All posts by Adam Laats

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION IIc: VALUES. . . of what?

If the moral scheme of multiculturalism can’t deliver on its promise for a moral agenda for America’s public schools, what can traditionalists offer in its stead?  This is where traditionalists’ arguments carry the most weight, in my opinion.  They can draw on deeply embedded notions about the purpose and function of schooling, what historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban have called the “grammar of schooling.”  They can rely on ideas of schooling lodged so solidly in America’s idea of itself that they rarely need to be articulated at all.

In the early 1990s, historian Arthur Zilversmit commented on the strength and durability of these traditional notions.  Zilversmit had studied the ways self-proclaimed progressive ideas of schooling had had limited success in the middle decades of the twentieth century.  One of the leading reasons for this lack of success, Zilversmit argued, was the surprising strength of Americans’ “strange, emotional attachment to traditional schooling patterns.”

Of course, from the traditionalist point of view, there is nothing strange about this attachment.  Rather, traditionalists believe it reflects a sensible, rational commitment to time-tested ideas about schooling.  It only seems mysterious, strange, and emotional to those who assume that schools ought to be radically changing their approach to education.

What are these traditional values of America’s schools?  In future posts, I’ll explore each of the next three notions in more detail.  But in short, traditionalists can offer three clusters of values:  First, schools exist to teach young people things they did not know.  Young people go to school primarily to learn these things.  And that means that they should gain and retain information they did not previously have.

Related to this fundamental conception of schooling is another: Schools will help people improve their social and economic status.  If, that is, young people manage to gain skills and information at schools, they can use that knowledge to secure more lucrative, more prestigious employment. They can move up in society.

Finally, traditionalists can argue that the value scheme of America’s public schools does not need to be radically overhauled in order to include the rich pluralism of American society.  Such traditional values as honesty, bravery, kindness, tolerance, and hard work are common to many cultures, including traditional white European American culture.

These values are anything but strange and mysterious.  In fact, they are so commonly held that most people do not question them at all.  And in spite of decades, indeed, generations, of self-consciously “progressive” attempts to undermine these foundational values of schooling, Americans of all cultural backgrounds and economic classes have continued to cling to these ideas.

 

Further reading: Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago, 1993); David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, 1995).

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by Adam Laats on January 31, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 31, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/31/traditionalist-education-iic-values-of-what/

IN THE NEWS: A SOCIALIST JESUS AND A NEW EDUCATIONAL REALITY FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE

–Thanks to LC

Live Free or Die!  So every New Hampshire license plate proclaims, and a new law in the Granite State looks like it will move New Hampshire residents one step closer to making that decision.

A controversy arose in December, 2010, when two New Hampshire parents pulled their son out of his Bedford High School.  Their complaint was that the boy had been assigned Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed in a personal finance class.  The parents complained that the book called Jesus Christ “a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”

I haven’t read the book, but for many people, them’s fightin words.  Predictably, the controversy drew national attention.  Glenn Beck’s website agreed with the New Hampshire parent that the school district made a terrible curricular decision.  The Huffington Post, not surprisingly, ran an article much more favorable to the school district and to Ehrenreich.

There’s not much in the story, in fact, that should raise eyebrows among ILYBYGTH readers.  As we are well aware, parents often complain about the curricular materials assigned in schools.  Conservative pundits encourage careful scrutiny of reading materials they suspect of anti-religious, anti-patriotic, anti-capitalist materials.

The best publicized case of this nature in the past generation was arguably Mozert v. Hawkins County [Tennessee] Board of Education.  In this case from the mid-1980s, conservative Christian parents objected to the content of their county’s reading series by the textbook publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  The parents tried to convince a series of courts that the series promoted a vicious religious system, one they called “secular humanism.”  In addition, the parents claimed the books promoted a grab-bag of pernicious notions, such as witchcraft, extra-sensory perception, pacifism, and non-traditional gender roles.

There is nothing unusual about conservative parents objecting to the curricular materials their children use in schools.  What makes the Bedford, NH case so extraordinary is that it has led to a remarkable new state law.  Thanks to the publicity from the controversy, the New Hampshire state legislature passed House Bill 542, then recently overrode Governor Lynch’s veto.

According to the new law, in effect as of the recent veto override, parents may demand alternative course materials to any material they find “objectionable.”  The parent or guardian must pay for the new alternative materials, but the school district must locate them.  The parents may also remain anonymous and they do not have to reveal their reasons for objecting to the material in question.

This is new.  This is remarkable.  I have spent a good deal of my professional time in the past few years researching the history of conservative educational activism.  Across the course of the twentieth century, conservatives have had remarkable success in keeping America’s schools traditional.  They have challenged “progressive” pedagogy, the teaching of evolution, the restriction of traditional Protestant religion from public schools, and the removal of traditional patriotic themes from public schools.

Throughout all that time, however, even in the 1920s heyday of anti-evolution state legislation, there has not been to my knowledge a state law that allows parents to object to any material they may find offensive for any reason.  Parents have not had the nearly unlimited right expressed in this new New Hampshire law to demand alternative curricular materials without explanation or justification.

When Governor John Lynch vetoed this bill in July, 2011, he noted that the bill would be “disruptive” and that it would be “difficult for school districts to administer.”  More compelling, Governor Lynch decried the bill’s tendency to push “teachers to go to the lowest common denominator in selecting material, in order to avoid ‘objections’ and the disruption it may cause their classrooms.”

What effect will this remarkable new law have in New Hampshire?  My guess is: not much.  The new law will generally fall into the very wide category of laws that are on the books but unknown and unenforced.  That, after all, was the fate of the anti-evolution laws from the 1920s, until the US Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in the late 1960s.  However, like the case of anti-evolution laws, even in states that did not have such laws, a large percentage of parents and teachers will be influenced by anti-evolution public sentiment.  One large survey of evolution education in 1942 found that eight percent of biology teachers thought evolution education was illegal in their states, even when they taught in states that had not passed such a ban.

In short, this law will not change behavior too drastically.  But that is NOT because teachers and school districts will continue to teach controversial material.  Rather, the law itself will not change behavior since so many teachers and school districts are already bowed down by the weight of perceived public opinion.

 

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by Adam Laats on January 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 26, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/26/in-the-news-a-socialist-jesus-and-a-new-educational-reality-for-new-hampshire/

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION, Part II, The Cult of Multiculturalism (cont.)

In the last few posts (here and here), we have imagined the arguments traditionalists might make that multicultural ideology contains an unacknowledged bias against those who maintain traditional beliefs.  Even if we take multiculturalism on its own terms, however, we run up against unacceptable results in practice.  As even its most earnest promoters recognize, “multiculturalism” has come to include a vast muddle of conflicting meanings.  James Banks, for instance, one of the most prominent advocates of multicultural ideology in schools, sums up the many meanings of multiculturalism into three tendencies.  Multiculturalism, Banks argues, can be an idea, an educational reform movement, and a process.

As an idea, at least in Banks’ exposition, multiculturalism refers to the notion that “all students—regardless of their gender, social class, and ethnic, racial, or cultural characteristics—should have an equal opportunity to learn in school.”  Embedded in this notion is the idea of reform.  Banks argues that in order to achieve this kind of equal opportunity, multiculturalism implies a sustained effort to change schooling.  This must be more than simply including a unit on different ethnic groups in a history class.  This must be more than reading stories about all kinds of ethnicities.  Rather, Banks argues that multiculturalism must include a thorough overhaul of the school as an institution.  Students, teachers, administrators, staff, and parents must all work to create a total environment in which every person feels welcomed and represented.  The totality of this scheme is part of what leads Banks to argue for multiculturalism as a process.  Too many schools and school districts, in Banks’ opinion, merely slap some multicultural window-dressing on traditional schools and call it a day.  Instead, multiculturalism must include a continuing effort to create a truly multicultural environment.

In essence, multiculturalism is the latest attempt to get schools to correct the fundamental injustices of American society.  The promise is appealing.  For most of American history, schools have promised to equalize opportunity.  Do well in school, the tradition assures us, and anyone can be President.  Yet the reality of American education has usually merely reproduced social, economic, and racial hierarchies.  For instance, poor kids went to worse schools.  They tended to be tracked into educational programs that would fit them only for the worst-paid, lowest-prestige jobs.

