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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
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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: 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

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2012/01/07/from-the-archives-of-penises-and-progressive-schools/

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
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 2, 2012

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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).

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by Adam Laats on December 28, 2011  •  Permalink
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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/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IIb: Bumps in the Road

Recent posts (see here and here) have noted the repressive and depressing realities of much of American education.  Much of the school talk these days reflects a surprising ignorance about those realities.  Politicians and business leaders offer shockingly naïve reform proposals for schools, to which every good teacher responds, “This guy hasn’t set foot in a real school since he graduated.”  In this post, I’ll try to offer a detailed look at what happens in real schools.  I’ll argue that a truly progressive education is possible, but it must do more than simply try to change one classroom.  It can and must work in two ways.  First, educators must work to divest themselves of dictatorial authority in the classroom.  This is not due to any touchy-feely desire to be nice; it is a hard requirement of effective schooling.  As I’ve argued in recent posts, when students see learning as an imposition from above, they will resist it accordingly.  Teachers and students must work together to build a classroom culture in which students buy in to the work; students must shift from seeing classwork as breaking rocks to seeing classwork as working with a personal trainer.  But this cannot be done in isolated classrooms by isolated teachers.  Educators must work to change the structure of education itself.  That is, educators must work as citizen activists to even out the funding of schools, no matter where they are.  They must work to change the administration of those schools.  Schools can’t be run effectively as stalags; they must become places in which students embrace the rules.  Neither of these two things can be achieved independently.  A classroom teacher crammed into a classroom of 35 students, in a school that encourages students to see themselves as targets of a cruel and bureaucratic authoritarian school regime, cannot have much hope of transforming her corner of that school into a garden of authentic learning by empowered students.

That doesn’t mean that teachers don’t try.  In my career as a middle- and high-school teacher and teacher mentor, and now working with lots of people training to be teachers, I have seen a depressingly predictable pattern.  A new teacher steps into her new school, determined to be a different kind of teacher.  She wants to guide students to embrace more than just the dry facts and regurgitative lists of historical details.  (My experience is mostly in history and social-studies classrooms, but I’m guessing it is similar no matter what the subject.)  She attempts to empower students, but finds that both the school administration and the students themselves reject all of her attempts.

For instance, instead of simply telling students about the Civil War, she plans a research project in which students will develop their own research questions and use primary sources to explore the authentic past.  She is not trying to do it all on her own; she devised a practical teaching unit based on student use of the incredibly rich resources at the Valley of the Shadow website from the Virginia Center for Digital History and the University of Virginia Library.  This website is the answer to her prayers, she thinks.  In one place, it offers military records, letters, newspapers, and even battle maps of various units in the war.  She devises a clear step-by-step guide in which students will select one participant in the war and track his or her experiences throughout the Civil War.  Her plan is to entice the students to generate their own questions about the Civil War.  Why did so many Virginians oppose secession?  Why did families go to war?  What did it mean for their lives?  The new teacher’s hope is that many—in her fantasies she imagines most—of her students will jump at the chance to find answers to these questions, once they see that the Civil War was more than just a chapter in a book.

What happens?  First of all, the school gets in the way.  Second, the students themselves reject her attempts to empower them as learners.  Here’s what can happen: In order to run this unit, the teacher needs students to have access to the website.  They need computers.  Over the summer, the teacher made sure to familiarize herself with the school’s technology.  She was thrilled to hear that the school, thanks to a federal grant, has three laptop carts with fast new computers.  Great.  She reserves the carts for the days her class will need them.

Some of the students, however, can’t log in.  They forgot their school username, perhaps.  Or the laptops have not been maintained properly and they won’t turn on.  With a classroom of twenty-eight students, the teacher can’t adequately help each student figure out how to get online.  When students can’t sign in, they start doing other things, non-educational things.  Soon the teacher is fully occupied with the frustrating task of telling students they can’t just poke each other with pencils, or worse.  Meanwhile, those students who have managed to get online notice that the teacher is not really paying attention to them, so they begin to check their Facebook accounts, ESPN, or other non-Civil War-related websites—whatever sites young people find interesting these days.  They’re not allowed to see those sites, and the school has put in place an online screen to block access to non-educational sites, but every student knows how to circumvent that screen.  When a teacher wants to use Youtube, however, the block will prevent that.  Meanwhile, of the class of twenty-eight, there may be a few students who persevere in following the directions the teacher laid out.  They may be exploring the Valley of the Shadow website.  But when and if they have a question about it, a question about the nature of the Civil War or the organization of the website, they can’t get the teacher’s attention because she is busy keeping other students from punching each other.  Soon enough, they realize there’s no real reason for them to keep at their assigned task.  The more polite ones may just wait for the bell to ring.  The more energetic ones will join in with the pencil-poking and punching.  Two days later, the new teacher is called in after school to the principal’s office.  The principal has been told that students in the new teacher’s class have been using laptops to access porn.  Turns out the laptops had mementoes of their surfing experiences that popped up the next time a teacher tried to use the laptop cart.

