[Re-post] It's All Our Fault

Because of the holiday this week, I’m reposting one more older piece, that didn’t get a lot of views back when I first uploaded it. New stuff next week, I promise.

We spend a lot of time fighting about what subjects should be taught in our schools and what facts should be included in those subjects, thinking that our tinkering and arguing is essential to the health of the republic—that, perhaps, if we just ban this book, or censor this topic, or include this under-represented perspective, we will fix the ____ that plagues us (which could be, depending on your political persuasion, ignorance, gullibility, and tribalism, or moral relativism, atheism, and multiculturalism, I guess).

In our endless cleverness—and bitterness—we find a way to fight about every subject at every grade level: from how we should teach our youngest students to read, to what we should allow our oldest students to read; from how we should teach our youngest students to develop math fluency, to what kinds of problems they should be allowed to apply their mathematical thinking to.

In all of these arguments, we make an assumption that whatever we teach, our students will learn, and that whatever we ask them to think about, they’ll think about in the same way, and from the same perspective, as their teachers. These are dubious propositions at best, especially once we start talking about high school students. It assumes a pedagogical power on the part of our public school teachers that feels superhuman to me and divorced from any reality I’ve ever experienced. Good luck getting kids to do their homework, much less adopt your worldview.

The thing we argue about far less—and which, it seems to me, has far more effect on the health of our country—is how we teach our children to understand and adopt the basic habits of mind necessary for participation in a republic. At most, we force students to take a civics class where they learn how a bill becomes a law. Is that all we think is required? Do we think that political self-rule is simply automatic? Instinctive? That, left to our own devices, we all understand how to engage with our neighbors in the kind of rational discussion and debate that allows a community—and then a state—and then a nation—to make rules for itself and then live by those rules? If we believe that…why do we believe it? Has anyone been to a school board meeting lately? What are we thinking?

For most of recorded history, the norm has not been community self-rule, but something like feudalism or monarchy (for a fascinating look at pre-recorded history, and the surprising variety of social/political forms and shapes in which we seem to have lived, check out The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber). And in our own time, we’ve seen two examples of so-called Western, allegedly civilized societies sliding from democracy into autocracy: once in the 1930s, and once right now. If democracy is so instinctive, why does it seem to be so hard to hold onto?

And if we believe that democracy is not only our birthright, but coded into our DNA, why are we so afraid that schoolchildren will mindlessly agree with and adopt the opinions of their teachers (and that, therefore, those adult opinions must be tightly monitored and controlled)? Is it just about children—that they have not yet been adequately taught to be critical, skeptical, and rational? If we believe that about seven year-olds, why do we still seem to be believe it about 17 year-olds? And do we still believe it about 27 year-olds?

I would argue that democracy requires habits of mind that are not instinctive and automatic, and that require education and training in order to adhere in adulthood and allow individuals to stand upright and make decisions for themselves and for their communities—decisions that do not simply hand power over to a charismatic charlatan or a bullying strongman. What is natural and instinctive—what appeals to our lazier, less rational, more reactive brains (as per Daniel Kahneman’s metaphor of having two brains, one fast and one slow) is to take mental shortcuts wherever we can, to let other people make difficult decisions and take difficult actions upon themselves, especially if they present themselves as strong. We are capable of thinking and acting for ourselves—but it’s often easier to defer to authority, especially when authority begs, pleads, and cajoles with us to give them that deference.

In the decades after the American Revolution, writers gave a lot of thought to what this new country could be, and what kind of mind and soul was required to make good the promises of our founding documents. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography of the personal virtues he tried to practice and perfect, starting in earliest childhood—virtues that aligned neatly with those of the Roman Stoics who many of the Founders admired for their ability to lead calm and self-directed lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote compellingly about self-reliance and what was required to break free of the constraints of history and the expectations of one’s neighbors. “Trust thyself,” he said. “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” made reliance on one’s own spirit in the face of history and convention something nearly religious. Frederick Douglass, in his famous Fourth of July address, challenged White America to live up to its founding principles and face its hypocrisy in denying those ideals to so many people living on these shores.

