Even though John McCain declared education to be “the civil rights issue of this century,” his idea of equal opportunity has more to do with “shaking up failed school bureaucracies” and introducing market-driven competitive forces to “empower parents with choice” regardless of whether, in fact, a choice actually exists. And while he’s busy talking about shaking things up, he’s wants us to know that Bill Ayers is a menace, which has got Sol Stern worked up again about leftist teachers with social justice agendas:
America’s ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Mr. Ayers has tried to give the civic culture ideal a coup de grace, contemptuously dismissing it as nothing more than what the critical pedagogy theorists commonly refer to as “capitalist hegemony.”
Like me, for instance? But I’ve never needed Bill Ayers’ or anyone else’s help to understand that teachers and schools should make a difference for people. The big question appears to be, How? I’ll join Nancy Flanagan in saying that it feels like we’ve entered a parallel universe in which social justice has been “muddled up with extremism and destroying the fabric of democracy.” Social justice teaching isn’t all that big a stretch when you consider, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, “information itself has a liberal bias.”
I’ve been reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham -1963 with my students, and we just finished the church-bombing chapter. I’ve been reading this aloud to them, only a chapter or two each week – not making very quick work of it – so it’s taken us many weeks to get through the book. There’s a first person narrator, Kenny, who has a colorful storytelling style that the kids really enjoy. It’s mostly just good fun, kid stuff, until the end when Kenny’s family travels from their home in Flint, Michigan to Grandma Sands’ house in Birmingham, where they become personally involved in the 1963 church bombing.
I read the book several years ago, but I’ve never read it with any of my students. I chose it because I wanted to discuss first person narratives, and I also wanted to take an informal look at the Civil Rights Movement in the 60′s using multicultural historical fiction as a vehicle. I am, these days, an OLD person who was around when this stuff was really happening. My students think I’m some kind of antique, with first-hand knowledge of a watershed historical moment.
The narrator takes the reader up to the doorway of the church, full of smoking rubble, with people screaming and running. We’re told little, if anything, though, about why the church was bombed. The book doesn’t reach to make a large political statement, and instead focuses on the family’s human response to this horrific trauma.
But to make sense of what happened, if that’s even possible, kids need to know what was going on in the South then. I told them a little bit about Jim Crow and segregation, which they’ve mostly heard about before. I suggested they look on the internet if they wanted to learn more, and several of them did just that. That pleased me, since it indicated an authentic interest, and those students have helped flesh out some of the background for the rest of the class. They learned that Martin Luther King wasn’t just assassinated out of nowhere. There was a lot going on that is not commonly discussed anymore.
At lunch the other day, while the kids were eating, I overheard several of them talking about the election, saying that Obama was going to be shot. Where’d you all hear that? I asked. They pointed to one of the boys. I asked, Why do you think that’s going to happen? And he said – this really got me – Because Obama’s good. I asked them to please not talk like that, and now we’ve started to discuss some of this more calmly.
I did a quick search myself, and found a collection news articles and essays about the bombing. One stand-out quote gave me chills: “Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.” Given the hate talk I’ve seen lately on youtube, and all over the internet, it feels a lot like turbulent old times.
Several students are now asking the school librarian where she keeps the historical fiction.
Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense. The school day has been circumscribed by concern for testing, which has pushed other very important concerns to the periphery.
Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined. I’m not interested in indoctrinating anyone. My only agenda is activating some gray matter, and acknowledging the value of participating in public discourse, none of which is emphasized in any official reform agenda.
John Dewey’s, My Pedagogic Creed, begins with the assertion that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.” How can it proceed otherwise?
To that end, The Zinn Education Project offers a free download of A People’s History, A People’s Pedagogy, by Bill Bigelow, and other resources that support social justice teaching. History is a Weapon has published A People’s History, by Howard Zinn, online.
Teachers who want to find multicultural children’s literature, or any other kind of children’s literature, for students at any age, can find plenty in the Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature.
It’s worth emphasizing, I think, that rising test scores are nothing to celebrate. Thank you, Alfie Kohn.
7 Comments
Hey, Doug.
Some stirring words. I’m impressed with any blogger who can rationally quote The Colbert Report and Howard Zinn in the same piece.
