Have NYC Schools Embraced the 'New Left'?

Jason Jones sent me an article recently that wound up causing me to write an awfully long email. I've lightly edited that email and turned it into this post.

The article in question in George Packer's "When the Culture War Comes for the Kids: Caught between brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City's schools" from this Month's Atlantic magazine. I can't decide if I recommend it because it's interesting and worthwhile or because it's useful context for what I'm writing here, but go ahead and check it out.

If you know me and have talked with me about my potential future research, I'm sure you can see why I have no interest in studying schools in NYC! And with all the absurdly stressful hoops that even the privileged jump through to secure what they consider the proper public or private educations for their children, you can also see why so many parents are vocal in maintaining segregated schools. And bathrooms. The demographics of NYC are fascinating when you consider how 'we' want America to look in a decade or two. Texas is almost there. Georgia will be there soon, too. Already, averaged across the US, most students are not white. As someone once said, the future is here but isn't distributed evenly. Perhaps I mean that in multiple senses when thinking about schools. 

And yes, life is so hard for a boomer Yale graduate who, with only an arts degree, has managed to live and raise a family in one of the most expensive cities in the world - all on the income from his writing. Woe is he. If only there was some way his children could be assured a future without succumbing to the oxymoronic pathway of the meritocratic elites. This guy's laments remind me of the kind of logic underpinning the recent college admissions scandal. He's got all the privilege afforded an educated white man but not quite enough money to entirely finesse the system. He looks at the hedge fund guy and recognizes that guy's kid will get into, say, Yale, because he'll buy them a new performing arts center or some other donations scheme. Meanwhile poor Mr. Packer's kids might have to settle for, gasp, Amherst, Swarthmore, or Williams! And when you see that he was considering $50,000 a year for private school tuition for 18 years, the $75,000 spent bribing a psychologist for a disability diagnosis, cheating on the SAT, and photoshopping some water polo photos starts to look less crazy. Hell, if the penalty is two weeks in prison and one year probation...

That bit about the PTA paying for various teachers' salaries was particularly grim. I wonder how much that has to do with testing in elementary and middle? New York's regents exams only cover ELA and Math until they get to high school so, I suppose, there's no reason to learn those things. There's also something incongruous about Packer's son's black friend Marcu simultaneously not know they had a backyard and almost always playing at their house. His insinuation that their friendship was made better by not talking about the obvious inequality of their families should be read against the following sections 5 and 6. Heaven forbid Packer or his kid have to feel uncomfortable. Someone find him a safe space! Mr. Packer is suddenly shocked when the Marcuses of the world want to talk about inequality, racism, and everything else. When the parents realize they have a choice in avoiding a series of tests that are used for middle and high school admissions, he balks at the 'opportunity' he might be throwing away for his own kids. Solidarity is, after all, only for the oppressed. 

Though, by the end of section 7, I was coming around to some of his criticisms of empty 'activist' education. It's a real pity that civics has been lost. Notice the PTA pays for a foreign language and science but not a social studies teacher - also not a tested subject until high school but they're an opt out school so I am increasingly confused by the logics. Elementary grades often fold all the subjects into the one classroom teacher's job. At least that was the case when I was over at PS 59. Social studies wasn't a separate class so much as an hour each week devoted more specifically to questions of history and society than to the use and consumption of language or math. Science was, curiously, a separate class with a separate teacher they attended once a week for two hours. Again, the logics confuse me. Because NYC in insane and kids can't even go to middle school without an application and test scores, they use a nobel-prize winning algorithm to 'match' children to schools. This is the exact same one used for medical residency matching - a process that I believe ensures nobody is happy. Seriously, no residents get their top choices, no residency gets their top recruits, and for six months nobody know where they're going to live in the following year. I'm so glad we're extending this to other areas.

But, I want to diverge from the article a little bit and talk more specifically about the integration initiative Packer mentions is happening in his district. I think it's an excellent case study in exactly how this fucking city replicates privilege at every opportunity. He only sees what what is happening to him and his kids' schools. Myopic but understandable. 

