Truth Teaching

An ugly truth about American public education is that Truth, writ large, has become an endangered subject. Schools have always had to battle censors and would-be censors, from the library to the classroom to the computer lab. Overprotective parents, bureaucrats, politicians, and others have long sought to control what students learn, often by denying teachers and students access to factual information. Free speech has never been free in school. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Let’s talk racism, for example. It’s a big example because racism touches every aspect of our social fabric and therefore every aspect of the school curriculum, ranging from underrepresentation—of authors of color in literature anthologies or libraries and lack of attention to historic figures who didn’t happen to be white—to outright misrepresentation. An example of the latter is a recent Texas decision, as reported in the Washington Post:

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

Furthermore, Texas school children are supposed to be taught that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War.

It’s easy to pick on subjects like literature and social studies where Truth has gone missing. But consider the compulsory over-testing of English and math skills that has pushed other subjects to the curricular fringe or over the edge entirely, such as music, art, civic education, and any sort of practical training—what we called in olden times home ec and shop. The truth is that the world of work, the world of human endeavor, does not rely merely on the ability to bubble in correct answers about standard prose and basic arithmetic. Turning our young into test-taking automatons is hardly an effective strategy for reaching the vaunted goal of “college and career readiness,” the latest in a legion of empty education reform mantras.

Racism is largely absent because it is, to use Al Gore’s pet phrase, inconvenient truth. Moreover it is a truth that is as plain as the nose on your face, to pile on another cliché. But it is a truth that must be ignored if we are to keep our future citizens in ignorance. And that is precisely what the rising rightwing proto-fascists (to borrow Henry Giroux’s term*) want in order to solidify and expand much of the political power they have already grabbed.

The threads of racism run through the social fabric of our country: in the wealth gap, in voter suppression, in subtle and not so subtle redlining and sundowning, in the grading of schools to reinforce the negative effects of poverty, in police brutality directed against blacks, in the over-population of our prisons with nonwhite inmates, and so much more. If we cannot teach this inconvenient truth, then we can never hope to change.

Writing in a recent article** Henry Giroux commented, “The United States has become a country that is proud of what it should be ashamed of.” That sentence calls to mind all of the recent waving of the Confederate battle flag by “patriots” hiding behind “heritage” to flaunt their fundamental racism.

Truth. How inconvenient.

Where are the rebels in our classrooms, our administrative offices, our school board meetings, our parent associations, our legislative bodies, who are willing to speak truth not merely to power, but to our children who deserve it most?

*Henry A. Giroux. Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, 2004.

**Henry A. Giroux. “The Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland.” TruthOut, July 19, 2015.

Je Suis Charlie

The murderous terrorist attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s offices that left twelve persons dead and others injured demonstrated, again, the fragility of free expression. Observant criticism, whether sober or satirical, often provokes strong, emotional reactions. Among extremists, particularly religious and ideological radicals whose ardent fanaticism is rooted in delusional beliefs that admit no contradiction, the reaction can be far out of proportion to the perceived offense.

Most rational people shrug off criticism as insulting but not life-threatening. Criticism based on untruths is countered, sometimes with legal action claiming defamation, libel, or slander. The legal tests are rigorous, particularly in the United States because our Constitution values freedom of expression as articulated in the First Amendment. Extreme beliefs, however, can and often do lead to extreme actions. The Paris massacre is merely the latest example.

U.S. education “reform” initiatives, which have come wave after destructive wave over several decades now, have consistently neglected to emphasize civic education. Such neglect has resulted in an electorate that is ill-informed about governance matters—from what the Constitution says and means to how legislative acts actually affect people’s lives—and largely disengaged from the governance process. As witness there are the abysmally consistent low numbers of citizens who vote. Indeed, voter turnout in the 2014 U.S. general election was the lowest since World War II. Scarcely more than a third of eligible voters cast ballots.

Extremism is an assault on civitas, the idea that civil society is bound in law, which conveys both responsibilities and rights of citizenship. Whether in France, the United States, or elsewhere, fanaticism endangers not only the individual targets of extremism but also the society as a whole. The purpose of civic education, therefore, is not simply to help young people to understand how government functions but to understand how they as citizens can and must participate meaningfully in civil society.

In a free society freedom of expression is a value of considerable worth. Such freedom should not be merely tolerated but prized. But even criticism must be grounded in truth. Satire, such as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, points up untruths and misinformation and pokes fun at lapses of judgment and delusions. In the United States the satirical Daily Show offers a complementary forum. Part of the charge of civic education is to teach critical discernment, which is the root of satire.

The far more insidious assault on freedom of expression is the promulgation of misinformation as truth or “news.” Effective civic education would help young people become discerning consumers of media, better able to distinguish news from propaganda. As it is, for example, a significant proportion of U.S. citizens takes at face value propaganda purveyed as truth—“news”—by organizations such as Fox News, despite fact-checking which shows that a majority of Fox’s “news” is misleading or blatantly false.

Facts do not change the minds of fanatics. Extremism is impervious to truth, which is why most extremist groups oppose education in favor of indoctrination. If the United States wants to improve education—to enact actual, forward-looking “reform”—then more effective civic education should be a high priority. Comprehensive civic education would help young people become informed citizens less likely in future to be radicalized by mistruths and more likely to be positively engaged in the maintenance of a free civil society.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).