Multicultural ideology hoped to help remedy that problem.  By including all cultures in schools, multiculturalism promised to achieve many goals simultaneously.  First of all, it would erode the racial hierarchy that kept white people on top.  That hierarchy has often been reproduced intentionally in schools, especially up through the middle of the twentieth century.  After that point, however, many schools have tended to reproduce white privilege unintentionally.

One promise of multicultural ideology is that schools will teach each new generation of white kids that other cultures are equally valid, equally American.  This will have the double value of weakening the power of traditional white supremacy while also showing students of other ethnic backgrounds that their experiences are equally legitimate.  Such non-white students will come to feel welcome in school and able to succeed.  The implicit dominance of white culture that had ruled schools for so long will no longer force students to feel they must abandon their culture in order to do well in school.

This will not just be a racial or ethnic difference.  American schools have a long and ugly history of serving as “sorting machines,” to use Joel Spring’s term.  Multicultural ideology promised to smash that machine.  To allow students of every gender, every race, every economic class, every religion, every sexual identity, to feel equally welcomed by the institution of school.

Inclusive, multicultural schools would open up the benefits of education to everyone, not only those who come to school already skilled in the implicit culture of schooling.  Just as important, multicultural education would deliver better education to those who come from traditionally dominant groups—in other words, for the well-off white kids.  By incorporating and valuing the wealth of cultural experiences into schooling, students of every group would achieve a richer, more authentic education.

Multiculturalism, in short, promised to improve education for all, to eliminate any notion of a zero-sum game.  Multiculturalism would help kids from minority backgrounds while also improving education for those who had started out on top.  In this way, multiculturalism served as only the latest in a long series of panaceas in public education.  By fixing schools in a multicultural direction, the argument went, we could fix society.  We could finally achieve the sort of racial, class, and gender equality that we had been striving for for so long.  Again, a very tall order.

The vast ambition of multiculturalism is part of what led Banks to insist this must be at once an educational reform movement and an ongoing, continuous process.  If not, as Banks and other multicultural proponents recognized, multicultural ideology can easily become something far less promising.

And, in practice, multiculturalism has failed on its own terms.  The way schools and teachers have used it, multiculturalism has degraded into a mishmash of ideas that reify overly simplistic notions of identity among students.  In other words, the effort to include and celebrate the rich cultural mosaic of American life in public schools has instead had an unintentional dehumanizing effect.  Students are trained to see people as expressions of stylized cultural identity, instead of as fully realized persons.  For instance, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos are pigeonholed into exclusively ethnic stereotypes.  The fact that those stereotypes are now cast in a flattering light does not change the fact that non-whites tend to be reduced to mere racial identity.

In addition, multiculturalism in practice tends to promote an idea of ethnicity as something other people have.  Whiteness remains the norm, and other cultures become colorful exceptions to the rule.  So, for instance, multiculturalism in practice promotes the notion that culture means traditional cultures from other countries, perhaps the home countries of American immigrant society.  It tends to promote those cultures as quaint and archaic, not as authentic contemporary notions.

For example, one recent study of purportedly multiculturalist children’s literature found a much more conflicted ideological message.  The authors, Bogum Yoon, Anne Simpson, and Claudia Haag, found that many non-white, non-English-speaking characters in such literature are presented as outsiders.  In other words, in practice, multicultural ideology implied that other cultures were legitimate places to be from, but in order to achieve full personhood, protagonists needed to assimilate to traditional white English cultural norms.

Even uglier, multiculturalism in practice can degrade into a call for racist preferences for traditionally put-upon ethnic groups.  We see this most starkly in the call for Afrocentric curricula.  Led by many scholars based in universities such as Molefi Kete Asante, Maulana Karenga, and Asa Hilliard III, the push for Afrocentric school history began in the early 1980s.  Activists argued that traditional schools had miseducated students for generations, especially African American students.  Instead of forcing a biased and inaccurate European-based history down the throats of black kids, these theorists argued, schools ought to adopt a thoroughly Africanized curriculum.  At the very least, this should put Africa at the center of historical study.  It should teach students that they are not primarily Americans, but primarily Africans in America.  It should also teach students that they share essential racial characteristics.

This was not just ivory-tower theorizing.  Several large school districts adopted some form of Afrocentric curricula during the 1980s and 1990s.  In the Washington DC school district, for instance, one school had an Afrocentric program that started each day with an opening ritual patterned after purportedly African-derived practices.  Students were taught that they were part of a people that saw themselves as spirits that have a body, not bodies that have spirits.  Students were taught that Western culture derived from Africa, stolen, diluted, and bastardized by Greeks and Romans who learned at the feet of Black African teachers.

In the 1990s, superintendent Matthew Prophet encouraged teachers in Portland, Oregon to teach their students that Africa represented the source and inspiration of all culture, including literature, politics, mathematics, and science.  Students should be taught, according to the social-studies material available for Portland teachers, that Africans had colonized South America long before Asians or Europeans.  They should learn that Africa was the source of the Pythagorean theorem and of every significant scientific breakthrough of modern times.  Anything less, in the words of one author of this curriculum guide, would cause “great harm” to students.

These were not unfortunate misinterpretations of multiculturalism’s lofty goals.  Instead, they form a predictable result of an overambitious and overly vague cultural ideology.  The promise of racial and cultural equality that forms the core of multicultural ideology will predictably be used to promote a new version of racism, new visions of cultural hierarchies.  Multiculturalism promises to include all students in schools; it promises to open educational opportunity to all; it insists it can improve education for all.  But in practice, what schools are left with is simply a new racist ideology, one that inverts the traditional pyramid.  In the new multicultural order, however, racism is not eliminated but celebrated in a new way.

As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. complained, multiculturalism waters down real learning.  It turns the study of history and literature into “therapies whose function it is to raise minority self-esteem.”  Left unchecked, such ideas about the proper values for schools will not only dumb down public schools.  By asserting racism in the guise of multiculturalism, by encouraging students and teachers to think of themselves not primarily as individuals but first and most importantly as members of an ethnic group, Schlesinger argues that multiculturalism will lead to the “fragmentation, resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”  Schlesinger was no right-wing crank.  He was one of the most prominent liberal historians of mid-twentieth century America, well known for his elegant prose and for his role as the Kennedys’ “court historian in Camelot.”  It was precisely his embrace of the liberal values of an open, egalitarian, individualistic, humanitarian society that led him to attack the race-driven vagaries of multiculturalist ideology near the end of his career.

Schlesinger was not concerned with protecting the rights of students from traditionalist or conservative Christian backgrounds.  He did not hope to reinstall a regime of prayer and Bible reading in American schools.  He worried that multiculturalism would “disunite” America.  He worried that multiculturalism made true learning impossible.  He worried that multiculturalism heralded a return to racial supremacy as an organizing idea for American schools and culture.

 

Further reading: James A. Banks & Cherry A. McGee Banks, eds., Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 7th Edition (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2010); Amy J. Binder, Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine: National Educational Policy Since 1945 (Longman, 1976); Bogum Yoon, Anne Simpson, Claudia Haag, “Assimilation Ideology: Critically Examining Underlying Messages in Multicultural Literature,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 54 (2) October 2010, pp. 109-119; Matthew W. Prophet, ed., African American Baseline Essays, revised edition (Portland, OR: Multnomah School District, 1990); Michael Olneck, “Terms of Inclusion: Has Multiculturalism Redefined Equality in American Education?” American Journal of Education 101 (1993): 234-60; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, revised and enlarged edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).

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by Adam Laats on January 23, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 23, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/23/traditionalist-education-part-ii-the-cult-of-multiculturalism-cont/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION III: SCHOOLS AS SAVIOR

Whenever an argument for the progressivist transformation of schools comes up, we can be sure the traditionalist rejoinder won’t be far behind: “Why should we transform our schools?  Traditional schools have worked fine for generations, they will work now.”  Behind these traditionalist arguments is a sentiment that America in the past had a certain moral backbone that it lacks today.  The sense—sometimes vague, sometimes explicit—is that today’s schools with their mollycoddling progressivism have created a generation of self-centered, lazy, even criminal youth.  Only traditional schools, in this oft-repeated line of thinking, can help put America back on course.