What can the teacher do?  When she tried to make the regime more useful and less dictatorial, she was beset from both sides.  The school culture made it difficult.  First of all, with a large classroom and not enough technical support, there was no way for her to get all her students up and running on their laptops within the class period.  But more important, since most of the classes in the school functioned with a stern authoritarian teacher, students viewed her attempt to loosen that discipline as an opportunity to be exploited, rather than as a chance to engage in learning.  Even worse, even when some students managed to access the website, they tended to avoid engaging with the material.  Instead, they did the very minimum amount of work they could do to get by.

What can the teacher do?  She can quit.  And lots of new teachers do.  As Barry Farber called it twenty years ago, the high rate of teacher turnover is a main cause of the “Crisis in Education.”  In the 1980s, over a third of new teachers left the field after four years or less.  More recent surveys by the National Education Association indicate that the number of teachers who leave the profession within five years hovers around forty percent.

More depressing, like the students who stay in school but disengage from the dictates of the school regime, the new teacher may keep her job but accept the necessity of dumbing down her teaching.  Instead of exploring the Valley of the Shadow, she may revert to stern, authoritarian recitations of historical facts, punctuated by perfunctory examinations of student knowledge.  The students won’t learn, and she won’t teach, but she and they will get through each day.

In order to avoid this outcome, a truly progressive solution has to do more than transform classroom methodology.  It must transform institutional education itself.  This will mean that all teachers must act as more than classroom leaders; they must become political actors as well.  It will also mean that all adults become active educators by engaging with the educational regime.  It will mean that all adults, teachers and otherwise, must demand and enact changes in the ways schools are funded.  They must change the ways those schools are operated.  They must demand that teachers in all classrooms and administrators at all levels put student engagement at the top of their lists.  Even if their children are not in those schools.  Even if they can afford to move to a higher-income area in which these problems are not as glaringly apparent.

A single teacher in a single classroom has very limited options.  In order to make each classroom more progressive and more effective, we need to change the entire system.  Schools, after all, are the collective public institution of our society.  We must shape them to be the vision of the society we want, not merely the holding pens for young people trapped in the society we have.

 

FURTHER READING: Barry A. Farber, Crisis in Education: Stress and Burnout in the American Teacher (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).

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by Adam Laats on December 19, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 19, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/19/progressive-education-iib-bumps-in-the-road/

Traditional Education II: The Cult of Multiculturalism

If we agree that education includes values, as I’ve argued in previous posts, then it is hypocritical to say we will remove traditional values from classrooms and encourage students to develop their own moral systems.  That is not what schools do.  The language of open moral dialogue and self-directed student moral learning is embedded within a cluster of ideological notions that has come to be called “multiculturalism.”  It can get confusing, since one of the primary moral claims of this ideology has been that it promotes tolerance and diversity.  Yet that tolerance, by definition, cannot extend to those who do not accept its premises.  Those who insist on traditional moral values, in which certain values have transcendent right on their side, cannot easily accommodate the notion that different value systems must be respected and even celebrated.  It is impossible, in other words, for someone who earnestly believes that Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation to agree that other religions are equally valid representations of the human quest to comprehend divinity.

Schools, therefore, will continue to actively discriminate against all those who have traditional moral values.  This is not merely fundamentalist paranoia.  Some of the most articulate voices of the cultural left have called explicitly for this kind of intolerant tolerance.  In a short 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” leftist philosopher Herbert Marcuse called for the outright restriction of freedom of speech and assembly for right-wing opponents.

