A few years ago, I gave a presentation outlining classroom practices that can promote caring and cooperation. When I finished, a woman stood up and heatedly informed me that she was not sending her child to school to “learn to be kind.” That, she said, would be “social engineering”. Furthermore, she added, her child needed to be “taught to respect authority”. It took her a moment to realize that since the latter could also qualify as an example of social engineering, the phrase was only used to discredit any topic she didn’t like.
This conversation came to mind recently when I read about how right-wing political activists have created “a constellation of well-funded groups aimed at disrupting school boards. A key feature of their “trolling of real local politics” is organized outrage at the way teachers allegedly “teach” students liberal ideas.
If I understand this correctly, it is “political” to say that black lives matter, but not political to act as if they don’t. Teaching the ugly historical realities of conquest and slavery in this country is “teaching” – or, in the words of one Republican voter, “hammering political thought into these little kids” – while avoiding teaching it is not. (More remarkably, the people who use the words “freedom” and “liberty” as weapons to undermine public health measures are not afraid to rely on coercion – to ban books and prohibit the teaching of certain topics.) Apparently, it is not racism that is unacceptable, but having bad manners to use the word “racism,” which Texas lawmakers were warned to avoid when debating voter suppression legislation. Around the same time, one school district in that state ordered its teachers to offer opposing views of the Holocaust, apparently to avoid indoctrinating students into thinking that mass murder is bad.
There will always be disagreements about what to teach, and different views about the content of teaching. But people who think that a certain event being taught in history class didn’t really happen, or wasn’t that horrible, or isn’t something children should learn about should just say so. It is dishonest to pretend that the curriculum they prefer is apolitical or free of values. What has been taught for decades can actually amount to indoctrination through omission or misdirection.
This applies not only to the teaching of history. What sociologist Alvin Gouldner once called “the useless ritual of moral neutrality” should be exposed as dishonest in every activity – and certainly in every aspect of education. Asking whether values should be allowed to be taught in school is as reasonable as asking whether our bodies should be allowed to contain bacteria. Just as people are teeming with microorganisms, so schools are teeming with values. We cannot see the former because they are too small; we overlook the latter because they are too similar to the values of the culture as a whole.