In fact, just the opposite is true.  It may be true that American society has some troubling fractures.  But those fractures will not be healed with sterner authoritarian classrooms.  Instead, the only way to bring America together—whether or not this returns anyone to any kind of golden age—will be to encourage schools and classrooms in which every student feels himself or herself to be an important member of American society, not merely an inmate in a social and educational processing regime.

Consider the depressing reality.  In America today, whenever there is the slightest crack in the regime of control, people go nuts.  The second there is a power outage in a major city, or a natural disaster, or even a major sporting event, Americans riot.  My hometown of Binghamton, New York, for example, recently experienced a major flood.  Whole neighborhoods were engulfed by the rising Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers.  Police and emergency crews couldn’t keep up with the situation.  To be fair, lots of people—I like to think most people—put aside their selfish interests and tried to help those folks who had been flooded out of their homes.  But there were the predictable number of people who took to looting.  They knew police could not patrol the downtown streets, so they helped themselves to anything left dry in downtown stores.

And sunny Binghamton is much friendlier in its rioting than bigger cities.  I remember back when the Chicago Bulls won their first of three national championships, back in the 1990s, we hurried downtown to see the predictable riots.  Drunk people spilled out of sports bars in the Rush/Division neighborhood to celebrate the victory.  Before you knew it, taxis had been flipped over and lit on fire, and horse-mounted police were doing their damnedest to clear the streets.  The crowd by then had expanded.  Not just the white-collar/loosened tie/after-work sports fans were yelling and pushing back against the cops. The crowd had been bolstered by no-collar/no tie/no-work enthusiasts from the vast public-housing complex just down the street, Cabrini Green.

It was obvious that the police couldn’t handle the situation.  That slight loosening of the regime was all it took.  Soon the riot script played out to its predictable end.  People smashed store windows, threw bottles and rocks at the line of police, and waited for the inevitable tear gas to chase them away from the area.

And why?  Because Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippin, and the rest had defeated another basketball team.  It doesn’t matter the reason.  As soon as people feel the slightest crack in the regime, as soon as it becomes clear that the government cannot enforce its will, people will riot.

What does all this have to do with progressive education?  Everything.  Traditionalist educators may point to riots and social upheaval as evidence that young people today are no longer being taught respect and obedience.  They may insist that schools need to return to traditional disciplinary schemes.  Maybe even get back to some good old-fashioned corporal punishment.  But just the opposite is true.

Riots like this are not the result of new-fangled progressive notions of including every young person as the most important decision-maker in schools and education.  Riots like this have appeared in every society, whenever authorities try and fail to maintain total domination of a population.

Consider an example from the roots of United States history.  In Boston, in 1770, tensions had been building up between the British regime and the young colonists.  (In this case, the youth of both sides played a crucial role.  The soldiers were mostly teenagers, and they were taunted and provoked by a crowd led by teenagers.)  In March, a group of soldiers found themselves surrounded by a crowd of angry colonists, taunted to fire their muskets, pelted with rocks and snowballs.  Finally they fired, killing five of the crowd and pushing the rest of the colonies further on the path to open revolution.

Here’s the question for traditionalists: were those angry colonists the product of touchy-feely, ‘progressive’ schools?  Or had they received whatever education they received in thoroughly traditional ways?

The point is that coercive regimes—as the British were perceived to be in Boston, in March, 1770—are only able to hold on to power by brute force.  And traditional schools in the United States are nothing if not coercive regimes.  When students and their families agree with the regime, the coercion is hidden.  But when they do not, the coercion emerges in its ugliest forms.  This is why schools in poor neighborhoods look and feel so much like prisons, with armed guards, metal detectors, and very limited student freedom.

There are two possible solutions.  First, and most common, we can bolster the effectiveness of traditional regimes by strengthening the coercive arm.  Schools can hire more truant officers to round up absentees.  They can implement stricter rules for student dress and behavior.  They can mandate “zero-tolerance” rules to crack down on student resistance.  These are traditional responses, and they can be effective in the short term.

However, the costs of this kind of stepped-up coercion are obvious.  In order to compel compliance with the school regime, school administrators must alienate each student.  When people—even young people—are forced to act in certain ways, it eliminates the likelihood that those people will embrace those actions.  When they are forced to go to school, forced to be in classrooms, and forced to submit to the authority of teachers and school administrators, they are unlikely to see those schools as places in which they can improve themselves.  They will not embrace the process of education in the ways they must if they are to actually learn something.  Some might.  But those few are the exception, rather than the rule.

And, predictably, whenever there is the smallest crack in the efficiency of the coercion, students will take advantage of it.  They may not flip over taxi cabs and battle with mounted police each time, but they will disrupt the function of the school in any way they can.

The second solution is the only sensible solution.  In order to have schools in which students learn, the primary goal must be to encourage students to embrace the process of schooling as something they want to do.  As argued in other posts, students must see schooling as more like working with a personal trainer, and less like breaking rocks.

The earliest roots of tax-funded public schooling included this notion of schooling as the best defense against anarchy.  Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century leader of the public school movement, warned that mobs were nothing more than “wild beasts, that prove their right to devour by showing their teeth.”  In order to tame those mobs, Mann argued, the public must fund schools to teach young people that they played an important role in American society as empowered citizens, not merely as subjects and ‘wild beasts.’  In 1877 the US Commissioner of Education warned of ‘the enormities possible in our communities if the systematic vagrancy of the ignorant, vicious, and criminal classes should continue to increase.” In his opinion, “Capital, therefore, should weigh the cost of the tomb and the tramp against the cost of universal and sufficient education.”

These days, the only schools that can effectively defeat the tendency of people to riot against their coercive regimes are schools that do not resort to the tactics of such regimes.  Students must see themselves as part of the schooling process.  They must be given authentic power within the school regime.  Otherwise, it will be seen as a coercive imposition and resisted accordingly.  Traditionalists may gripe that this kind of empowerment will lead to a breakdown in social order, as every person acts in his or her immediate self interest.

Not so.  The mentality of the looter does not come from a breakdown in traditional values in schools.  Instead, it comes from a consistent application of traditional schooling.  When schooling is a coercive experience, young people are trained to see school and society as a heavy hand, an imposition of external power.  When the pressure of that hand is relaxed in the slightest, as must happen occasionally, young people who have not embraced their role as a valuable part of that school and society will act aggressively.  They will take what they want.  They will loot, ignite, riot.

In contrast, a progressive educational system, not just in every individual classroom but in the schooling system as a whole, trains young people to be invested in both school and society.  They embrace their role as empowered members of that society.  When the power goes out, or if the Bulls win the playoffs, people—even young people—who are invested in their society will help hand out candles.  Young people who spent their youth incarcerated in traditional authoritarian schools seize upon the temporary weakness of the regime in order to lash out.

 

FURTHER READING: Horace Mann, Life and Works, IV; Report of the Honorable John Eaton, US Commissioner of Education, for the year 1877, on Crime and Education.

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by Adam Laats on January 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 19, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/19/progressive-education-iii-schools-as-savior/

From the Archives: Ralph Spitzer, TD Lysenko, and the Left-Wing Attack on Science

In any culture-war debate these days, we can count on a few predictable ideological combinations.  The conservative/traditional/Right side will fight for freer markets, smaller government, more patriotism, more traditional social mores, and greater public Christianity.  The progressive/liberal/Left side will fight for greater egalitarianism, more robust government, and multiculturalism.

One of the other relatively consistent ideological markers these days seems to be an attitude toward science.  Conservatives, whether they like it or not, are now the side of anti-science.  Whether it is evolution or human-caused climate change, the Right is now the side that is skeptical of the claims of mainstream science.  Of course, as with any issue in this culture-war minefield, we need to be careful to note that this does not mean that these culture warriors are necessarily against science as such.  Rather, many conservatives will adopt an attitude of profound skepticism toward the directions in which mainstream research-university-based science research has gone.  REAL science, they might insist, will confirm their claims.  But ‘science falsely so called,’ in the minds of many cultural conservatives, has come to dominate the academy and academic press.  They are not anti-science, these conservatives might insist, only anti-false science. To the person on the street, though, it is easy to conclude that the Right is the side that always opposes science.