So, as Parker points out, District 15 in Brooklyn is supposed to be undergoing an integration plan that seeks to, largely, equalize the racial demographic proportions of the middle schools. Whereas they may have had 1 very white school and 9 very not white schools, now they will be distributed around in a way where about 10% of each middle school is white and so-on. (I'm using 10 middle schools as a nice round number example, I think there are actually only 8). Unlike in, say, Atlanta where Fulton County buses black students 30-40 miles from the south side to white schools on the north side, District 15 is only about 3 miles long and a mile wide. The transportation changes would be minimal. You could probably walk end to end in about 1.5 hours. Anyway, time for a thought experiment. We know who, demographically speaking, tends to do the best in school. White kids and Asian kids. As it stands, throughout NYC, white and asian students end up clustered in a few high ranked public schools. They score higher on tests, sure, but also attend schools that promote them through in a way that better sets them up for admissions to competitive middle and high schools and, eventually, colleges. All of this is what the DOE's proposal is trying to fix. Here's the thought experiment: should this plan succeed and the middle schools in this district become largely proportionate to the demographics of the district, which students will be the highest performing students at every school?

Okay, now, keeping your answer in mind, allow me to introduce another initiative that the mayor and DOE are trying to implement. They want to overhaul admissions at the city's selective admissions high schools. These are only 8 of hundreds of schools but they are, essentially, private academies for the highest performing students in the city and are considered a golden ticket into Ivy League universities. As it stands now, there is even a special test for the selective admissions high schools, the SHSAT (again, these people are fucking insane). The proposal would change admissions at these elite schools to automatically accept the top 7% of students from every middle school. The top 7%. Not 10 or 5 but 7 because why not?

Now, do you remember the answer you had to your thought experiment? The one about which students would comprise the top students of middle schools under the proposed integration plans? That is how privilege really works. That is how the most segregated school system in America will replicate white supremacy under the guise of diversity and equity. That is how a progressive mayor and a DOE largely run by people of color can be the handmaidens of social reproduction. Indeed, I have experience with a not-too-dissimilar program, the HOPE scholarship. I benefited from a Democrat's progressive attempt to make college free for a large number of students. That attempt, though, was largely funded by the poor and by black Georgians because that's who buys most of the lottery tickets! When I talk to people about this, they don't respond well. Most, like Packer, are concentrated on what it means for their kid, for their school, and if they need to flee to private schools or somewhere unthinkable, like White Plains.

Of course, everything is still muddling its way through. Nothing is rolled out city-wide or, in the case of the high school admissions, even close to becoming policy, yet. It'll never happen that way, they assure me. We thought that about concentration camps for children at the southern border, too. We felt that way about voting, that rights only move in one direction. We felt a lot of things that made us feel better about an uncertain future. Packer seems eager to portray his son as a budding Atticus Finch. Maybe he thinks it'll help his admissions chances to Stuyvesant High School. Meanwhile, the machine grinds on; mulching people into the grist needed to keep the Packers of the world on top. 

Thinking more broadly about the situation nationwide, I wonder how it is that the most progressive places in theory are often the least progressive in practice? Why is it that black men have higher social mobility in the conservative, discriminatory South than in the progressive, inclusive northeast? Why is it that the most segregated schools are found in the northeast and midwest? (Even when controlled for desegregation busing!) How can the west coast be both the most progressive and the national hotbed of unsheltered homelessness? (Georgia cut its homeless population by 10,000! Makes me wonder if they're playing with the math?) How is it possible that 10% of progressive NYC's students are homeless? Yet we are told to worry about opt-out and too much discussion of identity in the classroom?

It's a stunning indictment of American progressive values put into effect. No wonder there's a reverse great migration of African Americans away from the North. Recently Gloria Ladson-Billings gave a talk here at TC. She was discussing the 'northern strategy'. This is obviously a play on the Southern Strategy but, rather than focusing on reframing political coalitions, she is focusing on how schools nationwide are being reframed in the lens of northern education reform. The talk does a good job of tracing the often-hidden lineage of the northern cities and states in maintaining and growing segregation both in the pre- and post-Brown US. She flat out calls it de jure and I am inclined to agree. 

A pox on both their houses.

I read a book: Let's discuss The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Author's note. I began this post in Feburary after finishing the book but it fell by the wayside as my workload for the semester increased. I'm procrastinating a big paper right now, which makes it the perfect time to wrap up and publish the post. 