Marcuse’s argument hearkened back to much older debates.  In the seventeenth century, Roger Williams famously argued for tolerance of religious dissenters.  His argument has often been mistaken by current multiculturalists as an early call for modern pluralism.  It was not.  Though Williams advocated religious liberty for all believers, including Catholics and Muslims, he did not do so because he valued a diversity of belief.  Rather, Williams was worried that the Boston church would debase itself if it stepped into the role of civil authority.  If the church assumed such authority, it would put itself in the unchristian role of persecutor for the sake of religious conscience.  Further, if the church insisted on a role as civil authority, it must include those who did not embody the true beliefs of the church.  That church, Williams believed, must be strictly limited to true believers.

Williams did not argue that each culture had intrinsic worth and deserved respect.  Instead, Williams used extensive biblical proofs to prove that the church must actively root out those who did not share fully in its beliefs.  This, in Williams’ argument, was the reason why the church must not attempt to assert power in the civil sphere, since to do so would make the church far too inclusive.  In other words, if the church sought to punish those who did not uphold its beliefs, then it implied that all the people were members of the church and subject to its rules.  Such a wide inclusive policy would destroy the true church, Williams argued.  Tolerance must be nearly unlimited in the public sphere, he insisted, not because every belief was of equal value, but rather because only one belief was true.  Only the biblical belief in the salvation by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ was true.  The rest were pernicious doctrines leading to damnation, Williams insisted.  But to force such unbelievers to follow the dictates of the true church would corrupt that church.

Consider Williams’ interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the tares.  In this story, Jesus warned his followers not to pull up such weeds, as they would likely disturb the wheat as well.  In other words, do not jump too quickly to judgment, lest you destroy all that is good as well.  One might think, based on Williams’ later reputation as the champion of multiculturalism, that he would use this story as proof that all people must be welcomed and all beliefs must be celebrated.  But that was not Williams’ argument.  Instead, Williams made the more complicated case that the tares were not meant to represent hypocrites.  That is, Williams argued that Jesus did not insist that the church ought to tolerate unbelievers.  Rather, Williams insisted that the church must earnestly exclude and remove such threatening belief.  Jesus’ parable, in Williams’ interpretation, did not insist that the church should leave unbelievers alone.  Instead, Williams argued, the church must aggressively seek out and remove all those whose faith did not live up to Williams’ high standards.  The tares, Williams argued, only meant those whose belief was demonstrably different from true Christian belief.  For Williams, then, the church could and must dig out false belief from among its members.  It must not allow any fence-sitters or backsliders to call themselves Christian.  But that persecution, Williams believed, must not extend to the entire society.  The church must control itself, but it must not control the rest of society.  Thus, Williams might better be understood to be the first American fundamentalist, rather than the first multiculturalist.  His objection to John Cotton was not that Cotton had acted in a way that insisted on only one truth—that was what Williams wanted—but rather that Cotton inserted state power in a religious dispute instead of leaving the dispute in the hands of the godly.

Marcuse’s 1965 essay, in any case, did not range itself on the side of Roger Williams and religious tolerance, for whatever reason.  Marcuse did not insist on tolerance of those with whom we disagree.  Instead, Marcuse revised the argument of Williams’ foe, John Cotton.  In the 1640s, Cotton was stuck arguing for the moral imperative of an overtly repressive state.  Cotton defined the question as one of civil order.  “The Great Question of this Present Time,” Cotton wrote, was “How far Liberty of Conscience ought to be given to those that truly fear God?  And how far restrained to turbulent and pestilent persons, who not only raze the foundations of Godliness, but disturb the Civil Peace where they live?”  Exactly as Marcuse would argue centuries later, Cotton insisted that toleration of those who would destroy the fragile society was a mistaken application of the value of toleration.

To be sure, there were some important differences.  The seventeenth century debate focused on the propriety of punishing Christians for following their own conscience.  Cotton was not in favor of persecution for the sake of conscience, but in favor of persecution for sinning against conscience.  He believed that the “Fundamentals [of religion] are so clear, that a man cannot but be convinced in Conscience of the truth of them after two or three Admonitions: and that therefore such a person as still continueth obstinate, is condemned of Himself: and if he then be punished, he is not punished for his Conscience, but for sinning against his own Conscience.”  In other words, he did not oppose Williams for Williams’ beliefs, but for Williams’ insistence on his right to mistaken, heretical belief when the truth was apparent to all.