During a recent stint with some 1940s newspapers, I came across a story that complicates those comfortable assumptions.  Ralph Spitzer’s story is a good reminder of the reasons why we need to keep these storylines complicated.  It points out the danger of assuming any necessary relationship between science and politics.  Spitzer was fired from his teaching job at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University) in 1949 for his political beliefs.  At the time, he joined a swelling number of higher-education faculty who had lost their jobs for affiliation with Communist- or purportedly “Communist-front” organizations.

But unlike Joseph Butterworth, Herbert J. Phillips, and Ralph H. Gundlach, all fired from the University of Washington for their Communist Party membership or sympathy, Spitzer was also fired for his opposition to mainstream science.

Oregon State President August Strand accused Spitzer of betraying not only America, but also science.  Strand alleged that Spitzer’s public comments in favor of the prominent Soviet scientist TD Lysenko pushed Spitzer outside the range of legitimate scientific discussion.  By endorsing Lysenko, Strand accused, Spitzer had denounced the mainstream science of genetics and natural selection.  Thus, Spitzer was fired not only for being a communist sympathizer, but for being a sympathizer of communist anti-science.

Historian David Joravsky has argued that the popular understanding of Lysenko’s argument has become something of a durable myth.  Most people remember Lysenko’s scientific regime, if they remember it at all, as an ideological attack on genetics.  According to Joravsky, some have remembered Lysenkoism as an attack on the capitalist assumptions of genetics.  This myth presents Lysenko as a totalitarian ideologue, refusing to acknowledge the truth of genetics, due to mental blocks derived from Stalinism.  Humans, according to the Lysenko myth, must remain malleable in nature.  They must be able to form themselves into new beings, pushing a neo-Lamarckian understanding of human heredity to the fore.  In other words, according this Lysenko myth, humans must not have heritable DNA, since we know from Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism that humans can be recreated by new conditions.  Changes made in one lifetime can be passed on to future generations.

According to Joravsky, the truth of the Lysenko affair was far less ideological.  In Joravsky’s reading, the real thing was not theoretical or even political, except in the grubbiest of senses.  “Not only genetics but all the sciences that impinge on agriculture were tyrannically abused by quacks and time-servers for about thirty-five years,” Joravsky argued.   This was not done out of an ideological demand that humans be understood to be perfectable, but only because of a “self-deceiving arrogance among political bosses.”  The whole thing was mainly “brutal irrationality in the campaign for improved farming.”

In 1948, the Soviet scientific establishment, after long years of back and forth debate between anti-Mendelian Lysenkoists and modern geneticists, finally prohibited the science of genetics altogether.  This was the decision that Spitzer lamely defended.

Before we look at Spitzer’s defense, however, we need to take a closer look at the Lysenkoist vision of science.  What did Lysenko himself say?

Lysenko in 1935 gained control over the new science of agrobiology.  He engaged in a series of big new programs.  Each suggested a quick agricultural fix, such as a way to plant wheat in cold and arid areas, or to grow potatoes in warmer climes.  Instead of becoming implicated in the inevitable failure of these panaceas, Lysenko moved on in each case to identify himself with a new type of problem and quick solution.  Those who demurred from his over-optimistic and unscientific solutions were in danger of being labeled “wreckers” for their anti-Soviet pessimism.

By 1945, Lysenko insisted that plants such as oaks would thin themselves.  Out of community feeling, Lysenko argued, the weakest would kill themselves.   Thus, no thinning by hand was required.  This notion effectively repudiated the modern notion of natural selection.  It embraced a thoroughly unmodern notion that organisms would pass along inherited attributes, a notion usually referred to as “Lamarckism.”  In this case, Lysenko and his disciples argued, in effect, that the inherited characteristics of plants and animals could be radically changed by changes in their environment.  Most famously, Lysenkoites insisted that rye could grow on wheat plants, given the right environment.  This could, Lysenko’s disciples insisted, instantly increase agricultural yields in cold, dry climates.  Furthermore, Lysenkoite science insisted that the fellow-feeling among oak trees allowed for a massive planting policy.  Peasants could scatter acorns and let the resulting clusters of oak trees thin themselves.  With very little cost, this policy would lead to a massive forestation of the Russian steppe, turning its dry cold climate into a moist, warm one.  Such grandiose promises made modern scientists nervous.  They did not see the evidence on which these claims were based, because in Lysenkoist science no such evidence was required.

Lysenko’s Soviet approach to science was not the idiosyncratic tyranny that some have taken it for.  It grew out of a long Russian tradition of skepticism toward European culture in general.  Like the nineteenth-century Panslavists, some Russian chauvinists, before and after the 1917 Revolution, insisted that Western culture, including Western science, did not fit the Russian or Soviet world.

For example, before the Revolution, soil scientist SK Bogushevski denounced western methods of science as inapplicable to Russia.  As with American creationists, this kind of Russian anti-science did not generally denounce the idea of science.  Rather, as with the “anti-scientists” in twentieth-century American conservative circles, Russian and Soviet anti-scientists denounced mainstream science as misguided.

For example, in the early Soviet era, President Kalinin of the Agricultural Institute told his faculty, “There must be barbarism so that, from this soil, democratic, simple science can emerge.”  Similarly, in an early telegram to Lenin, Stalin articulated a vision of an alternate, superior version of science.  Stalin had insisted the Navy attack a fortress.  Naval experts pooh-poohed the plan.  But it worked.  And after it worked, Stalin wrote, “The naval specialists declare that taking [the fortress] by sea subverts naval science.  All I can do is bemoan so-called science.”  This kind of attitude toward science—that the nominal scientific experts really did not know what they were doing—sounds very similar to the kind of science promoted by Biblical creationists in twentieth-century America.  Of course, the preferred model of science was different for American creationists than it was for Stalinist Lysenkoists.  For Biblical creationists, real science derives from Scripture.  For Soviet or Russian ideologues, real science derives from chauvinist Russian or Soviet ideology.  Having pure, correct science, in this view, did not mean deriving it from religious sources, but rather from indigenous Russian peasant wisdom.

Throughout his career, Lysenko called his version of science “Michurinism.”  Michurin had been an agricultural outsider, a fruit-tree breeder with distinctly original and anti-scientific ideas about science and agriculture.  His popularity resulted largely from his aggressive style.  In 1930 a Bolshevik literary magazine (October) promoted Michurin as a “people’s” scientist: the editors declared the needed goal to “Michurinize” the country:

to knock out sleepiness with punches, with demands, with insistence, with daring.  With daring to master and transform the earth, nature, fruit.  Is it not daring to drive the grape into the tundra!  Drive!  Drive!  Drive! Into the furrows, into the gardens, into the orchards, into the machines of jelly factories. . . .  Faster and faster, . . . faster comrade agronomists!

Clearly, this isn’t much of a scientific argument.  Nevertheless, it WAS a powerful cultural argument about science and the nature of science.  Outside of scientific circles, and outside of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, this departure from mainstream science did not win a lot of support.  But it did convince one cultural A-lister.  In 1951, Bertholt Brecht composed a long, remarkable poem in celebration of Lysenko’s anti-science.  (Thanks to Robert C. Conrad and Ralph Ley who translated it into English in Autumn, 1976 issue of New German Critique, pp. 142-152).          “The Rearing of Millet” lionized Lysenkoite science as the true Soviet science.  It made heroes of peasants in their pre-scientific “hut labs,” exploring ways to leapfrog over Western agricultural science with Soviet zeal and Stakhanovite exertion.  A few stanzas will suffice to convey the poem’s flavor:

It was ten times that of previous years.

All winter, huddled around the oven’s fire

They praised in the village Berziyev’s millet seed.

But the old man thought only of an even better kind.

Dream the golden if!                                        

See the beautiful sea of millet rise!

Sower, know

That they are already one: tomorrow’s deed and today’s surmise!

…. So let us always with newer skills

Change this earth’s effect and form

Happily measuring thousand-year-old wisdom

With the new wisdom one year old.

Dream the golden if!

See the beautiful sea of millet rise!

Sower, know

That they are one: tomorrow’s deed and today’s surmise!