I don't write here enough and have been thinking of ways to encourage myself to do a bit more writing. One thought that came to mind was to review books I've been reading. I don't read much fiction or other kinds of literature these days (meaning since college). What I do read is split between readings for courses and books which interest me for their controversial or heterodox arguments. Part of trying to avoid building an epistemic bubble is seeking alternative ways of viewing the world. Given my doctoral studies, it's probably not surprising that two of the recent books I've read are about the US university system. I'll be talking about one here.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is a book which feels true. The centering of academic inquiry and free speech mesh with many values which I hold and feel are important to well functioning societies and robust university systems. I also appreciate how the authors put forward a more personal and caring argument for the mental and emotional well-being of students and university faculty. Lukianoff and Haidt are clear that the intent of their book is to make people's lives less stressful and encourage resilience in a generation of students who are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. The book is divided into four parts which I'll summarize and then move into making some commentary. I am planning to spend more time on the arguments so you'll see shorter summaries of the specific examples the authors use to illustrate their position. (As an aside, the authors helpfully offer bullet-point summaries at the end of each chapter, a strategy reminiscent of the hyperemetic articles published by Business Insider. I'm not sure when this trend started or what it's for but it is super helpful when writing summaries)

Part I: Three Bad Ideas

Lukianoff and Haidt begin with three bad ideas, they call them the "great untruths," which they claim have taken root in our culture and, especially, in our schools. The first great untruth is "what doesn't kill you makes you weaker." This inversion of the classic aphorism is a nice summary of their worry that we, as a society, are sheltering our children from any and every source of adversity in the name of keeping them safe. Without facing challenges, children don't learn and don't mature into "capable adults." The authors are critical of the ways in which trauma, originally a concept reserved for physical damage to the body and mental damage from extreme duress, has been broadened into a more general form of trauma which now includes upsetting language. They state that these broadened claims to trauma are not grounded in legitimate psychological research. The result of these appeals to safety and overprotection are that young people are deprived of a chance to become "anti-fragile" which, in turn, means they are more fragile, more depressed, stressed, and anxious than they otherwise might be. This includes an argument that overprotection makes young people more likely to see themselves as victims.

The second great untruth is "always trust your feelings." Here, the authors criticize practices and policies which encourage people to act and think in ways which their emotions direct them. Trusting your feelings, the authors say, means that a person who says something which upsets you is wrong if you feel they are wrong. Lukianoff and Haidt would like a clearer and more meditative distinction between, for example, aggressive speech intended to hurt and microaggressions which are not intended to hurt. They write that schools are encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way which discourages empathy and increases feelings of stress and anxiety surrounding social interactions. One crucial component undergirding the logic of Coddling's project is introduced in this chapter: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In short, CBT aims to help patients understand how their active thought processes can be influenced by "automatic" processes. These automatic processes are not usually helpful and generate "cognitive distortions" which cause, among other things, depression and anxiety. One crucial distortion is emotional reasoning - allowing your emotional state to drive the way you think and act. By calling on students to always trust their feelings, rather than encouraging empathy or self examination, schools are encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and, therefore, encouraging mental illness.

The third great untruth is "life is a battle between good people and evil people." Lukianoff and Haidt push against a specific vision of identity politics which they see as creating eneminity based on binary understandings of oppressor and oppressed. They contrast common-humanity identity politics with common-enemy identity politics, noting that creating a common-enemy is a great way to organize politically but doesn't reflect the reality of any group's composition. Where there is not a unified good "us" and a unified evil "them" the logic of a common enemy creates one. This leads to lashing out, unwillingness to discuss problems, and creates a call-out culture among students detrimental to their education. Universities need free inquiry, analysis of dissenting ideas, appeals to evidence, and "intellectual honesty" in order to educate students. A culture which encourages professors and other students to call-out for their firing, disinvitation, or outright harassment damages schools' ability to educate. There's an interesting (I think) discussion of intersectionality in the chapter as part of the problem. The authors rightly note that intersectionality is a diverse set of ideas and that its functioning largely depends on who's writing about it and from which perspectives. They don't aim to wade into that debate so much as to note that it's being taken up is as a way to group people into oppressor/oppressed identities - which is not what intersectionality means. The adoption of intersectionality by the public, they argue, has led to an "us vs them" mentality.

Combined, Coddling's three great untruths lead to psychological harm, reduced academic inquiry, and a sense of stress and malaise among students who are increasingly anxious about the people and ideas they encounter. In the second part, they apply this interpretive lense to specific events which they argue are otherwise incomprehensible to many outside observers.