Cotton’s and Marcuse’s arguments were very similar in their insistence on the perceived threat such dissidence posed to a fragile society.  Cotton asked what should happen if he should continue to espouse heretical ideas, even after being counseled by the orthodox.  “If God should lead me so far,” Cotton asked, “as to fall fearfully into this three-fold degree of Heretical wickedness, what am I better than other men? Better myself cut off by death, or Banishment, than the flock of Christ to be seduced and destroyed by my Heretical wickedness.”  In the seventeenth century, Cotton was not speaking merely theoretically about the use of state power.  He had it, and he used it.  Williams was forced to flee into a nighttime storm, eventually finding sanctuary with Wampanoag leader Massasoit near Narragansett Bay.

In some important senses, this Protestant cultural hegemony lingered well into twentieth century.  It had been challenged, certainly, by a dynamic American society, including the increasing political power of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.  By the 1920s, cultural and demographic changes left this traditional Protestant domination of the public square vulnerable.  For instance, at the Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925, where a Tennessee schoolteacher was put on trial for teaching evolution, one of his lawyers made a plea for tolerance.  That lawyer, Dudley Field Malone, pleaded with the court and the assembled audience to “Let the minds of the schoolchildren be kept open!”  Tolerance, in 1925, meant not inflicting Protestant orthodoxy on public schools by force of law.

Reflecting on the balance of tolerance and intolerance on display at that 1925 trial, journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann concluded that the main danger to liberty came from the kind of majoritarian dominance on display in Dayton, Tennessee.  Yet in his widely read 1928 book American Inquisitors, Lippmann argued that true tolerance could only be extended to those willing to abdicate their claims to transcendent values and moral claims rooted in those values.  Lippmann acknowledged that “Reason and free inquiry can be neutral and tolerant only of those opinions which submit to the test of reason and free inquiry.”  Unlike most of his non-fundamentalist colleagues, Lippmann recognized that this demand placed an impossible burden on those, like the fundamentalists of his day, who claimed that truth derived from the Holy Scriptures.  Lippmann recognized that any dedicated fundamentalist “would cease to be a fundamentalist if he were no longer convinced that above human reason and the available evidence there is a gospel which contains a statement of facts that are the fundamental premises of all reasoning.”

By the time of Marcuse’s entrance into this long-running debate, the monocultural hegemony of Protestant republicanism had been much diminished.  Marcuse no longer needed to plea, like Scopes’ lawyer Malone, for open-mindedness about ideas other than traditional Bible-believing Protestantism.  By 1965, Marcuse argued against tolerating those who do not accept the foundational principles of toleration.  He fulminated against those who use the language of toleration to mask continuing dominance by an elite class.  In Marcuse’s mid-1960s analysis, he identified the apparent tolerance of liberal democracies as a sham.  Such apparent tolerance only served to limit true debate to those ideas which supported the status quo.  And that status quo, according to Marcuse, funneled dollars and influence into the already stuffed pockets of the existing elites.  In order to “reopen” the public square to truly democratic ideas, Marcuse argued, activists must embrace “apparently undemocratic means.”  First, Marcuse called for “the withdrawal of toleration from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”  Marcuse made here a sweeping call for the disempowerment of a shockingly wide segment of his political opposition.  Not only would these policies silence those who called for political aggression and white supremacy, but also anyone who disagreed with the increasing power of the government to provide public services.  Not only would those extremists who advocated violence against racial minorities or communists be barred from participation in public life, but even those who believed in the inherent superiority of the United States.  Furthermore, Marcuse explicitly renounced the notion that these repressions should be reserved only for those who posed a “clear and present danger” to public peace and welfare.  Such hesitant liberal policies, he insisted, had done nothing to stop the rise of totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany.  No, the current state of political threat, Marcuse argued, called for more decisive action.  Political movements of the Right must be preemptively silenced, banned from public life, before they could muster enough power to inflict harm.  More directly relevant in this context, Marcuse specified the need for “new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions” in order to promote the true opening of society to democratic ideas.