Clearly, for Brecht as for much of the Soviet scientific establishment, something was going on beyond the boundaries of modern scientific endeavor.  A portion of Soviet scientists embraced “Michurinism” as science, not for scientific reasons, but for either pragmatic political considerations or excessive ideological zeal.  They dreamed that they could overthrow accepted scientific “wisdom/ With the new wisdom one year old.”

To be fair, these reasons did not get far outside of the zone of Soviet influence.  Not even Ralph Spitzer supported this kind of Soviet science.  Nor did Spitzer actually denounce modern genetics or the idea of natural selection.  Spitzer was not a geneticist or an agronomist.  Rather, he was a chemist, and his damning support for Lysenkoism came in a letter he wrote to Chemical and Engineering News.  In his letter, Spitzer took issue with an article that had dismissed Lysenko’s claims to superior science.  Spitzer contended that the Soviet Union’s Party control over science did not differ in essential ways from the financial control of basic research in the capitalist world.  In both systems, Spitzer argued, only that research could be conducted that won the support of influential higher-ups in the establishment.

In addition to Spitzer’s and Spitzer’s wife activism in favor of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, this moderate level of support for Lysenko was enough for President Strand.  “I do not deny the right under the law to work for the Communist Party,” Strand conceded in a public statement after the firing, “but I do claim that the administration of the college has the right to terminate an annual contract.  We do not care to have Dr. Spitzer as a permanent part of the staff!”

For Strand, the issue was not one of science vs. anti-science, but rather Americanism vs. Communism.  Spitzer’s sin was not that he clung to an alternative notion of science, but rather that he defended the legitimacy of the Soviet method of funding science.

Beyond the sad result for Spitzer’s career, this brush with Lysenkoism in the American academy should be of interest to everyone interested in America’s creation/evolution debate.  There are at least four notable parallels between Soviet and American anti-science.

First of all, the crux of the Lysenko Affair, according to David Joravsky, was that between roughly 1935 and 1965, Soviet scientists could not safely dispute the scientific truth of the official ideological line.  Thus, Stalin’s nod of support in favor of Michurinism meant that all Soviet scientists who wanted to continue working had to at least offer lip service to the scientific truths of Lysenko’s ideas.

The outrage to mainstream scientists, in the cases of both Lysenkoism and American Biblical creationism, is that a political or religious source is given primacy over scientific discoveries.  For American creationists, the Bible lays down the orthodox line.  Whatever does not agree with it must not be scientifically true.  For Soviet scientists, especially in the high period of Lysenkoite influence between 1948 and 1952, whatever disagreed with Lysenko could not be officially recognized as scientifically legitimate.

Another intriguing similarity is the use of scientific-sounding language to buttress claims of scientific legitimacy by both Lysenko and Biblical creationists.  Lysenko famously used language that Soviet scientists found maddeningly vague.  He refused to offer scientifically valid evidence for his claims.  In its place, he dished out rhetorical gems such as the following:

The work of the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetics (Odessa) is based precisely on the established facts of such an absolutely definite sequentiality of the connection of the development of the hereditary base in stages, and of the latter in organs and characters. . . .

These solitary bottlenecks will be overcome in the process of segregation of the heterozygote by means of a mutual replacement of the bad index of one form by the analogous good index of the second, and conversely.

Non-scientists can be forgiven for finding these kinds of sentences meaningless.  However, trained scientists also found them to be nothing but fluff.  Critics of American Biblical creationism make the same charge against the science-like rhetoric of prominent creationists.  In a recent article defending the notion that complex organs imply intelligent design, Jerry Bergman employed some scientific-sounding rhetoric:

Likewise, the left RLN has a different anatomical trajectory than one would first expect, and for very good reasons.  In contrast to [paleontologist Donald] Prothero’s claim, the vagus nerve (the longest of the cranial nerves) travels from the neck down toward the heart, and then the recurrent laryngeal nerve branches off from the vagus just below the aorta (the largest artery in the body, originating from the left ventricle of the heart and extending down the abdomen). The RLN travels upward to serve several organs, some near where it branches off of the vagus nerve, and then travels back up to the larynx.

I’m not commenting here on the validity of Bergman’s claims.  But I do want to point out that modern American Biblical creationists value this kind of tone, a clinical authorial voice that implies a thorough mastery of the latest in mainstream science.  Whenever mainstream scientists examine the scientific validity of such claims, however, they invariably conclude that there is no real science behind them.

Third, both Lysenko and American creationists tend at times to belittle the academic nature of mainstream science.  Lysenko argued that mainstream science did not care enough about practical results.  Such scientists, Lysenko insisted, waited too long to produce their findings.  They waited for experimental results while Soviet peasants starved.  “It is better to know less,” Lysenko famously quipped, “but to know just what is necessary for practice.”  Similarly, American creationists have tended toward a deep skepticism toward mainstream science.  In spite of what some critics have assumed, creationists have usually not presented themselves as opponents of science as a whole.  Rather, American creationists have tended to argue that mainstream scientists been led down an unscientific path.  Like Lysenko, American creationists have offered their science as superior to the kinds of immoral and impractical science coming of major research universities.

Finally, one important parallel between Lysenkoism and American Biblical creationism has been the effect of each on teaching.  Those interested in American creationism will not be surprised to hear that high-school textbooks in America have tended to downplay the importance of evolution.  For example, Ella T. Smith’s 1938 edition of Exploring Biology (Harcourt, Brace) informed readers that “Evolution is a fact.  Plants and animals do change and have been changing.” In this edition, she told readers that for humans, too, “The fossil evidence is conclusive that man himself did not appear suddenly on the earth in his present form, but has gradually developed from a much more primitive species.”  The results of political pressure on publishers can be seen in the next editions of Smith’s book.  In the 1954 edition of this book, Smith backed away from her calm assertion about the facticity of evolution.  She told readers that evidence “leads scientists to the conclusion that the plants and animals of today are the changed descendants of the plants and animals of the past.”  There was another word to describe that change, Smith included, “That word is evolution.”  But Smith tended to use the word “change” instead.  When she described “the modern point of view,” for instance, Smith gave a bland description of evolution: “Biologists agree today that plants and animals have changed in the past, and continue to change.”  Even that vague reference to evolution did not satisfy the powerful critics.  By the 1959 edition, long references to “evolution” in the indexes of earlier editions had been cut down to one line.  Smith’s 1959 edition informed readers only that “The history of living things is a long one.  Much of it is still unknown.”  A ten-page section on the history of evolutionary theory was eliminated entirely, and in its place Smith offered a brief suggestion that students do a report on evolutionary theorists such as Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lamarck, or Hugo De Vries.

A similar progression marked the development of high-school textbooks in the Soviet Union.  One prominent textbook, Osnovy Darvinizma, by MI Melnikov, removed all mention of chromosomes and genes from its 1941 edition, though Melnikov had been an ardent supporter of the science of genetics before then.  According to David Joravsky, secondary science education in the Lysenko era became “a mixture of natural history, old-fashioned Darwinism, and meaningless chatter about Michurinism.”  As the political strength of Lysenkoism increased, so did the proportion of textbook content devoted solely to Lysenkoist ideas.  It was only in 1966 after Lysenko had been deposed that secondary-school textbooks in the Soviet Union again included any measure of modern science.

Certainly, there remain enormous differences between the Lysenkoist critique of mainstream science and the creationist one.  For evolutionists and mainstream scientists, however, it is important to note that attacks on the legitimacy of their work can come from many different directions.  Ralph Spitzer’s academic leftism demonstrated just as much contempt for the impartiality of mainstream science as would the right-wing critique of science by any creationist.

For creationists, it must be of significant interest that the mainstream scientific establishment can be threatened so significantly by political regimes.  The ability of Lysenko to promote his vision of proper science for decades, despite the vociferous objection of the mainstream scientific establishment, must offer an intriguing glimpse into the possibilities of alternative science.

FURTHER READING: “Lysenko Theory Sets off West Coast Imbroglio,” Harvard Crimson, May 25, 1949; Tom Bennett, “The Spitzer Affair: President Strand and the Communist Threat,” The Oregon Stater (February, 1997): 21-25; “College Ousts Professor Over Theory,” Pasadena Star News, February 24, 1949, pg. 2; David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Harvard University Press, 1970); Valerii Soifer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (Rutgers University Press, 1994); Loren Graham, Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Jerry Bergman, “Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Is Not Evidence of Poor Design,” Acts & Facts 39 (2010): 12-14.

