Virtually all of the dozens of teachers I met during the course of my research regard viewpoint neutrality in the classroom as a sacred obligation. A history instructor at a high school in exurban Chicago told me that he could never forget getting a C- from a college professor who objected to his defense of the USA Patriot Act of 2001. That, he said, was why he never revealed his party affiliation to his own students. “I tell the students,” he said, “that I hope they can come to know their own viewpoint and the views of others.” I saw very few Black Lives Matters banners in classrooms, but a great many portraits of the Founders and even of Republican presidents.
Yet conservatives aren’t simply making this stuff up. You cannot read the academic literature on pedagogy, official statements from educational administrators, or social studies standards in blue states without recognizing the pervasive influence of identitarian thinking. Minnesota, for example, places ethnic studies on a par with history, geography, government, and civics as the constituent fields of social studies. One of the ethnic studies standards for kindergarten asks children to “describe how individuals and communities have fought for freedom and liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally.” This for 5-year-olds.
So yes, even though teachers police their classrooms for signs of partisanship far more rigorously than conservatives recognize, in our intensely polarized culture blue states will implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, transmit a progressive view of American history and government, and red states a conservative one. One would wish for a single narrative in which all Americans could find a place, but our tradition of locally controlled schools means that each district and state will reflect its larger political culture.
In that new dispensation, students would not come to know their own viewpoint and that of others; they would learn that one viewpoint is right and others are wrong. Some history teachers ask students to read both a left-wing text like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and a conservative one such as Larry Schweikart’s A Patriot’s History of the United States. Under the terms of the executive order, they could teach only the latter.
We may take some comfort in the fact that the tradition of local control will prevent the president from running roughshod over the schools as he plans to do over so many other spheres of our national life. Trump may not be able to bully schools into whitewashing American history, but the executive order represents a terrible missed opportunity. Schools are not failing in their civic role because teachers are in thrall to a woke ideology; they are failing because so few students have the linguistic skills or the background knowledge needed to make sense of the Constitution or the speeches of Frederick Douglass. Everything else, by comparison, is chaff.
Here, in fact, conservatives do have something to offer. There is a strong argument that a more traditional pedagogy based on the acquisition of knowledge and an exposure to challenging texts is much more effective at building critical thinking and other core skills than is a progressive pedagogy that scants knowledge and chooses texts based on their personal relevance to students. But pedagogical conservatism, or traditionalism, has nothing to do with the radical assault on the culture that Trump is now mounting. Requiring teachers to force-feed patriotism to their students won’t make America greater; it will make us angrier and stupider.
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