Marcuse was no bogeyman plucked from academic obscurity to illustrate the paranoid fears of fundamentalist America.  He was among the most prominent public intellectuals of the 1960s, often called—against his will—the “Father of the New Left.”  His ideas about the suppression of dissent in the name of true freedom became and remain enormously influential.  For example, in a late-1980s debate over the nature of the cultural canon sparked by a curricular change at Stanford University, Harper’s Magazine sponsored a forum on the notion of America’s common culture.  One of the eminent scholars invited to participate in this roundtable discussion echoed Marcuse’s call for strict limits on the boundaries of toleration.  That scholar, Gayatri Spivak, now University Professor at Columbia University, insisted at the time, “Tolerance is a loaded virtue because you have to have a base of power to practice it.  You cannot ask a certain people to ‘tolerate’ a culture that has historically ignored them at the same time that their children are being indoctrinated into it.”

In other words, tolerance must not extend to all viewpoints.  In the world of today’s public schools, in which the dominant—if sometimes muddled—ideology of multiculturalism is often the only moral system in effect, those who do not embrace the equal status of every idea are not to be tolerated.  Those who insist on one transcendent truth not only are not tolerated, but must not be tolerated.  Marcuse’s call for a “democratic educational dictatorship of free men” has come to pass in many ways.  Those who disagree with the pluralistic, multicultural ideology of public schools have found themselves fired or constrained in their public speech.

FURTHER READING: Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969), John Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lamb (1647); Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644); “Forum: Who needs the Great Works?,” Harper’s, Sept. 1989, pp. 43-52, quotation on p. 46; Walter Lippmann, American Inquisitors: A Commentary on Dayton and Chicago (New York: Macmillan, 1928).

6 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 12, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Adam Laats on December 12, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/12/traditional-education-ii-the-cult-of-multiculturalism/

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION II: Breaking Rocks and the School Regime

What are schools for?  Throughout American history, schools have been processing & containment units.  As Michael Katz wrote over forty years ago, public schools have always been “conservative, racist, and bureaucratic.”  If a student came from a wealthy family, the school trained that student to be wealthy.  If a student came from a poor family, or from a beleaguered ethnic minority, schools trained him to remain poor and put upon.

This has been done in big ways and in small.  On a social scale, this has been done by keeping African Americans segregated into underfunded schools.  Before the Brown decision in 1954, this was done explicitly and legally.  At some point since then, it has shifted to being done as a result of social segregation.  Poor people live clustered in poor areas.  Their schools are funded by property taxes on property that is not worth much, from people who do not have much money to give.  As a recent U.S. Department of Education study noted, schools with poorer students tend to pay their teachers less, likely because those schools hire the least-experienced teachers.  Once those teachers get a few years of experience under their belts, they tend to migrate to schools where the students come from more affluent families.  In other words, the poorest schools get the newest teachers.  The most experienced teachers serve the more affluent schools.  Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule.  Many teachers choose to remain in less affluent schools, but it is hard to resist the siren call of a more affluent school or district.

At the human level, this has been done by maintaining dictatorships in every classroom.  Teachers have remained authoritative figures, imposing the cruelties and absurdities of a biased society directly onto its young members.  There is no simple accident in the fact that schools and classrooms get more dictatorial as the students tend to get poorer and darker-skinned.  It is a direct result of the fact that school is used to impose society’s injustices on the young.  For those who benefit from a privileged role in society, the yoke is light, easy to wear, even comfortable and flattering.  They can have classrooms in which the teacher divests his authority and encourages the students themselves to take over.  But for those who are at the bottom of the economic scale, classroom practice becomes an obvious imposition of an unpleasant and unwilling obedience on students who have no good reason for complying.

It ought not to be a surprise that high-school completion rates match very closely to socio-economic status.  As schools become more and more like prisons, students will naturally view them more and more as unpleasant impositions.  As soon as students can get away, they will.  But even for those who remain in school, there are plenty of ways to avoid engagement with the educational regime.  In order to have any sort of meaning, education must be a process in which teachers, administrators, students, and families agree on the importance of the process.  Students don’t necessarily have to enjoy practicing math tables or reading about the Boston Massacre.  But they do need to buy into the notion that school is a place where they can and will do tasks that, in the end, have some meaning for the students themselves.  If they do not, then no amount of imposed authority will be able to force them to learn.

Consider this analogy: there is obviously an enormous difference between working out at a gym with a personal trainer and working on a chain gang breaking rocks.  With a personal trainer, a person has willingly engaged in this enterprise.  Despite the difficulty of the tasks assigned, the person willingly puts himself or herself through the routines.  No surprise: he or she has signed up for this kind of work.  Not that he or she won’t gripe or try to avoid the hardest parts of the workouts.  But in the end, a person working with a personal trainer agrees on the purpose and function of the training.  He or she is much more likely to work hard at it, even if he or she doesn’t like it.