 

 

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by Adam Laats on January 13, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 13, 2012

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In the News: Conservatism a Category of “Diversity” at Iowa Law School?

This just in: Now being a “conservative” is a legally actionable category.  A story in yesterday’s New York Times tells the tale of conservative activist Teresa R. Wagner.  Wagner had applied for a job at the University of Iowa College of Law in 2006.  She was not hired, and recently she won the right to sue from the Eighth Circuit US Court of Appeals in St. Louis.  She hasn’t won anything yet, but the circuit court ruled that she had shown enough evidence that the decision not to hire Wagner was due to unconstitutional discrimination against Wagner’s political beliefs.

Apparently, the smoking gun here was a statement in 2007 by the school’s Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson.  Carlson said Wagner ought not be hired since most people at the school “despise her politics (and especially her activism about it).”

Wagner doesn’t dispute her fierce partisan politics. She has worked for the National Right to Life Commitee and the Family Research Council.

One thing that makes this looming lawsuit so interesting to all those interested in the culture wars is that the notion of conservatives as a special kind of persecuted minority has become such a large piece of the jigsaw puzzle of cultural conservatism.  As we have noted on other posts, creationists have complained about this prejudice for years.  Jerry Bergman, for instance, insisted that he was refused tenure at Bowling Green State University due to his religious beliefs.  Clifford Burdick was refused his doctoral degree at the University of Arizona.  He and his supporters have argued that he was only denied due to his religious beliefs.

Of course, these are very different cases.  Some mainstream scientists will find it perfectly appropriate to refuse tenure or a doctorate in science to someone who dissents from one of the basic premises of mainstream science.  At a law school, however, faculty can agree on basic principles, while holding different political ideologies.  In other words, it is not as if Teresa Wagner disputes the existence of the Constitution.

In any case, students of the culture wars will be watching the progression of this case carefully.  Even if the legal issues in play don’t technically mean much for other sorts of conservatives, a legal decision that conservatism should be considered a category of ‘cultural diversity’ will doubtlessly be used as a weapon in upcoming culture-war skirmishes.

 

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by Adam Laats on January 10, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 10, 2012

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From the Archives: Of Penises and Progressive Schools

Like most other culture-war issues, the enduring battles over the proper form and function of schooling have tended to fight with caricatures rather than realities.  Each side has produced compelling fictions about the dangers of ‘tyrannical’ traditional schools or ‘anarchic’ progressive ones.  Among fans of progressive education, the generations have not produced a more damning portrait of traditional schooling than Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind.

Gradgrind hammered home his bullheaded vision of the proper goal of schooling:

‘“Now, what I want is Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!”

‘The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.’

A little bit later in the story, Gradgrind receives a visit from an official in the government bureau of education.  The two reach perfect agreement on the essence of proper schooling:

‘“Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And “Fact, fact, fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.  You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.”’

This sketch of the cruelties of traditional education from 1854 could just as easily be a conversation from 1954 or 2004.  The caricature of traditionalist education is that it harps senselessly and incessantly on the need for young children to memorize and regurgitate ‘Facts, Facts, Facts!’  Every traditionalist since 1854 has lambasted “progressive” schools for including fads and frills, of ignoring the overwhelming importance of ‘Facts, Facts, Facts!’

For their part, traditionalists can’t hope for a more ridiculous picture of the perils and puerility of progressive education than we find in the 1955 novel Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis.  This is a title that resonated powerfully with Americans when it first came out.  It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, and sold over two million copies.  Inevitably, it was made into a Broadway play and musical, then into a Hollywood movie.  Apparently, the musical still makes an appearance every now and again.

The novel tells the story of young Patrick Dennis, a ten-year-old orphan sent in 1929 to live with his free-spirit Aunt Mame.  Mame lives the life of the New York intellectual avant-garde to the hilt.  At first, young Patrick is terrified by the outlandish characters his aunt surrounds herself with, but he soon embraces her slapdash bohemian elegance.

When it comes time to send the boy to school, Aunt Mame subverts his dying father’s last request that the boy be sent to a “conservative school.”  Instead, she finds Patrick a place in a “completely revolutionary” school run by her friend Ralph, a man who scolds Mame for allowing the boy to read.

When young Patrick arrives at the “progressive” school, he falls in with a school regime that typified contemporary stereotypes of the foibles of progressive education.  The portrait so perfectly captures the enduring caricature of excessive progressive schooling that I’ll include a good long chunk of it here:

When we got there, the big room was filled with naked children of all ages racing around and screaming.  Ralph came forward, as naked as the day he was born, and shook hands cordially.

‘Isn’t he lovely,’ Auntie Mame gushed.  ‘Just like a Praxiteles.  Oh, darling, I know you’re going to love it here!’

A square little yellow-haired woman, also naked, rushed up and kissed Auntie Mame.  Her name was Natalie.  She and Ralph were running the school together.

‘Now you just tag along with Ralph and enjoy yourself, my little love, and I’ll see you back at the flat in time for tea.’

Auntie Mame departed with a gay wave and I was left alone, the only person in the place who was wearing any clothes.

            ‘Come in here and disrobe, yes?’ Natalie said, ‘then join the others?’

            I always felt a little like a picked chicken at Ralph’s school, but it was pleasant and I never had to do anything.  It was a big, stark, whitewashed room with a heated linoleum floor, quartz glass skylights, and violet ray tubes running around the available ceiling.  There were no desks or chairs, just some mats where we could lie down and sleep whenever we wanted, and, in the center of the room, a big white structure that looked like a cow’s pelvis.  We were supposed to crawl in, around, and over this if we felt like it, and whenever one of the younger children did, Ralph would give Natalie’s broad bottom a resounding smack and chuckle, ‘Back to the womb, eh Nat!’

There was a communal toilet—‘Nip the inhibitions in the bud’—and all sorts of other progressive pastimes.  We could draw or finger-paint or make things in Plasticine.  There were Guided Conversation Circles, in which we discussed our dreams and took turns telling what we were thinking at the moment.  If you felt like being antisocial, you could just be antisocial.  For lunch we ate raw carrots, raw cauliflower—which always gave me gas—raw apples, and raw goat’s milk.  If two children ever quarreled, Ralph would make them sit down with as many others as were interested and discuss the whole thing.  I thought it was awfully silly, but I got quite a thorough suntan.

But I didn’t stay long enough at Ralph’s school to discover whether it did me good or harm.  My career there—and Ralph’s too, for that matter—ended just six weeks after it began.

Ralph and Natalie, under the misapprehension that their young followers did any work at school, organized an afternoon period of Constructive Play so as to send us all home in a jolly frame of mind.  The general idea was that the children, all except the really antisocial ones, were to participate in a large group game that would teach us something of Life and what awaited us beyond the portals of the school.  Sometimes we’d play Farmer and attend to the scrubby avocado plants Natalie grew.  At other times we’d play Laundry and wash all of Ralph’s underwear, but one of the favorite games of the smaller fry was one called Fish Families, which purported to give us a certain casual knowledge of reproduction in the lower orders.

It was a simple game and rather good exercise.  Natalie and all the girls would crouch on the floor and pretend to lay fish eggs and then Ralph, followed by the boys, would skip among them, arms thrust sideways and fingers wiggling—‘in a swimming motion, a swimming motion’—and fertilize the eggs.  It always brought down the house.

On my last day at Ralph’s we’d been playing Fish Families for about half an hour.  Natalie and the girls were on the linoleum and Ralph started to lead the boys through the school of lady fish.  ‘A swimming motion, a swimming motion!  Now! Spread the sperm, spread the sperm!  Don’t forget that little mother fish there, Patrick, spread the sperm, spread the . . .’

                        There was a sudden choking sound.

                        ‘My God!’ a familiar voice gasped.

            We all turned around and there, fully dressed and looking like the angriest shark in the sea, stood [Patrick’s “conservative” trustee] Mr. Babcock. . . . With one deft motion, he yanked me out of the melee.  ‘God damn it!  You get your clothes on and hurry.  I want to talk to that crazy aunt of yours and I want you to be there with me!’  He threw me in the dressing room.  ‘As for you, you filthy pervert,’ he shouted to Ralph, ‘you haven’t heard the last of this!’ . . .

