The education news these days has its sickening aspects: state governments in many of these United States are working to ensure that an honest, evidence-based approach to issues of race and social justice be expunged from these states’ public school classrooms, with certain materials banned outright. A few proposed bills go further, specifically including provisions for the punishment of teachers who dare to suggest in their classes that American history has not been about the creation of one big, happy, equally well cared-for family.
Sustaining the Big Lie of melting-pot harmony and equity is exactly what the nation and the world don’t need, now or ever, but the movement to do so is a natural outgrowth of the last half-decade’s liberation of bigotry and hatred. Of course this bigotry and hatred have always been with us, well before it invaded the Capitol wearing horns and carrying flags naming its champion.
In my mind’s ear I keep hearing the lyrics of a song that spelled this all out—initially in the context of a quasi-patriotic entertainment—in 1949, just as the Cold War was ramping up. “You’ve got to be carefully taught” to hate and despise, and curricula devoid of the facts of the bigotry and hatred that have marked the history of the Americas are very carefully teaching children that such was (and still is) the way of the world. We in the biz call this the null curriculum—letting the absence of certain content speak for its unimportance or simply give a nod to letting “whatever you think already or hear around” stand in for what is true and correct.
In the biz we’ve long known that the “null curriculum” can harbor any number of pernicious attitudes or beliefs that need to be acknowledged and addressed. In my youth six decades ago the great manifestation of the null curriculum was the absence of authors from our reading lists or the mention of leaders of note in any field who weren’t white, male, and preferably dead. In my all-male and very traditional independent school, I was carefully taught that it was a man’s world; even when I had the blessing of a woman teacher in tenth-grade English class, the school couldn’t stop reminding the world of her very impressive academic credentials as if to excuse this vagary in their hiring practice. And, for the record, our reading list—no doubt imposed upon this pioneer teacher—was all dead white male authors. It took a decade of watching civil rights marches, anti-war protests, and the murders of great leaders to rid me of most of what I had been expected to absorb from this null curriculum. I hope there’s nothing of that left, and I try hard to check myself, but I know that all the accoutrements of the privilege I carry around are hard to see and shed.
So we all know that we have to be carefully taught about equity and justice. We also know that an intentional curriculum can have great power, especially when we work hard to make it be relevant and meaningful to students.
There can be no argument here: we must offer our students intentional curricula that speak truth, not just to the weighty power of unexamined history but to the lives that students lead today and the diminished lives they may find themselves leading if the world slips further into economic decay, the climate continues to gasp, and the forces of bigotry and hatred continue their recent resurgence. Somewhere, somehow, schools and educators must recognize that they are the last line of defense against the willful ignorance and denial that will not preserve a status quo or take us back to a golden past but instead precipitate the human world into its final paroxysms.
One little blog post won’t stop those legislators from enacting willful ignorance, bigotry, and hatred into public school curricula. They have their majorities, and they will rule. But who in those benighted polities will have the moral courage and devotion to truth to present not some innocuous null curriculum but an actively, affirmatively, and relentlessly intentional curriculum designed to nurture the attitudes and skills of moral, social, and political leadership that might yet save our planet?
Well, if you’re reading this you are likely connected to the world of mission-driven independent schools, and once again I call upon you to interrogate the mission and values that your own special school or schools claim to represent.
For a period in my younger life I regarded the motto of the school I attended, “Truth” (echoed in part of the motto of the university from which I graduated) as having been—in my time—ironic, worthy of a derisive snort. But now I see that word as being a mandate, and I have a sense that educators everywhere—including at my old school—are taking its meaning to heart in their work. Whatever the actual words, the mandates to do and teach what we know to be true and right are present in the language.
We must work fast. Here’s a chance for independent schools to truly live up to their public purpose: to help our students learn what they need to ensure themselves and everyone in their world a happy, healthy, safe, just, and equitable future.
Get to it!