Part II: Bad Ideas in Action

This section of the book brings forward examples of specific events which were harmful to universities, students, faculty, and others. Each example showcases one or more of the effects of the great untruths and how they act in conjunction to undermine the purpose of universities and students' learning and growth.I don't intend to spend a lot of time going over each specific example but I will highlight them here.

• Feb. 2017 "Milo Riot" at the University of California at Berkeley in which violent protesters successfully stopped Milo Yiannopoulos. The authors cite students interviewed in the media who state that their physical violence was a form of self defence against speech they felt was itself violent. They add that the student status of many of the protesters is in dispute, with some potentially being non-student members of "antifa" groups. However, surveys indicated 20-30% of students felt it was sometimes acceptable for other students to use violence; although, far fewer said they would resort to violence themselves. 

• Spring 2017 protests against Charles Murray's book talk at Middlebury College. The primary point here is that faculty who invited Murray were target by students who disagreed with his invitation to talk and that one faculty member was verbally and physically assaulted by a student while trying to exit the speaking venue. 

• Spring 2017 at Claremont McKenna College saw students protest Heather Mac Donald's book talk for The War on Cops. This led to Pomona College and Berkeley rescinding speaking invitations for Mac Donald following outcry form their student bodies. 

• Aug. 2017 "Unite the Right" neo-nazi rally and counter-protest which resulted in the death of one peaceful counter-protester. Lukianoff and Haidt say this raised tensions on college campuses significantly. 

• Reed College's perennial sit-ins and "white-out" which entail refocusing curriculum away from Eurocentric authors and trying to have a day on campus free of white students and professors.

• Oregon State saw protests at the president's "State of the University" who sought greater representation in the largely white administrative offices.

Lukainoff and Haidt's point here isn't to directly criticize (although they definitely include condemnation of violence). Rather, they want to question the idea that words are violence because they feel that considering words violent has dangerous ramifications, some of which are playing out in these examples. They argue that "[i]nterpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond" (p. 95). Instead, the authors think students should cultivate the Stoic ability to not be emotionally reactive. They connect this with CBT and Buddhism explicitly and thing we all ought to prefer a world where people choose not to be emotionally harmed, stressed, or made anxious by the extreme and provocative behavior of others. This would allow for the clearer use of reason and argument against poor reasoning and poor argument, ultimately making everyone stronger for it.

Similarly, Lukianoff and Haidt write about how coddling encourages "witch hunts" among college students. By seeing everyone as good or bad, students lump people into groups with little semblance to their actual beliefs or work. Professors targeted in some of the events mentioned above, for example, worked on issues related to LGBTQ equality, protecting constitutional rights through the ACLU, or had hoped to use the speakers as an example of differing points of view which were absent on campus. Coddling makes the case that this leaves students and faculty isolated, afraid to present their ideas, and hurts the educative mission of higher education because opposing views can't be vetted against each other or weighed on the merits of evidence.

Part III: How Did We Get Here?

I'm going to keep this section brief. Although it offers some potential causes for Coddling's crisis coming to a head right now, I think it actually needs the least summarization. Most of what is written here has been widely discussed in both academia and public for many years. Anyone I expect to have reading this blog, has likely encountered forms of these arguments before. That said, I will return to chapter 7, the one about anxiety and depression, again in my commentary on the book. So, how did we get here? According to Lukianoff and Haidt:

• people are more politically polarized than ever before, especially young people
• young people suffer from anxiety and depression at higher rates than before and those rates are growing
• parents are increasingly overprotective and overbearing, leading to a kind of paranoia about their children's' wellbeing and success while children become used to parents organizing their lives
• children don't play anymore - especially with regard to the kinds of risk-taking and resilience rough forms of play had in earlier generations' childhoods (see also the previous point)
• the concept of safety has become a bureaucratic modus operandi whereby schools and higher ed. feel compelled to do everything necessary to make students feel safe and undisturbed, including emotionally and intellectually safe
• and, finally, people are increasingly focused on distributive justice as opposed to procedural justice leading to disproportionate views of what constitutes justice - in other words, simply redistributing based on outcomes without addressing systemic causes of injustice is not lasting or meaningful justice

These six trends are increasingly effective in modern life and are increasingly impacting the lives of young people. Because of these trends, the authors argue, the terrain of higher education is ripe for the kinds of strife and free speech issues outlined in prior chapters. 

