May08

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The Clown Show, Part IV: In Every Accusation, There Is a Confession

It is hardly a secret that Republicans in general, and the Trump administration in particular, have waged war against universities and against public schools, backed—at least in part—by the claim that these institutions are some sort of left-wing indoctrination mills.

This is, on the whole, stupid. It's true that education, especially higher education, tends to make people think critically, and that does not always work out well for political parties and religious groups who are peddling dubious notions (say, trickle-down economics or prosperity gospel). There are also a small minority of outspoken left-wing teachers/professors, and some of them teach unabashedly left-wing classes. But you know who signs up for those classes? Left-wing students. Not too many presidents of the campus chapter of the Young Republicans Club are signing up for Critical Race Theory 101.

In the last week, there have been a couple of high-profile reminders that Republicans not only believe in the notion of indoctrination, but also that the switch can be flipped, such that the students can be brainwashed in a right-wing direction, instead of a left-wing direction. Here, first of all, is Stephen Miller, from a speech last week:

Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding ... we're gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.

OK, Steve. Here is what we thought of while he was speaking:

We'll just leave that there, without further comment.

Meanwhile, example number two involves Ryan Walters, a pro-Trump and anti-communist zealot who bears the delightfully ironic title of Oklahoma Education Commissar. He is apparently responsible for putting together the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Social Studies, and has now added this to the list of things students are expected to know/learn:

1. Explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts including Title 42 and Remain in Mexico policy, consumer and business confidence, interest rates, and inflation rates prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
   
   
2. Describe the effects of the replacement of NAFTA with USMCA, expanded European contributions to NATO spending, the signing of the Abraham Accords, and the successful avoidance of new wars.
   
   
3. Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab and the economic and social effects of state and local lockdowns.
   
   
4. Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of "bellwether county" trends.

If you want to see what an actual attempt at indoctrination looks like, well, there it is.

The good news here is that there is just no chance Miller or the Commissar will have any meaningful success with their efforts at brainwashing. There are, of course, students who don't pay attention and don't learn much of anything. More important, however, is that students who are above the age of about 11 (5th grade) tend to be very skeptical, and very good at sniffing out B.S.

Further, there is also a compliance issue on the part of the teachers and the professors. A handful of them will welcome far-right guidelines, it is true, because those folks want sanction for teaching a far-right class. But the great majority of them do not want to feel like they are being used as tools by The Man. And every time some person, regardless of their politics, puts out sets of standards like these, they ALWAYS overshoot by a country mile, and include stuff that would take three times as long to cover as the time that is actually allocated. The (somewhat lefty) standards for California state history, taught to 4th graders, is something like 9 pages long, and contains some subjects that (Z) wouldn't even try in a college class, much less a 4th grade class. The point here is that it's easy to skip the stupid and propagandistic parts, on the basis that "I just couldn't get to it all. Sorry!"

Now, in some cases, a rule or a standard is not optional for teachers—for example, the new Louisiana rule about posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms. It is for this circumstance that malicious compliance was created—follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit. There are all kinds of ways to pull this off, as an educator. Indeed, we are reminded that several readers wrote in to ask us what WE would do if required to display the Ten Commandments in our classroom. We were at work on our answer, but didn't get it finished, and then the endless march of BIG NEWS intervened. Maybe we'll try to get back to it for tomorrow's posting, as an illustration of what we mean by malicious compliance.

So, those are our thoughts on this matter. We had quite a few readers write in about the Oklahoma nonsense, so we thought we'd better share them. (Z)