That is very different from the imposition of physical labor as a regime of external punishment.  A person sentenced to such hard labor will not embrace the work.  He or she may be forced to make the motions, but he or she will never go beyond the absolute minimum of effort.  The two experiences are worlds apart.  Yet, in some ways, they are the same.  Both workers are being pushed to work hard.  Both are being pushed to work harder than they would work on their own.  Yet working at a gym with a personal trainer is understood as a privilege, a luxury even.  While working breaking rocks is a punishment.

The educational implications are obvious.  In schools for poorer kids, there is often a perception that students and families have not bought into the process.  Instead of opening up the school regime to encourage student and family buy-in, the depressing American tradition has been to impose sterner discipline and harsher authoritarian structures in order to force students to accept their roles as learners.

That is exactly the wrong approach.  It encourages students to see the schools as an entirely punitive institution, one that can and must be evaded or fought against.  For some students, that means leaving school at the earliest opportunity.  For those who remain, it means putting forth the absolute minimum required effort.  Learning can’t happen that way.  And the proof is seen in test scores and academic achievement measures.  When such scores are low, policy makers respond by saying students must require greater supervision, less intellectual and physical freedom, and a harsher, more demanding environment.  They push for military-style discipline, uniforms, and classroom pedagogies that devolve into teacher-led chants.

Such responses might be effective if students really were sentenced to punitive physical labor.  But in schools, real results can only come out of increased student embrace of their learning.

 

Further reading: Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Teachers College Press, 1968); Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited (Longman, 1989).

4 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 7, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 7, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/07/progressive-education-ii-breaking-rocks-and-the-school-regime/

TRADITIONALIST EDUCATION Part II: VALUES…of what?

Formal education must include moral values.  In some subjects that fact is overwhelmingly obvious.  History and literature, for instance.  At the most basic level, the selection of literature reveals an entire worldview.  What counts as a good book?  Is it Holden Caulfield trying to pick his way through the field of phonies to discover an authentic life?  Or is it Abraham pulling Isaac up to the top of the mountain to fulfill God’s cruel command?

But such moral values are embedded in every subject, even those that seem to be mere delivery of information.  Some people might suggest that schools should simply teach students academic skills: reading, writing, arithmetic.  But what would such a value-free classroom look like?  Will women and girls be allowed to participate?  Will there be tuition?  Will there be an authoritative teacher at the front of the room dispensing knowledge, keeping order, and evaluating student work?  Or will it be a collective effort, each student responsible for his own learning?  Will students vote to decide policy?  The classroom and school structure dictate a comprehensive set of values, even when the subject matter is limited to such seemingly neutral subjects as geometry and plane mechanics.

Schooling these days is in a woefully chaotic moral condition.  Officially, most public schools are meant to be ruled by a value system of pluralism.  Not verging into the choppy waters of cultural relativism, in which all cultural values are deemed equal, pluralism hopes to insist on a moral code of tolerance and acceptance.  Every type of culture and belief will be celebrated.  Diversity will be embraced as the new path to moral relevance.

All well and good.  From the traditionalist perspective, however, pluralism has the crippling internal flaw of claiming to welcome all cultures, while in fact it often belittles or even criminalizes traditionalist beliefs.  Just recently, a spate of legal cases involving teachers’ religious views has illustrated this trend.  First, from the San Diego area, Bradley Johnson was ordered to remove large signs from his math classroom containing such slogans as “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” “God Bless America,” and “God Shed His Grace On Thee.”  The California Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Johnson did not have free-speech rights to keep such signs in his classroom.  The Court reasonably concluded that such slogans, though they came from well-known songs or foundational historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence, created an atmosphere that unacceptably breached the wall of separation between church and state.  They implied that the school endorsed Judeo-Christian belief.

It seems as if that was exactly Johnson’s intent.  Johnson was not merely a patriotic teacher with a yen for big banners.  He was also the faculty leader of the school’s Christian Club.  When the school offered to replace his banners with reproductions of documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Johnson refused.  When another teacher suggested that his signs could shock students from other religious backgrounds and make them feel unwelcome, Johnson allegedly replied, “Sometimes, that’s necessary.” 