Part IV: Wising Up

Again, I am going to keep this section short. It actually is the shorted section of the book and largely offers unobjectionable remedies. It's broken into three sections: Wiser Kids, Wiser Universities, and Wiser Societies. Overall, children should be permitted more freedom, including freedom to make mistakes so they can better conceptualize taking risks. Part of this, Lukianoff and Haidt think, is to teach children that their own thoughts can be their worst enemies, not other people. Drawing on CBT, they would prefer young people learn how not to let things emotionally disturb them. This also has the benefit of letting them see people as complex beings with mixes of right and wrong, good and bad. Also limit screen time because the internet makes everything worse. Schools ought to be a part of this by breaking from the trends of safetyism and all young people should find work or community service before college. 

Likewise, universities, are at their best, say the authors, when they make freedom of inquiry a key part of their institutional identity. They would like to see selective schools admit more students who are older, are employed full or part time, or who have had careers and families (this is already the norm among "non-selective" schools which educate the vast majority of americans in high ed. - read: community colleges). Additionally, universities should hire faculty with greater viewpoint diversity, even if those views are unpopular. Orthodoxy in a university setting harms academic inquiry and denies students the chance to evaluate alternative viewpoints. They are careful to say this does not mean representing all views, just that schools could hires some conservatives from time to time and it wouldn't be super terrible. And, universities should make "productive disagreement" more central to their mission. Disputing and evaluating ideas is key to the kind of work we expect modern citizens to do, so schools should encourage that, not eject unpopular views. 

The final chapter, on a better society, ends on a positive note. The authors point to a number of "green shoots" where schools, universities, companies, and governments are making progress along the lines of what Lukianoff and Haidt call for in the preceding chapters. They pitch this as a bit of intellectual honesty on their part and an effort to avoid one of CBT's "cognitive errors", catastrophizing. They see, instead of a dark path ahead, a chance to turn away from coddling and toward anti-fragility and growth. 

Mission Accomplished?

This January, Jeffery Sachs, an economist, argued that the crisis was over. In 2016 the total number of speaker disinvitations (successful and unsuccessful) was 43. In 2017, the number was 38. In 2018, the number was 9. In 2017, 28 professors were terminated, demoted, fired, or forced to resign for politically controversial speech. In 2018, the number was 8. Finally, the number of institutions given a "red light" rating for their campus speech rules continued its decade long decline to 28.5 in 2018. All of this data come from FIRE, the campus free speech advocacy group founded by Coddling author, Greg Lukianoff. What gives? Well, Sachs concludes by writing:

it may make sense at this time to rethink the link between conditions on campus and larger generational trends. According to one popular theory, young people today subscribe to a “culture of victimhood,” one that fosters in students a feeling of vulnerability and intolerance. Maybe, maybe not. But considering how quickly the situation on campus has changed, there is reason to doubt the theory’s ability to explain student behavior.

I largely agree with Sachs and want to make a closer consideration of some of what is argued in Coddling. I think it's somewhat obvious given the decline in disinvitations, terminations, and restrictive speech codes that the crisis may be a bit overblown. I'm still close enough to my college years that I remember numerous campus events which made people uncomfortable. Christian preachers of one kind or another were a common feature of the common areas on campus most springs. They'd shout and directly insult students passing by (one devout christian routinely made an effort to call young women our for masturbation and fornication and gaggles of men would stop to watch the ensuing shouting match). Most students simply passed them by. Even when the whole quad outside the bookstore was taken up with displays of mutilated fetuses from anti-abortion speakers, it barely registered to most students and this was (and maybe still is) an annual occurrence. I recall that Clarence Thomas gave the speech at graduation one year to considerable controversy given his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill. People protested and there was a petition to disinvite him. Such is campus life. It's been that way for a long time and questions of free speech and inquiry on college campuses go back generations.

In an interview about Coddling, Jonathan Haidt makes what I think is an important admission,

but [unlike the broad data about depression and anxiety] the linking of that [depression/anxiety] to political demands for safe spaces and other kinds of protection - that is not national. So, as I travel around, I find that in the Northeast, especially at liberal arts colleges, but in the Northeast and right along the West Coast, there it's the rule. That is, it's generally happening.