The next day Ralph’s school was raided by the police, and the tabloids, caught in a lull between ax murders, became profoundly pious about all of progressive education.  Over delicately retouched photographs of Ralph and Natalie and the student body were headlines such as SEX SCHOOL SEIZED, with articles by civic leaders and an outraged clergy that all seemed to begin: ‘Mother, What Is Your Child Being Taught?’

Some of the emphasis on Freud as a panacea for curing children of traditional hang-ups seems a bit dated, but the notion of over-eager progressive school leaders establishing bedlams under the cover of freeing young minds does not.  Every generation of progressive school leader has suffered from comparisons—voiced or silent—to this kind of caricature of the dangers of progressive schooling.

Of course, progressive educators will counter that this kind of cartoonish depiction says nothing about the realities of progressive education.  More important, though, to understanding the seemingly permanent culture war over the proper nature of education, this stereotype of the eventual result of progressive schooling has always had enormous cultural power.  Many traditionalists have argued that any opening in the traditional school regime will lead eventually to some sort of chaotic free-for-all.  For most traditionalists, however, Patrick Dennis’ rose-colored nostalgia for the bumbling Freudian ineptitude of Ralph and Natalie mistakes the more common result.  Not only will students “never have to do anything” constructive in such muddle-headed progressive schools, but the students will soon be robbed of any sense of traditional morality.  They will descend, as in Ralph’s game of Fish Families, to little more than scrabbling beasts, learning that they should consume raw vegetables from the field, that they ought to defecate in public, and that they should see the end and goal of their animal existence as nothing more than laying eggs and spewing sperm.

READINGS: Charles Dickens, Hard Times, For These Times (New York: Signet Classics, 1961); Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame (New York: Vanguard Press, 1955).

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by Adam Laats on January 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in From the Archives, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 7, 2012

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TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION IIa: The Cult of Multiculturalism (cont.)

In an earlier post, we argued that the dominant ideology of public schooling speaks in the language of inclusion and tolerance, but it therefore must exclude and suppress any traditionalist notions of a single transcendent truth.  Fundamentalists have complained long and loud that such unacknowledged discrimination is at the heart of contemporary education.  They have appropriated the language of the twentieth-century civil rights revolution to appeal for their own rights as an aggrieved minority.

For instance, in 1984 the pro-evolution American Association for the Advancement of Science invited prominent creationist Duane Gish to a meeting between creationists and evolutionists.  When he arrived, Gish complained that he had not been afforded the equal treatment he had been promised.  The conveners of the “confrontation,” Gish claimed, had disingenuously told Gish that they had not had time to invite more creationists, but they had found time, he noted, to include more evolutionists.  Such unfair treatment, Gish complained, allowed biased evolutionists “to do what is done every day in practically every university in the United States.”  The evolutionists could dominate the proceedings and relegate the science of creationism to the role of the unwelcome outsider.  Gish protested against such unfair treatment by concluding, “I will proceed to take one of the two seats on the back of the bus reserved for the creationists in this meeting.”

Like other beleaguered minority groups, Gish implied, fundamentalists could not get a fair hearing in mainstream academic culture.  Other fundamentalist authors agreed.  Jerry Bergman, for example, complained that he had been refused tenure at Bowling Green State University merely because he held fundamentalist views.  He admitted that he had spoken with students about his beliefs, but not as part of his instruction.  He had talked with students about it, but to refuse him tenure for that reason, Bergman argued, was as if a “black were fired on the suspicion that he had ‘talked to students about being black,’ or a woman being fired for having ‘talked to students about women’s issues.’”  Those who might be expected to come to Bergman’s defense, he complained, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, did not, since “many members are intolerant, narrow-minded, anti-religious bigots.”  In Bergman’s opinion, “Not since Nazi Germany turned on the Jews has such widespread intolerance existed in a modern, ‘advanced,’ educated nation.”

Other examples of discrimination against fundamentalists and especially creationists in America’s pluralist schools have become legendary in fundamentalist circles.  One of the most well-worn sagas of intolerance in American higher ed among fundamentalists is the story of Clifford Burdick.  Burdick attracted attention among both creationists and evolutionists for two of his most controversial claims.  First, Burdick insisted that he had found evidence of pollen in layers of core samples that, according to an evolutionary interpretation, ought to have been laid down before any such pollen had evolved.  Second, Burdick found what he claimed were human footprints in rock layers that also included dinosaur fossils.

More relevant, though, Burdick and his supporters insist that he had been denied his PhD from the University of Arizona because of Burdick’s religious beliefs.   Burdick completed all his work for the degree, but one of his professors adamantly refused to grant a fair hearing.  The only reason for this hostility, Burdick claimed, was because that professor had found out that Burdick was a committed creationist.

Of course, the professors had a different explanation.  They found Burdick’s scientific work sloppy and incompetent.  More damning, Burdick—as he himself later admitted—could not answer many of the questions posed during his oral examination.  Even some relatively sympathetic creationists considered Burdick to be more of an intellectual liability than a persecuted martyr.

But COULD such discrimination play a role in the millions of minor decisions Americans make about one another every day?  Could fundamentalists fairly complain—even if stories like that of Clifford Burdick don’t hold water—that they are the targets of bigotry and unfair prejudice?  Consider the results of a 1993 Gallup poll, in which 45% of respondents admitted they had a “mostly unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of “religious fundamentalists.”  Or a similar Gallup finding from 1989, in which 30% of Americans admitted they would not like to have “religious fundamentalists” as neighbors, while only 12% said out loud they would not like to have African American neighbors.

Such poll results, one might object, do not fairly specify the meaning of “fundamentalist.”  The folks answering such questions might have objected to living next door to Osama bin Laden as much as they did to Jerry Falwell.  The 1993 poll, for instance, found that only 25% of respondents had a “mostly unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of “born-again Christians” in general.  And in the 1989 poll, even 24% of the respondents who identified themselves as “evangelical” said they would not want to live next door to a “religious fundamentalist.”  Even more befuddling, these polls merely ask respondents for their views of fundamentalists in general.  They do not shed much light on whether or not a creationist doctoral candidate can get a fair hearing before a committee of evolutionists, or whether a fundamentalist who opposed gay marriage can get a fair hearing before a school board staffed with people committed to equal status for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people.  But it makes a good deal of intuitive sense to suppose that those situations would be even more slanted against fundamentalists.  That is, if almost half of Americans don’t want fundamentalists as neighbors, think how much more strongly those people would feel about having fundamentalists as their children’s teachers.  If such respondents don’t even want fundamentalists living in the same neighborhood, think how unsympathetic they would be to fundamentalist worries that the public schools are indoctrinating their kids with ideas that break down their home morality.

We can’t know much for sure from such polls.  But taken as yet another piece of evidence, they suggest that some Americans tend to see bias against fundamentalism as a badge of honor.  They openly admit to this kind of bias, ironically, because they think it demonstrates a fashionable open-mindedness.  This kind of convoluted belief runs especially strong among the cultural left.  In some circles, it is fashionable to go to excessive rhetorical lengths to bash fundamentalists.  Consider the case of Timothy Shortell of Brooklyn College.  This case came to light in 2005 when Shortell was elected chair of the Sociology Department.  In a 2003 article published in the online journal Fifteen Credibility Street, Shortell used highly derogatory language to describe not just fundamentalists, but all people of faith.  As he put it:

On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like pop music or reality television. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.

The phrase that garnered the most attention was Shortell’s “moral retards.”  Ouch.  To be fair, the bigotry and cruelty of Shortell’s comment caused the higher-ups at Brooklyn College to block his advancement to department chair.  Yet the fact that his hostile anti-religious beliefs did not disqualify Shortell in the eyes of his colleagues from taking on a leadership position speaks volumes.  Imagine if an academic writer had used such language to condemn any other social group.  He or she would likely be hounded from his or her position; he or she would become a social pariah as well.  Yet Shortell was not only accepted but lauded by his colleagues in spite of his use of such offensive language.