Johnson wanted to make the point that although his traditional religious message was prohibited, the district allowed other teachers to display messages from a wide array of other religions and value systems.  He conducted visits to the four other high schools in the district and found a wide array of displays to confirm his charge, including a Tibetan prayer flag, a John Lennon poster with the lyrics from “Imagine,” a poster of Malcolm X, and posters of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.

Johnson provoked this court case to make his point.  Schools, in his opinion, promoted every value system except that of traditional Christian patriotism.  Another recent teacher controversy came about more accidentally.  In Union Township, New Jersey, special education teacher Viki Knox came under fire for criticizing the school’s support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History month.  The school had put up displays that celebrated prominent homosexuals.  Knox complained on her Facebook page that, although she loved those who were gay, her religious beliefs taught her that homosexuality was “against the nature and character of God.”  Furthermore, Knox argued that a public high school was “not the setting to promote, encourage, support and foster homosexuality.”

Now her job is on the line.  Not technically for her religious beliefs.  But she is accused of being unable to perform her duties—duties that include defending every student from bullying and harassment—because she does not agree with the moral values of the school.

Time will tell what lies in store for Ms. Knox.  But the story illustrates the cluster of values that public schools actively promote.  The large banner that offended Knox promoted the notion that all people have equal value.  It attacked the idea that homosexuals could or should be discriminated against.  For the record, I agree with those notions.  I think people have equal value and sexual orientation must not be used as grounds for discrimination.  The important point here, however, is that those values themselves discriminate against certain religious traditions.  They would make students from fundamentalist churches and families feel just as excluded as Bradley Johnson’s banners would make atheist students feel excluded.

Supporters of such pro-homosexuality values in public schools might argue that such students ought to feel excluded.  Students who do not embrace the equal rights and status of all fellow students, regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation, must be forced to change their beliefs.  That is a tricky perspective.  Especially if, as did Knox and as do many other conservative Christians, religious students advocate love for homosexual students, but not for homosexual behavior.  Such religious folks do not suggest violence or even ostracism for homosexuals.  But they also do not recognize their sexual orientation as legitimate.  Can public schools force such traditionalists to change their religious beliefs?  Doesn’t that violate the wall of separation between church and state?

Finally, consider another recent court case that illustrates this bias of public schools and courts against traditional religion.  As I noted in a recent post,  we don’t have to merely imagine that anti-Christian statements by teachers might be treated with less severity than pro-Christian statements.  The California Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the same Court that ruled against Bradley Johnson, decided that James Corbett could not be held to account for statements that belittled traditional Christian belief.  In his Advanced Placement European History class, Corbett had created a hostile atmosphere for any student who might have believed in a young earth or in the special creation of humanity by God.  Corbett repeatedly ridiculed such belief.  Like the New Jersey posters supporting the notion that homosexuality must be celebrated, such an environment breaches the wall of separation of church and state, by attacking one set of beliefs.

Yet the Court let Corbett off the hook.  Corbett, they decided, could claim “qualified immunity” for offending religious students.

The wider picture is clear: Public schools do promote a certain set of moral values.  Most of those values are hard to argue with.  Who could deny the value of teaching young people that every person deserves equal respect, regardless of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation?  Who could deny that students should learn to question their own belief systems; that schools must force students to learn to think deeply about such notions?  But we must also recognize that religious notions are embedded in those laudable values.  Students and teachers from traditionalist Christian backgrounds will feel excluded.  They will feel that public schools are hostile environments.

Public schools and school law have a very difficult time wrestling with these moral conundrums.  Their value system of pluralism and acceptance does not recognize itself as one system among others.  It claims, rather, to embrace and celebrate all cultures.  It is incapable, though, of embracing and celebrating any value system that insists on a set of immutable, transcendent values.  In America, that excludes a very large number of families.  It creates a hostile religious environment for all those who believe in the foundational truth of Biblical teachings.  Even worse, it does so while claiming to be opposed to the creation of a hostile religious environment for anyone.  Since it claims to be a neutral arbiter of moral values, it is incapable of easily recognizing its role as a moral agent.

11 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 4, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Evolution/Creation, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 4, 2011

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2011/12/04/traditionalist-education-part-ii-valuesof-what/

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