He goes on to reference an ongoing discussion with Jeff Sachs (yes, the same Sachs) in which it's made clear that this kind of behavior is not happening at the vast majority of American colleges. Haidt says the politicization of fragility is not happening everywhere. I'm left wondering why, then, Lukianoff and Haidt felt compelled to write this book.

Creating Mental Illness on the Intersectional Left

The answer to this question lays in the few spots in the book where I think the argument exposes itself for critique: Intersectionality, CBT and Stoicism, Distributive Justice, and the connection between those things to the rise in mental illness among young people. The thrust of this book seems to be less about the crisis of free speech on campus (that has declined dramatically in only a year's time and that one author admits is really just about a small percentage of schools) and more about positing a connection between mental illness and social justice warriors. That is, Lukianoff and Haidt introduce us to the notion that anyone who feels threatened by white supremacy, patriarchy, or political violence, anyone who seeks to redress systemic inequality via redistributive practices, and anyone who wants to be emotionally invested in who they are is mentally ill. They are depressed, anxious, and prone to making cognitive errors and distortions. Do you object to a misogynist twitter troll giving a speech after hours on your campus? You're in need of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Do you think centuries of real, historical oppression via the transatlantic slave trade followed by another century of real legal discrimination means African Americans deserve real monetary redress? You're allowing your emotions to get the better of you! Best to be dispassionate like the Stoics and embrace procedural change.

Intersectionality

What's wild about the extremity of these claims Coddling is making isn't that they're extreme but that they seem, to the authors, to be rather banal. In their discussion of intersectionality in chapter 3, Lukianoff and Hiadt rightly reference Kemberle Crenshaw's legal scholarship in which she coined the term but they quickly move beyond Crenshaw's insights and toward more popular notions of intersectionality. Their argument here is that intersectionality's purpose is to identify axes of oppressor and oppressed creates more tribalism and acts against "common-humanity politics". In other words, intersectionality creates common enemies and feeds into the negative cycles they outline in part II.

I don't think this could be further from the truth. Indeed, intersectionality is rooted in understanding the material conditions of a person's life. Crenshaw didn't create a theory, she created a mode of analysis. Crenshaw's insight was that we could better understand how laws impact people if we more closely examine how they and the people around them handle questions of identity. She argued effectively that we might better understand, say, Jonathan Haidt if we saw not just that he is white, male, Jewish, or a university professor but as all of those things. The law, according to Crenshaw, didn't see people as a whole but as distinct identity subgroups - something any teacher will immediately recognize as inadequate.

But, Coddling needs to do two things here. First, it's responding to the increasing popularity of intersectionality in an increasingly and proudly diverse public. Young people are far more diverse than older generations. White students are already the minority in many public school systems but remain a majority on campuses, especially selective ones. This leads to real instances of discrimination on campus and one response is for students of color and their allies to emphasize the importance of identity - namely that many identities exist on campuses and people of color do belong at these institutions. Intersectionality is a clear framework for not just celebrating the many overlapping kinds of people you find on campuses, it's a framework for advocating that they are treated more equitably. What Lukianoff and Haidt describe as encouraging common-enemy identity politics is really this generation's embracing of common-humanity identity politics.

CBT and Stoicism

This is really a two-part criticism but I'll group them together because Coddling treats these as homologous views of self discipline. CBT is therapy. Like all kinds of therapy, it is best pursued under therapeutic conditions - like the supervision of of a therapist. This is, in part, because the role of a therapist is to help individuals seeing CBT treatment to see themselves and their thought processes differently. The automaticity that CBT finds in emotional reasoning is automatic for a reason. The individual cannot often recognize the flaws in their logic absent outside perspectives. CBT is well researched and found to be very effective clinically for a variety of diagnosed mental illnesses. Lukianoff and Haidt are calling for a broader kind of public embrace of CBT principles - expanding the scope of CBT from patients diagnosed with depression and anxiety to anyone who may feel stressed or emotional under certain circumstances. My own experiences with CBT lead me to believe it would be helpful even for someone merely seeking assistance in coping with a stressful life. A diagnosis might not really be necessary, but the assistance of the therapist is.