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance argues that “Fat discrimination is one of the last publicly accepted discriminatory practices. Fat people have rights and they need to be upheld!”  Fundamentalists might make a similar claim.  Like the plight of fat people, fundamentalists in American life have reason to complain that they are one of the few cultural groups that it is still considered socially acceptable to attack.  When nearly half of surveyed adults say that they would not want you as a neighbor; when your children in public schools are forced to repudiate central beliefs of their families and faith traditions; when every group in society except yours is apparently granted special rights and privileges to counteract the pervasive prejudice to which Americans are prone; these conditions make it difficult to deny fundamentalists’ claims of a unique form of cultural persecution.

 

FURTHER READING: Jerry Bergman, The Criterion: Religious Discrimination in America (Richfield, MN: Onesimus Press, 1984). Ron Numbers, The Creationists (2006); Duane T. Gish, “The Scientific Case for Creation,” in Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites, eds., Evolutionists Confront Creationists: Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vol. I, Part 3 (San Francisco: Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1984), 25-37; George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1993 and George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1989.

 

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by Adam Laats on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 2, 2012

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/02/traditionalist-education-iia-the-cult-of-multiculturalism-cont/

In the News: Public Schools and Public Christianity

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article “exposing” the strong role played in some public schools by Biblical Christianity.

The article describes the evangelistic activities condoned and even promoted by several public schools.  At one school, a performer/evangelist bragged that hundreds of middle-schoolers had embraced the Gospel at an in-school rally.  You can still find his promo video of the event on Youtube.  At another school, a teacher preached the Gospel through a bullhorn as students arrived for school.  In another school district, teachers and administrators led a prayer service before a high-stakes standardized test.

It’s worth reading the article, especially for those who share the perspective of the article’s author that these questions of public Christianity in public schools had been settled since the mid-1960s.  Of course, more careful students of the culture wars will be able to point out a few problems with the article’s interpretation.

For one thing, the notion that these issues had somehow been settled with a couple of high-profile US Supreme Court cases is far too simple.  Those cases–Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington School District v. Schempp in 1963–insisted that public schools could not mandate a prayer, have students read the Bible, nor have teachers lead students in the Lord’s Prayer, even if students could be excused.

As Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Phillip E. Hammond demostrated convincingly in 1971, those decisions often had neglible effect on actual policy and practice in real public schools.  These two political scientists studied five towns in the pseudonymous midwestern state of “Midway,” and they found that school practice after the Engel and Schempp decisions continued largely as before.  In schools where teachers and students had been praying and reading the Bible, they kept on doing it.  More surprising for the authors of the study, this utter evasion of the Court’s intent raised absolutely no controversy in any of the towns.

More careful students of the history of the struggle over the role of conservative Biblical Christianity in the public square will also likely wince at the author’s use of geographic stereotypes.  The author reports that these demonstrations of public Christianity remained powerful “in some corners of the country, especially in the rural South.”  This has long been the oversimplistic cultural geographic stereotype of fundamentalism.  In this case, it is puzzling that a careful journalist would still fall into this misleading stereotype.  After all, the article itself describes one of its cases from Baltimore, Maryland.  It defies even the simplest common sense to lump this major metropolitan area in with others as being some kind of backward corner of the country.

The notion that these “corners of the country” are the strongholds of Biblical Christianity largely results, in my opinion, from the idea that only those areas in which Biblical Christianity remains utterly dominant in the public sphere are important to this discussion.  Evidence piles up, though, that such conflicts over the role of conservative Christianity in public schools map much more completely over the rest of the country, including the North, the West, and in large cities.  Allow me to use a couple of examples.  In one of my first teaching jobs, in St. Louis, I worked briefly in a pretty rough public high school.  The student body was mostly from low-income families.  Students, faculty, and administration were all almost entirely African American.  I was surprised to find out that most of the teachers began their classes with a Bible verse and prayer.  It did not seem to be a controversial thing.  Students and faculty took it as the norm.   Beyond just my personal experience, more careful surveys of traditional religiosity in public schools have found that the stereotypical imagined geography of schools in the rural South as being the most congenial homes of public Christianity don’t hold up.  R.B. Dierenfeld, for instance, conducted surveys of public school religious practice, and found Bible reading the most prevalent in public schools in large cities.  It was equally strong in the Northeast and Southeast, and faded away in the West.

One final point: the tone of  the article’s author tended toward the incredulous.  The author seemed surprised that people “still” prayed in public schools.  The evangelists, on the other hand, seemed fully aware that they were evangelizing on hostile terrain.  Christian Chapman, along with one school’s principal, specifically hoped to reach students in purportedly “Godless” public schools, even if it meant the end of the principal’s career.  As Chapman suggested in the NYT article, students in public schools heard the hostile message of “evolution” every day.  Why shouldn’t they hear from the other side?
These days, this kind of discrepancy seems common.  Secular and pluralistic types often assume that religion has been banished from the public square.  Those battling to get more Jesus into public schools seem fully conscious that their mission has become subversive.

FURTHER READING: Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Phillip E. Hammond, The School Prayer Decisions: From Court Policy to Local Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); R. B. Dierenfield, Religion in American Public Schools (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1962).

7 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 28, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 28, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/28/in-the-news-public-schools-and-public-christianity/

In the News: Schooling, Poverty, and the Educational Culture Wars

In a recent piece in the New York Times, (Class Matters: Why Won’t We Admit It?)  policy professor Helen Ladd and journalist/college-guide writer Edward Fiske offered a strong argument for the close link between social class and school performance.

Poorer children tend to do worse in school.  As Ladd and Fiske point out, this is not news.  Nor is this only an American dilemma.  Other countries face similar situations.
The point of Ladd’s and Fiske’s piece is that federal policy has obstinately and deliberately ignored this important aspect of education policy.

For those interested in the continuing culture wars over education, the more interesting question is this: how have the progressives/liberals/Left come to embrace the position that fixing only schools can not fix education, while the traditionalists/conservatives/Right has taken to heart the idea that schools can be fixed by more rigorous testing and standards?

After all, the notion that schools are only one educational institution among many has long conservative roots.  For generations, educational conservatives have argued that the educational rights of family, church, and other non-school institutions must be respected.

Similarly, for a long time the notion that schools must find ways to test every student to determine individual capability and performance has a long and respectable progressive history.

Yet these days, the notion that schools alone can’t be held responsible for students’ total education has become a favorite on the educational left.

My hunch is that there are two main reasons for this development.

First of all, ten years of No Child Left Behind has shifted the ideological weight of “testing” squarely from left to right.  But this did not come out of Right field.  The progressive appeal of testing faded when the cultural biases of IQ tests were clearly established in the middle of the twentieth century.  When progressives called for more testing, they did so in the hope that such tests would allow schools to tailor education more closely to individual strengths and interests.  When traditionalists call for more testing, they do it as an appeal to the long American tradition of educational exhibitionism.  In the American tradition, schools, teachers, and students are all expected to make public displays of their learning. Today’s high-stakes tests are only an updated version of the old tradition of calling the schoolmaster out on the rug, forcing students to “toe the line,” to show off their learning in ways the community finds acceptable.

In addition, the argument that schools alone can’t fix education comes from a progressive notion that any social improvement must be more than just a policy band-aid.  That is, in order to fix schools, we must fix the more basic injustices of our society.  In order to improve students’ performance, we need to address the fundamental economic imbalance of society.  This would shift the discussion in markedly progressive directions.  Instead of labeling poor children and schools in less affluent areas as ‘failing,’ we would need to start talking about reducing the Gini coefficient, about reducing the growing chasm between the few rich and the many poor.  Instead of blaming schools and teachers for cheating on high-stakes tests, we would need to find ways to improve the economic well-being of huge numbers of poor people.

The ideological baggage that comes along with each of these educational positions points out the difficulty of speaking calmly and clearly about education reform.  Each side hopes to seize the moral high ground, even while claiming to argue in practical, non-ideological terms.  But the very terms we use frame the discussion in ways that are difficult to overcome.  Are we talking about a redistribution of income?  Or are we talking about improving individual performance in reading and math?

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by Adam Laats on December 22, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 22, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/22/in-the-news-schooling-poverty-and-the-educational-culture-wars/

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