Big bad Marx

I just listened to episode #424 of This American Life, "Kid Politics". Like all episodes of This American Life, it was fantastic, but particularly so to to me because it focused on various incarnations of democracy in education. The first act got me especially riled up in terms of how we help students build knowledge. Do we didactically tell them what to think? Or do we give them information and help the build the skills to form their own opinions on issues? Obviously I favor the latter; the teacher from the program's first act certainly did not. She took her students on a field trip to the Ronald Reagan Museum's Discovery Center--in and of itself, a very cool field trip. It sounded like a pretty freaking awesome experience for middle schoolers (I think it was a class of 6th graders): a replica of the Oval Office, Air Force One, a "Command Decision Center", and the Press Room. Students were divided into teams of presidential advisors and press corps, with one lucky student serving as President Reagan himself, and role played the Invasion of Grenada.

I was really excited as I listened to the set-up of the activity; what a great way to explore different issues of leadership, decision making, and international conflict. But as the activity progressed, I became more and more frustrated at the disservice the teacher was doing to her students. Leading students through rote recollection of which countries were Communist and which were Democratic, she posed questions like:

• Why is Communism bad? (Because people don't get to have freedom, etc.)
  
• Do people in Communist countries get to keep all of their money? (No)
• Who gets all of the money in Communist countries? (the government)

Whoa. Talk about over-simplifying a very complex political topic. And posing such leading questions that clearly had a "right" answer....well, I just consider that to be completely unprofessional.
Yet, complex economic and political issues are often presented in such simplistic or skewed fashions in textbooks because....go figure.....publishers are "afraid of being labeled Marxist" as one top social studies editor told James Loewen in "Lies My Teacher Told Me".



The answer to being "labeled Marxist" is apparently to omit any reference to class struggle, present America as a flawless hero, and eliminate any debate about the course of history. When the student playing Reagan made a different decision than Reagan himself did, a buzzer went off and lights started flashing, clearly indicating that he had made the "wrong" answer. How are students supposed to truly build their own decision making skills if we insist on just thrusting information at them, and expect nothing from them but regurgitation of those same facts?

A teeny bit of textbook history

When I first conceived of this independent study project on the politics of textbooks, it was based out of a desire to learn more about the processes which govern textbook content approval. My curiosity was piqued from various articles I had read over the years discussing various textbook battles being fought in California or Texas, and their disproportionate impact on textbooks in the rest of the nation due to their buying power and the economics of printing presses. In my readings and research, however, I am reminded that ideological battles over how knowledge is disseminated are nothing new. After all, we have:

• Copernicus (1473-1543)
• Galileo (1564-1642)
• Horace Mann reform era (1830s-1840s, when Mann exerted major influence over education reforms. Most notable was the establishment of a common school system whereby public education became available to all children; most controversial was inclusion of religious-based morality teaching. Note that at the time this was controversial not because it included religion in public schools, but because it adopted a non-sectarian approach rather than pick either the Protestant or Catholic side.)
  
• State v. John Scopes (1925 Tennessee court case overturning an anti-evolution state law)
  
• Everson v. Board of Education (1947 Supreme Court case ruling that public school transportation could not be used for Catholic school students)

Of course, there are lots and lots of other pieces of this puzzle--this little list is only meant to be a sampling. The point is that ideological battles over what gets taught have been waged for a long time, and I don't think they'll be ceasing anytime soon. So what, then is, our responsibility to students? I view this through two lenses. On the one hand, as a society and community we seek truth and knowledge. So it seems like incorporating the truths of any given field in a textbook is a no-brainer. But then again, how do we truly build knowledge? It's not by having facts spewed at us and passively ingesting them. We build knowledge through interaction; by taking in information from various sources, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing that information into true understanding. Seeking truth and knowledge is not limited to making sure the "right" words are in any given text, but that students are given the skills and opportunity to do the right thing with those words.

So! How Are The Children?

I'm currently reading about constitutional challenges to textbook content. There are multiple court rulings affirming the right of local school boards to determine the permissibility of materials used in class. Parents are most often the source of court challenges, when they read their children's school books only to find the content offensive to their moral or religious beliefs. The article I'm reading posits that this is likely because texts provide the only hard evidence of what their child is being taught in the classroom, which really made something click for me.


It's been really hard to find research sources about textbook content that is less than 15 years old. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but the idea that textbooks are somehow the only way for parents to keep up with what's going on in their kid's classroom seems really dated to me. Most of the teachers that I know maintain websites for their classes, send home some sort of e-newsletter or hard copy newsletter in addition to the school's regular communication, and regularly attempt more personal contact (such as conferences or phone calls) with parents. Building parental relationships is a major focus of my graduate teaching courses. It seems to me that in a well run classroom in 2011, parents have multiple opportunities to find out what's happening in their child's classroom. Maybe that is why textbook controversies don't seem to be as big of an issue in the education/academic world. Of course, battles still rage in some states (i.e. Texas, which is nothing to sniff at given its role in determining textbook norms for the rest of the nation). In my estimation, however, given everything else that schools are dealing with, the content of textbooks seems to rank pretty low on the list of priorities.

Thank you, Google

Ok, so I know that there are all sorts of scary elements to Google's impending world domination, but wow am I a huge fan of Google Scholar. I've been having a hard time finding more current articles about textbook politics, and it helped me unearth this gem: The Textbook as Discourse, which contained an article called "Textbook Content and Religious Fundamentalism". It outlines the modern history of textbook activism by right-wing Christians, as founded by Mel and Norma Gabler in Texas.

