse. It reaches into the conditions that allow thought itself to emerge.
In the classroom, this becomes visible in small, subtle ways. A student hesitates before raising her hand because she’s not sure how something will land. A comment is softened, or abandoned altogether, because it might be taken the wrong way. A question goes unasked because it feels easier to stay quiet than to risk being misunderstood. None of these moments appear particularly dramatic, though each one narrows the space in which thought can be worked out in real time. It removes the moment where a person hears themselves clearly enough to recognize that something does not hold… or that it does.
Whatever thoughts are constrained in the room do not disappear. The student conceals them and at times carries them elsewhere to test in a more sympathetic environment, where agreement is more likely.
When speech does not disappear but simply moves out of view, it changes shape. Without response or resistance from the real-life community, ideas tend to harden. What might have been clarified in the open becomes more certain in private. For example, a student writes something in a discussion board they know will not be challenged, and it stays exactly as it is. The same idea, spoken out loud in a room, would have met a question, a pause, a raised eyebrow, something to press against. Without that, it holds.
Some amount of friction is part of how thinking happens. It gives ideas something to meet, something that reveals both their limits and their strength.
To think with any depth means holding two competing ideas at once without reducing either one into something easier to dismiss. Something that can stand on its own. It means articulating a position you do not agree with well enough that someone who does would recognize it. It means resisting the urge to resolve the tension too early. That kind of thinking is slower. It asks for precision. It asks for attention. And it asks for restraint, the willingness to let both ideas remain intact long enough to actually see them.
That work depends on language. It depends on the ability to say something before it is complete, to hear it, and to revise it.
What takes place in a classroom extends into the wider structure of public life. The same dynamics appear at a larger scale, where the pressures shaping speech influence the development of thought across entire communities. When speech narrows, whether through formal restriction or informal pressure, the range of what can be articulated begins to contract. Thought continues, though along more limited paths. Some ideas remain unspoken. Others circulate without meaningful challenge. Over time, this reshaping of discourse influences what can be examined, questioned, and understood.
Peterson’s insistence on the role of speech in thought formation places him within this broader conversation. His position has generated controversy in part because it resists attempts to separate language from its cognitive and social functions. To speak carries risk. It opens a person to misunderstanding, critique, and revision, and places a developing thought into contact with other minds. That contact is where refinement becomes possible.
The stakes of this position become clearer when viewed through the environments in which thinking occurs. A classroom, a conversation, or a public forum. Each serves as a site in which language mediates the development of ideas. The freedom to speak within these spaces does not guarantee clarity or truth. It establishes the conditions under which both can be pursued.
What began as a question about who students recognize in a classroom unfolded into a larger inquiry about how knowledge is formed. Cultural memory shifts. Names recede. New figures emerge. Beneath these changes, the underlying process remains consistent. Thought develops through articulation, through response, and through the sustained interaction between language and understanding.
Within that process, speech holds a central place. It allows a person to hear what they are saying closely enough to recognize where it holds and where it begins to shift.
In the end, the question of free speech returns to something simple. It has to do with whether there is still room to say something before it is finished, and to let it change in the presence of other people.
Jill Szoo Wilson 