He "wants to see how she thinks," but is at the same time telling her that she's WRONG to tell him what she actually thinks.
Have you brought this idea to his attention, in just the way you wrote it here? Maybe he doesn't realize what he's doing.
That's a really good point, actually. When I broached this subject with him, he defended the practice under the guise of "teaching good college skills" and "shaping her thinking the way a HISTORIAN does it..."
I'm not sure that I'm really buying either explanation.
I think that the ideology piece may be more important than I've given it credit for, actually. He's coming at things from a "It's simple! X, Y, and Z," standpoint (which is complemented by his own ideology which supports that). She, on the other hand, is coming at this from a more kind of
thoughtful (?) perspective which is more like, "While it may at first appear simple, it soon becomes apparent that if X, then A, which often means that Y and Z are only possible together or not at all, in which case B instead, not that there's anything wrong with that." It's more narrative than procedural, if that makes sense.
HER ideology supports that kind of approach, fundamentally. Her beliefs personally tend to lead her to be VERY mulish about the kind of oversimplification he's looking for in value judgments. She really does interpret this as him punishing how she thinks on some level.