All of these thinkers and writers were focused on the new-ness of what they saw in this country—in actuality or at least in potential. All of them saw the need to break free of old chains, old habits, old ways of doing things, if this was truly to become a new world, and not simply a transplant of the old world onto new ground. It was, to them, a project. It required doing. And to do something new required learning something new.

So: where should these habits be learned? Is it the job of American schools to explicitly teach these virtues or habits, as part of some kind of character education curriculum? If so, are we able, anymore, to agree on what those virtues and habits are, and whether schools have any right to teach anything beyond being, you know, nice to each other?

Should these virtues and habits be taught more implicitly, by exposing students to the essential writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, that helped delineate these idea? That seems like the proper role of schooling, and fairly uncontroversial. But how many of our high schools or middle schools are still teaching those writers?

It’s not just about certain Progressives in education deciding that Dead White Men need a downgrade in our curriculum. The mere fact that the stuff is old frightens many teachers (and publishers) away from doing more than publishing a fragment or a summary.

When the Common Core State Standards were being rolled out, I led some workshops to introduce teachers and administrators to the standards and to some of the test questions being developed to assess those standards. Because of the reading standards’ focus on close reading of complex, informational text, and the importance of reading such texts in the academic disciplines and not just in English class, one of the sample assessment items included a passage from John Locke, which students were asked to compare with the Declaration of Independence, to discuss the ways in which Jefferson’s thought was inspired and informed by the earlier, English writer (and the ways in which Jefferson varied from Locke). The audience reacted with, I think it’s fair to say, outrage. How dare the test-makers throw something that long, that complex, that OLD at our students? There was no way their students were going to be able to handle that reading load on a test.

Was this outrage…outrageous? No, in some ways it was perfectly justified. Rolling out a new, more challenging set of academic standards for 13 grade levels and expecting the oldest students immediately to meet those standards, without the benefit of having grown up under them, was foolish. A sane system would have introduced the standards at Kindergarten and then added a year’s worth of new expectations as that cohort grew. But that would have required 13 years of sustained political conviction and capital, which…we don’t have.

On the other hand, was it really outrageous to expect 17 and 18 year-olds, young Americans at or near voting age, to be able to grapple with the foundational texts and ideas of their nation? If so…why? I know the standards were new, but why was the gap between the old and the new so profound and challenging? Why had we stopped expecting young people to be able to read at the same level that Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, and others had written? We still teach Shakespeare (badly, mostly, but still); why is that required and expected, but John Locke is considered a bridge too far? Why was that something new and strange, that students would never have seen before?

This is not merely academic or pedagogical. A strong America needs to be able to understand its own history, and to be capable of reading it in its original voices. A strong America requires people able and willing to identify propaganda, race-baiting, and tribal divisiveness, and to reject it—because it knows what its values and beliefs are. A strong America requires people who know when they’re being played—when they’re being seduced into hurting “others” who are actually just their neighbors. A strong America, upon learning that an adversary nation is trying to influence and upend its elections, should be able to reach across political divides, unites as a country, and says, “Hell no.” A strong America would not wave enormous flags and build golden idols bearing the name and face of a mere political candidate, as if that candidate were God himself, or the avatar of the country.

That has not been this nation. Not in a while.

If we had been taught right, we would know better, and we would say No. It’s as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Ignorant, deluded, fearful people who are easy victims of xenophobia and conspiracy-mongering are not caring neighbors, are not good protectors of their communities, and are not truly free. Citizens who are strong, smart, self-reliant, independent, and hard-to-fool are tricky subjects for bad people to lead, which is why so many of those bad people are happy to see so many citizens ignorant, deluded, and fearful. I call that un-American.

It can’t be the job of schools alone to mold our young people into strong and free Americans. Families matter hugely. What gets said around the dinner table (if anyone eats at the dinner table anymore) matters. Churches, mosques, and synagogues matter. Community civic organizations matter. So much matters. Only the whole community can make the whole community strong.

The whole community. Every child, every family, every religion, every ethnicity, every gender expression, every way of loving and living. Us.

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