The article does an admirable job of examining their concerns. A variety of specific examples from different textbooks are given to illustrate the types of concerns held by the Gablers, all of which boiled down to essentially the same point: that textbooks should not promote a "humanist" view of the world, which rather than being the separation of church and state is actually the promotion of a different religious viewpoint. I find it ironic that all of the examples they give are ethical situations with open ended possibilities that students are asked to explore, which the Gablers and their activists claim leaves children vulnerable because their "moral values are not clearly defined". They claim this undermines the authority of the family in the moral education of the child. I can understand how people could have that need for control, but I see two major problems with it: 1) it doesn't acknowledge that at some point, every person needs to determine their own morals and beliefs, and that people need to be well equipped to make that individual determination, and 2) lots and lots of kids grow up in environments where they receive nothing in the way of moral education, and schools would be negligent if they provided no development of ethical reasoning skills.

Public Hearing on Social Studies Standards

Tonight I went to a public hearing at the Minnesota Department of Education about the proposed changes to the state social studies standards. This is basically Minnesota's version of a textbook review panel; they do not have a formal body that reviews or approves textbooks for classroom use, but there is a set of state standards about what should be taught in each subject area. I am familiar with the old social studies standards, a bulky and disjointed document that was difficult to follow with an odd mix of micromanagement and vagueness. The new standards are a huge improvement, in my opinion; much easier to follow, streamlined, with sensible guidelines and benchmarks that leave appropriate space for adaptation by the teacher.

But I digress. I went to the hearing because I wanted to see who was there, and hear other thoughts and opinions. I had no idea what to expect, other than the fact that there would probably be a panel of people in suites. I was pretty much right about that.


What I was curious about was whether there would be any Texas-style ideologues out to inject the social studies standards with a particular "type" of history.


The first person to speak was a middle aged white woman, and as she started I thought that I might be witnessing the beginning of a political rant. She introduced herself as the representative of a citizens organization that had a distinctly right-wing feel to it (Citizens for Freedom in Education or something like that). Her comments were very specific. She began by pointing out a reduction in times that the "founding fathers" are mentioned within the standard; she talked about the number of times the values of "freedom" and "prosperity" were written (yes, she had sifted through and counted); and stated their concern about capitalism not being presented in a positive enough light. All in all, it was quite respectful and although I didn't agree with a lot of what she was saying, I was actually really happy to see the public comment process working in that it allowed her to voice her opinions peacefully and meaningfully.

The rest of the comments came from teachers, professors, or other people in the education field and were interesting from an education perspective but not particularly political at all. All in all it made me feel pretty good about Minnesota's ability to keep politics out of curriculum development.

Rainbows in the Puddles

Lining up literature for this independent study was much more difficult than I thought it would be. A lot of the books I am reading were published longer ago than I would have liked; there just aren’t a whole lot of books on the politics of textbooks published recently. It’s striking to me, then, how frequently I see books published in the late 1980s or early 1990s that talk about the exact same issues that dominate discussions of American education today. In Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, he quotes a high school principal saying

“We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn how to think, because their teachers are straightjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives, nothing wonderful or fanciful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul. Is this what the country wants for its black children?”

A pastor from that same community, which is besot with chemical factories and waste dumps, offers a related perspective:

“The toxic dangers aren’t the worst. It is the aesthetic consequences that may be the most damaging in the long run. What is the message that it gives to children to grow up surrounded by trash burners, dumpsites, and enormous prisons? Kids I know have told me they are ashamed to say they come from Camden.

Still, there is this longing, this persistent hunger. People look for beauty even in the midst of ugliness. ‘It rains on my city,’ said an eight-year-old I know, ‘but I see rainbows in the puddles.’"

Teachers need to be able to help kids to find the rainbows in the puddles, whatever that may be in a given community. Primary and secondary education is supposed to help us make sense of the world around us, and equip us with the skills and tools we need to make our way in the world. It’s not a process for which there is a one-size-fits-all approach.

"Our" Schools

This paragraph from Teachers & Texts by Michael Apple struck a major chord with me:

"...we continually find references to a particular concept -- our. It is 'our' country, 'our' school system, 'our' democratic society. It is in this very construction that a danger resides. For the repeated use of 'our' covers the reality of relations that are structurally unequal - relations that are not due to education and will not be solved by them."

I work at an innovative, project-based charter school in Minnesota. It is run by a teacher cooperative, and the students have a lot of freedom over their own learning as well as the structure of the school. Yet in this admittedly quirky microcosm of the education system, I see this very same construction of 'our' (or 'their', as this case may be) play out almost daily. Students are told that this is 'their' school, expected to be self directed in order to foster 'their' success, and disciplined using restorative justice based on what is deemed to be best for 'our' community. For a lot of students, this works really great. But for many others, there seems to be a serious cognitive dissonance between what the schools stated ideals are and the reality of certain students life experiences and situations. Not surprisingly, these are our at-risk students; the ones who have bounced between a dozen+ schools in their young lives (some have been to three different schools just this year), who have unstable and often tragic home situations, who have never had anyone make sure that they get dinner much less a bedtime story. It's not hard to see that for a 15 year old (or 12, or 18, etc.) with that kind of life experience under their belt, getting invested in any notion of "community" is not at the top of the list of priorities. They are just trying to survive; they don't have the time or skills or resources to figure out how to thrive. It is a really frustrating dynamic. I know and like and respect the majority of the teachers at the school, and I know they are all social justice minded teachers who don't want any kids to slip between the cracks. But I definitely think there's more than a little ignorance of what it really takes to keep certain kids from slipping through the cracks.

If I see this dynamic playing out even in just my little school with its foundational commitment to community, I have to believe that large institutions without such a core commitment very easily lose sight of what the word our really truly means.