The Revolt against Left-Wing Schooling

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, June 14, 2021

 

In the past few months, we’ve seen teachers resigning their positions with fiery letters denouncing the “tribalism and sectarianism” that is overtaking traditional liberal education. We’ve seen parents taking the stage at their local board of education meetings to denounce their school for “emotionally abusing our children” and “demoralizing them by teaching them communist values.” The 1619 Project from the New York Times was turned almost immediately into material to be included in school curricula — a really killer play at a new income stream. And several red states have worked up legislation to ban variations of “critical race theory” or the endorsement of “divisive concepts” in history curricula. We have parents denouncing anti-racist parents’ associations as “Chardonnay antifa.”

 

Let’s just tick off a few things right at the top. The fact that these debates involve children almost guarantees that they will be the subject of moral panic and hysteria. And we should say that, in these curriculum debates, there is a great deal of deception, hiding the ball, talking past each other, often deliberately. A school district might propose an “anti-racist pedagogy” and parent-critics will respond that they don’t want “critical race theory” taught in school. The district’s defender will reply, haughtily, “We’re not teaching graduate seminars on the thought of Professor Derrick Bell.” Parents will complain that teachers are smuggling in trendy concepts about “white fragility” or “whiteness.” And teachers will fire back, “These parents don’t want us to teach that slavery was racist.” Finally, and most unhelpfully, someone will pipe up to say, “Who really remembers what they taught you in tenth grade anyway?”

 

Besides the fact that it involves children, this conflict is hot for two other reasons. First, precisely like police reform, it involves a public-sector union that certain members of the community feel is staffed and run by fundamentally hostile people who cannot be trusted to safely carry out their mission — even if given new and tough strictures and training.

 

Second, beyond the material actually in the textbooks or videos, our new educational debate is fundamentally about allegiances in a time of dissipation and polarization. Education of children involves putting things into children’s heads — the memorization of names, facts, definitions, the learning of stories, fables, and myths. Education involves imparting certain mental skills, the use of rhetoric, the ability to decode a text, the ability to confront new, complex, and unsettling ideas with some self-confidence. But most fundamentally, it involves the passions. We educate the heart, teach it what to love, honor, cherish, and aspire toward. This is the motive power for all the rest.

 

Fundamentally, the conflict is about whether students should be educated to have an allegiance to the historic American nation and its institutions, or whether they should be educated to have an allegiance to a notion of “justice” and to an egalitarian ethic that fundamentally seeks to critique those institutions, radically reform them, or replace them altogether.

 

This conflict is the result of a broken truce. The uneasy but mostly accepted way of teaching American history at the secondary level was to reconcile the above impulses by teaching an allegiance to the historic American nation and its institutions, precisely because that nation and its institutions embodied or enabled the pursuit of a more perfect and just union and the spread of democratic values. In effect, American high-school education took from Martin Luther King Jr. the notion of our Founding and its documents as promissory notes. This truce, if it was noticed at all, tended to be critiqued only by paleoconservatives.

 

But, in the last six or seven years, that truce has become untenable as it has come under assault from the Left. As predicted, progressives have adopted a set of ideological commitments — and experienced a series of setbacks — that impel them to reject major features of our Constitution. They are objections to its most anti-majoritarian features — the Electoral College, the Senate, and, in many cases, the Bill of Rights. The far more aggressive critique of the Founders and their work serves this larger agenda of constitutional reform and revolution. The pedagogy in colleges has finally worked its way down to the secondary level.

 

For conservatives, too, this newer revision of American history threatens their own view of what good public schools can do, which is to help students from diverse backgrounds cohere as a people. Instead, this education is taken to be an attempt to further enjoin students into mutual antagonisms, or to pronounce that they are permanently locked into these by the American system itself. No wonder conservatives find it “demoralizing.” That seems to be the point.

 

If polarization makes an education in a shared history impossible, the rationale for remaining in the same schools will go with it. As progressives find themselves able to put more of their political program into class, expect conservatives to embrace “diversity” of schools to escape it.