It's time to de-politicize schools
Within the open society that liberalism affords us is the understanding that we can talk through our problems and potentially reach a compromise without having to physically fight. Our ancestors used to fight with their spears and guns and now we “fight” with the quality of our arguments. They used to win by conquering land, through tribal influence and violence; today, we win by convincing people. We can see the results of this more enlightened approach in the area of politics where the winner is the one with the most votes. We can see the results of this in business where the company with the greatest market share within an industry has successfully convinced more people to purchase their goods or services than a competitor has. The metaphor is that the liberal social order is only the waterspring; it’s the small brooks which turn into big rivers that are the consequences of such an order and include every aspect of our lives: immigration, foreign policy, the social and domestic policy and so forth… However, the liberal social order tends to have a direct effect first on education.
Should a specific political or social minority/majority be in power at any level, it will have a direct influence upon education. What is being taught, how it is being taught, and the implicit moral values that are being taught through that education. This is coupled with the fact that education is said to be values-neutral. This dichotomy of presenting education as politically and socially neutral all the while passing on a dominant cultural set of values is a tension in schools and households today. All of this is the theory.?
However, as Yogi Berra famously put it, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”
A look at human nature and logic would have us see that it is difficult (if not impossible) to ask any human being to fully and completely put aside their own biases. An individual will have natural political leanings and may choose to become a teacher; they will bring those biases into the classroom in what they teach and how they go about teaching it.?
Secondly, a cursory reading of the news and of reality in the last 30 years has shown us, as a nation, to be increasingly divided and polarized. This not only affects political policy but educational policy as well. That division finds itself naturally filtering through into the classroom. It should be noted that no teacher, educator, administrator is in no way ill-willed. What a biased educator, teacher, or administrator does is what they believe to be the real best for the students. Having worked as a teacher for over 16 years, I am convinced of this.
That having been said, animosity arises directly from this stress between the theory theoretical reality and the individual biased educators ability to perceive it.?
This leads to the idea that far too many educators, administrators, and teachers, have brought in the contemporary tribal ideological battle into the classroom that one finds in the wider society.?
It’s time to actively work to de-politicize schools.?
The effect would be to open up a new flourishing of education that our current limited ideological back-and-forth stiffles. It is a tall order, but a discussion on how to do this could start with :
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Is de-politicizing schools even possible? Let me know with a reply to this article.
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