curriculum gag rules | The Perfect Response

As for academics as “condescending elites:” Give me a break.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to revisit the tired but durable American pattern of attacking Harvard and other American universities is brutal, and frankly embarrassing for the rest of the world to witness. Our massive private and state systems are the envy of the world. The cuts in research dollars and many universities will do harm. But the effort to ruin higher education will not succeed. Fortunately, American instructors have some immunity to this kind of political hate.

Why a man with a slippery grasp on reality has decided that Harvard University in particular represents the antichrist is both nonsensical and incredibly mean-spirited. After all, it is one of the world’s great universities. Moreover, the standard analytical point too many others carelessly make is that Harvard and other institutions represent a liberal “elite.” Tell Skip Gates he is an elitist and get ready to be set straight.

As the conventional logic goes, the rest of America is resentful of what the conservatives William F. Buckley and George Will have called the “condescension” of academics. In this familiar fantasy, academia misuses its privileged position to bend the young minds toward secular and collectivist ways of thinking. Who knew that the effectively fragmented academic world was so unified in its efforts? Give me a break.

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In one form of another this uniquely American complaint is older than the republic, carried in the Puritanism and the anti-intellectualism of early settlers. In addition to the endemic racism fostered by the first Americans, this additional and deeply embedded incapacity remains as a blind spot that makes reading, advanced learning and education suspicious experiences.

It has always been with us. Key thinkers like historian Richard Hofstadter have pointed out a kind of bedrock stance against intellectuals mostly on the political right and, by extension, millions of Americans. Even so, the nation’s educators have tried to shed light on the dark celebration of ignorance on subjects ranging from the age of the planet to intricacies of human sociology. Red states are trying to impose curriculum guidelines at various levels mandating courses in civics. Astonishingly, Florida’s political leaders even question the legitimacy of the social sciences.

Speaking broadly, knowledge workers labor under a cloud of suspicion fed by a culture that celebrates making and promoting more than knowing. But in truth, we could use more students of the human condition and perhaps fewer devoted to the finer points of selling stuff.

Though the damage of cancelled grants to institutions and students has been devastating, the hapless functionaries of this administration will loose this battle, as the Puritans, Know-Nothings, nativists, William F. Buckley, McCarthyites, Moral Majority members and Christian nationalists did in earlier American spasms of retribution against American educators.

As for academics as condescending elites: I’ve studied with some of the most brilliant people in my own field, none of whom could begin to match the arrogance of the expense account workers who feed the nation’s bloated consumer culture. An assistant professor at most institutions is probably going to make less than a licensed worker in the building trades. If we really want to experience elites at work and play, stay a night or two in New York or Chicago and have meals in their bloated expense-account restaurants. Attending an academic conference in one of these cities was like visiting a posh land of a privileged class of managers and executives. Like hundreds of other academics momentarily dispatched to a convention along the unfamiliar Dubai of Chicago’s lakefront, I was lucky to have my public college cover half of my expenses for one three-day conference.

Though Donald Trump would like to change it, education in the U.S. is decentralized, with states and local districts holding most of the power of control. To be sure, attainment levels in K-12 American public education often compare unfavorably with other peer nations: a legacy of distractions from market-totems like smartphones, as well as ingrained suspicions about books, curriculum and the narratives of modern history. But the nation’s crown jewels remain in the 5000-plus colleges and universities, who generally retain a degree of autonomy to develop programs and degrees mostly as they see fit, within broad accreditation guidelines. This process is duplicated in the academic freedoms of individual faculty members to teach and develop research using their expertise and years of graduate school. To the nation’s eternal credit, the authoritarianism of this administration cannot easily reach into most university classrooms. For the most part, academics will continue to profess their subjects in accordance with their professional expertise and using the standards of their disciplines: a strength I was reminded of after teaching for a year within an uncomfortably tight pecking order within a British University.

The American protection of an instructor’s classroom is as it should be, since the nation is momentarily misguided by an administration headed by a figure who generally does not read, makes up fantasies in lieu of evidence he cannot understand, and at times disappears behind a word clouds of near-total incoherence.

An age-appropriate accounting of the multiform American experience is an educator’s duty.

These days a possible run for the Presidency means becoming the voice of widespread grievances held by potential voters. It’s a bit too early to know, but Governor Ron DeSantis’ and Florida’s legislative leaders seem to have mapped a path that includes taking on the educational establishment. There appears to be no end to the state’s interest in laying down curriculum rules distinctly at odds with best practices known to schools of education, teachers, librarians and curriculum specialists. An age-appropriate accounting of the multiform American experience is an educator’s duty. But the Governor seems to favor gag orders that omit inclusion of all of the state’s citizens. Among other goals, he wants newer but widely accepted representations of gender off the table in most school classrooms. In addition, DeSantis has replaced a university president and most of its board with fellow social conservatives, demanded the removal of “inappropriate” library books, disallowed a high school AP African American Studies course, and is attempting to dismember various diversity initiatives. He clearly prefers narratives that pull us back to the less aware years of the last century, when homosexuality was mostly not acknowledged, or insights about social injustice were limited to a few heroic figures. And forget about introducing students to what we now understand are the many sources of systemic bias. He treats this aspect of organizational life as if it were mere speculation rather than settled social science fact.

Here’s the thing. Building a description of anything in everyday language is not a neutral act. The vast and largely accepted literature in the Sociology of Knowledge reminds us that narrative cannot help but come from perspectives shaped by the particular experiences and values of a given community. Narratives evolve with shifting preferences. The question is less if there is a perspective, but which ones are in play at any one time. These systemic preferences—some harmless and some pernicious—are built into the rhetoric of human communities.

To progress beyond these limitations requires awareness. Going the other way to denial leads us to banning rhetoric if it is “woke,” meaning that they may consider newer narratives that acknowledge more fluid definitions of gender, racial discrimination, or the situational ethics of the founding fathers. All are unsettling to anyone who mistakenly understands learning as a static enterprise dealing with “knowns” that are oversimplified into immutability. And so it follows that if a student is made to feel uncomfortable through discussion of a specific topic like the many form of the American family, a teacher is presumably supposed to retreat to some safer topic. Ditto for any topics touching on gender identity in the early elementary grades.

How does all of this look like in the classroom? One teacher in Palm Beach County recently changed her plans for a discussion about the first American woman to fly in space to omit the fact that Sally Ride was a lesbian. The teacher feared for her job if that detail was included. The same frightening logic is evident in the recent decision of a Florida College to cancel a scheduled appearance of the U.K.’s renowned King’s Singers. Someone discovered that a member of the acapella group was gay.

This land of swamps may have even more than it knows.

To be sure, no one wants to expose children to more than they can comfortably understand. And Ron DeSantis has imposed more gag rules on teaching professionals than the courts may accept. But hate bills against a lot of groups are fouling the very idea of education in the Sunshine State.

We can hope we have less to fear than we think from doctrines that pretend not to see. As Communication Theorist Marshall McLuhan once noted, school is a place where children can ‘take a break’ from their education via the mass media. For better or worse, our social and public media are infused with contemporary attitudes that are easily absorbed. And there are alternate ways for children to find their way to understanding the nature of social relations, even if they start with unfairly branded books like Todd Parr’s The Family Book, or Justin Richardson’s and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three.

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American Higher Education Will Not be Defeated

Thank you very much, but The Governor of Florida would prefer to tell your story his way.