I’ve spent too much time in a real classroom and know too many teachers to think that the critical theorists are running the show in the ed schools where most teachers are trained. And if any novice teacher does come out of ed school blazing with righteous indignation about the fundamentally unfair distribution of educational resources in this country, they generally have it squeezed out of them in their first few months of dealing with the overwhelming bureaucracy, tradition, “accountability” and sameness in the schools where they’re employed. Dangerously radical school reform? Tell me where. No, really—where?
People like Sol Stern are now even labeling Bill Ayers’ course catalog descriptions dangerous: “Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression — we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally.” Yeah, that’s dangerous all right–all that hope, optimism and roll-up-your-sleeves determination to be part of building a better country. Can’t have that.
Wonderful piece, Doug. Thanks
Nancy, my favorite line from your post: “If I’m not teaching—ultimately—toward social justice, toward improved opportunity for each of my students, then why would I teach at all? I certainly wouldn’t do it for the money.”
That pretty well sums it up.
thank you.
While I think you have put together a thoughtful peice about how you approach the concept of teaching for social justice, I wonder if you and other proponents of the doctrine (and yes, it is a doctrine that is taught in education schools among other places), can define what exactly you mean by social justice.
My problem with the concept of teaching for social justice is that the phrase can mean anything and can, and does, mean something different to different people. Simply the debate about the term and what it means can demonstrate that subjectivity.
But the problem that conservatives like me have is not that teaching for social justice is necessarily a bad thing. Rather, my concern is that in the rush to “make things better through social justice” we have forgotten to teach our children things like reading, writing, math, science (hard and soft), how to research and develop skils to really assess the world around them for themselves. My belief is that schools that educate children will develop citizens who can bring about change because THEY see the problem, not because some teacher believes a given cause to be important or a given issue is socially injust.
Social justice is a slippery term and it is one that should be defined by an individual person as to what the term means to them, as I am sure that my definition of social justice is far different than yours. What education should do, objectively, is teach children how to define that term for themselves, not be given the definition by someone else.
Matt, there’s not a lot for me to disagree with in what you’ve said here. Skills and knowledge are prerequisite for success in any area, and responsibility for that falls on schools and parents, for the most part. But I see other social agents as sharing some responsibility, also.
I don’t agree that acknowledging the role of culture, class, history, or economics in how advantage is distributed in our society is necessarily antagonistic to the goals of an academic program, though.
Your point about what social justice means, is well-taken. I see the same difficulty in discussing whole language philosophy and constructivism. For a quick exploration of what we mean by the term ‘social justice’, eduwonkette wrote on this topic last spring.
In response to your post, simply: amen.
I have been wondering if it is possible to relook at the debating opportunities in schools to see if there is a way to cover challenging questions like a team of researchers, anthropologists (Wesch flavoured, or Kat Jungnickel flavoured.)
rather than in a win lose binary debate.
I thought it might be possible to develop a game through which students could explore the process of research or collaborative inquiry to make a result. Also including querying or surveying parents and processing responses.
In my head the idea of developing those processes in schools means that the class could be the engine room for making proposals about the form or outcome of their learning. eg. Develop a proposal for what to do with a specific patch of school grounds, or a local historic site, or a building renovation.
I thought that this kind of articulation could make it possible for schools to develop and practice techniques and dialogue which would make it possible for them to make authoritative proposals for their own regional or cultural focus in school. ie Its that kind of rigor which would make it attractive for edu departments to find the best way forward through listening to the schools and their communities and students rather than relying on mass testing as the source for authoritative outcomes?
This is possibly waffle but i feel like there is something in the relationship with community and students which makes the school the place where policy and pedagogy could be more tailored to local needs.
It is possible this happens already it just feels like there is a need for some bottom up thinking to cut through the testing to find something more authentic and individual for students to aim for.
lucychili, I agree that bottom up thinking has to be included in any effort to build support for constructive change. The problem, of course, is in organizing people to give them even a sense of being, or seeing themselves as capable of action. How that would work, given existing power structures, I can’t imagine.
I like the idea of surveying parents and family members, and processing responses. It’s a step toward an ethnographic look at community, which is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. It would be doable, I think.
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