(THIS IS A SECOND ITERATION OF A POST FIRST PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER OF 2022—NOW DELETED. THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT INSPIRED ME MORE THAN A YEAR AGO HAVE ONLY BECOME MORE PRESENT AND URGENT—PG)
As each new year unfolds, the level of anxiety around the educational enterprise in the United States seems to elevate. School and higher education leaders, teachers, and governing bodies face both active and tacit critique, sometimes bordering on and even becoming authentic threat, from zealots who have constructed and are vigorously sustaining and expanding a politicized critique of “school” as a locus of indoctrination and inequity. Increasingly we see staff members in student-facing positions like DEIBSJ officers, librarians, and counselors in the crosshairs, as well. With little more ammunition than lists of topics and texts handed down by the designers and politically ambitious masters of this narrative, self-styled patriots are terrorizing the American educational system in an apparent hope of returning it to someplace that may never actually have existed—or, if it did, that sustained real inequities.
The mainstream media seem mired in their own ruts of reportage on this issue. The first rut highlights the painful fact that local strategies are proving quite successful for those who carry them out by disrupting school board meetings and calling for book bans and the end of the teaching of certain “theories” and materials they deem “unsafe for children.” Another quietly reports on incidents in the life of this controversy and on school folk whose employment status has been impacted by these tactics. And lately, student protests around the conflict in the Middle East have provided yet another predictable platform for those who like to take special aim at higher education. We have seen university presidents fall, but the full impact on students of these ideological attacks has been less thoroughly covered, alas.
Why, educators must ask, does this political strategy seem to be so effective? Even where the supposedly distasteful topics and texts are scarcely present, if at all, in classroom instruction, agenda-fortified members of the general public seem to rest comfortably with the story that all educational institutions are places where the brainwashing of students is the point. Why does this extreme notion resonate?
Let us return to our own classrooms of yore and to those of earlier generations. Let us admit that “school,” other than as a place of social interaction—in itself sometimes fraught—does not evoke happy memories for many Americans. And even if memories have faded and congealed mainly into sporadic fragments of classroom embarrassments and autocratic or inept teachers, we can stipulate that recollections of long nights of homework, of cramming for quizzes and tests, and of high-stakes exercises constructed to enshrine The One Right answer abound—for all of us. And empirical evidence suggests that for most adults outside of the so-called “learned professions,” school and its materials have had little demonstrable relevance beyond being a set of hurdles to be surmounted in sequence in pursuit of instrumental goals.
Let us acknowledge an unfortunate historical fact: Rigidly organized classrooms and assessments focused on eliciting single, simply presented responses are the legacy of a culture that also rigidly stratified students—and all people, really—based on their known or stereotypically predicted abilities to parrot what they have been taught. When standardized tests, for example, are key determinants of an individual’s status in a meritocracy, being able to spout those “one right answers” represents a kind of social and cultural indoctrination mirroring values and perspectives that have been deemed supreme—even if these are rooted in demographic characteristics like faith, ethnicity, gender, or race.
Thus we must consider the stereotypes many people carry in their memories and that are so often reinforced by the ways “school” is portrayed in entertainment media, where teacherly quests for that One Right Answer are intended to catch out and embarrass the unprepared and where student desks are arrayed in columns and rows as precise as any spreadsheet. Even if such classrooms were never really intended to be places of indoctrination, they live in memory as boot camps where what the instructor said was Right and True and Good. Alternate perspectives or narratives were Wrong and False and Bad and would earn not passing grades but, instead, failure and opprobrium.
Fast forward, O Educator Reader, to the very best kinds of classroom experiences of today, which feature problem-solving, active learning in myriad forms, open discussion, and content deliberately selected to be relevant and meaningful to students in the context of institutional missions, professional standards, and inclusive values.
Great classrooms in 2024 are places of student interaction and collaboration, of problem-, project-, and place-based learning experiences that focus on critical and creative thinking, and where mistakes are accepted as part of the learning process. Such classrooms celebrate process and nuance far more than single narratives or answers. Traditional knowledge like multiplication tables and place geography has it role: as building-blocks of active learning, but not as the be-all and end-all of the educational experience.
What then, to do? How might the indoctrination narrative, which seems to play so powerfully with many in the general public, be overturned by an understanding of the way things could be and truly are in many schools and universities?
I call upon our media, national and local, to start shining a bright light on the best of contemporary active learning. It would hardly be rocket science to find classrooms in which students of all ages are being asked to explore, to experiment, to collaborate, to connect, to create—to discover and see their own places in their world in all its complexity. Rather than cringing at novel or nuanced perspectives on content—whether in literature, science, history, the social sciences, social emotional learning, the arts, world languages, mathematics, or engineering—let intentional public programming in every realm show how great instructional design and engaged and caring teaching can inspire deep analytical thinking and generous understandings that go well beyond the parroting of received “facts.”
The only way to counter the indoctrination narrative is to show—on television, in films, in print, wherever the message can be placed and seen—that school in our time invites students to see the world not in terms of right and wrong answers but as a place where complexity reigns but does not have to trap or defeat us. If some people cling to a belief that things they think are untrue or un-American or immoral are going on in schools, let us show these benighted citizens how discussion and inquiry—in real classrooms, with real students and real instructors— can acknowledge and encompass differing perspectives and help students learn to recognize, analyze, evaluate conflicting ideas as they build skill in and appreciation for true dialogue.
People will always develop and promote their own opinions, but democracy and human understanding can best thrive where even true believers can acknowledge and respect the humanity and dignity of those who see things otherwise.
Educators must hope that our friends and allies in the media see the need to start revealing the true nature of the best of contemporary education as forward-thinking educators are working so hard to make it be. And we must beg these friends and allies, sincerely and energetically, to turn this hope into action.