I also find this attempt to broaden the use of CBT odd given the authors' questioning of "concept creep" in relation to trauma. They are sharply critical of the redefinition of trauma from a purely physical injury to a mental injury to anything "experienced by the individual as physically or emotionally harmful" (p. 25). They label this as subjective and claim it enables any person to call themselves traumatized if their feelings are hurt. What am I supposed to make of their rolling CBT out for general public consumption? How is this different from the concept creep they criticize? Now, perhaps I'm willing to be generous because of my experiences with CBT, but Lukianoff and Haidt likely see little harm in the layperson trying to CBT themselves whereas they outline harms in everyone calling themselves traumatized.

And what of Stoicism? Much like CBT, the Stoics believed that the greatest harms that could be done were harms people did to themselves. The Consolation of Philosophy, a parable by Boethius that is cited in the story, argues that the wrongfully accused prisoner awaiting death does not benefit from agonizing over their inevitable death. Indeed, they are making it worse because they can't change the conditions, but they can control their mental state. Accepting death and recognizing that it can't be stopped allows the prisoner to live out their last few hours in relative peace - an improvement according to the Stoics. Of course, in modern times, we find executing the wrongfully accused to be reprehensible and ostensibly built a system of appeals to safeguard against this happening. Of course, we're not doing great on that front, but we aim to get justice right rather than counsel the wrongfully accused to simply accept their deaths.

Much of what we know about Stoicism largely comes from the surviving writings of Seneca and from Meditations by the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. I find it amazing that there's so much attention around the Stoics but relatively little though given to who they were. Marcus Aurelius was a militaristic, bloodthirsty expansionist. He loved killing barbarians and felt, Stoically of course, that this was the best way to make Rome great again. Seneca, meanwhile, spent his life sucking up to people in power in the hopes of getting into their good graces, and beds. He apparently caused an uprising in Britannia by forcing large loans on the indigenous Britons. He may have been involved in a plot to kill the emperor's wife. Eventually Nero required Seneca kill himself but he failed at suicide, twice. Both men sat at the top of a hierarchy which was not particularly kind to the poor, to non-citizens, to slaves, or to the women. It seems pretty clear Seneca was a bad man. Cicero? Eh. Look him up.

There is another definition which may fit the emotionally detached Stoics a little bit better.

(re)Distributive Justice?

Returning to chapter 11, Lukainoff and Haidt make a lot of hay about the difference between distributive justice, which they define as an attention to the proportionality of outcomes, and procedural justice, defined as how decisions about justice are made and how a person is treated along the way. They argue that social justice is a blend of the two - a proportional-procedural justice. There's not much fault in this definition. People who care about social justice, care that the procedures of justice are fair and that the outcomes of the justice system are broadly equitable. And, Lukianoff and Haidt point to some occasions where even seemingly fair procedures still produce inequitable outcomes. Within this model, justice occurs when the system is transparent and distributes opportunities equitably, especially with regard to constitutionally protected rights. They contrast this with social justice focused exclusively on equal outcomes. Using problems with Title IX as an example, the authors note that the proportional requirements often led to distorted funding provided to some women's sports but not some men's sports and vice versa. Similarly, proportional representation of various identity groups, Coddling claims, fails to account for any individual or group's preferences and produces waste. This also undermines faith in the system as such waste and confusion leads people to doubt the whole endeavour, something which may eventually harm the cause of social justice.

But is this really what social justice seeks? Is the aim of social justice on campus merely to produce an equality of outcomes through proportionate representation of various identity groups? I'd say no. Social justice has a far broader view, one that extends beyond campus life and into society at large. In my view, social justice encompases all of the above, procedural and distributive. On one hand, we have unprecedented attention paid to who has access to universities, how that access is gained (the unsustainable loans are one example), and whether that access translates into opportunities post-graduation. These are largely questions of procedural justice that seek to make the pathways through higher education more fair. On the other hand, we have unprecedented attention paid to the current unequal distribution of various kinds of capital. How can someone without the opportunity to even pay for the SAT, or a college application, or a bus/train/plane ticket have access to higher education, especially the kind of higher education that Lukianoff and Haidt are thinking about here? These are questions of distributive justice. Distributive justice does not seek an equality of outcomes but rather seeks adequate conditions for all people. It's not about some kind of Marxist abolition of all property into the hands of the public via the state. It's about making sure that the richest country in the world doesn't impoverish a generation of middle class kids making their way through college. When taken together, both views are part and parcel of the modern social justice movement. Advocates of social justice rightly understand that one can't only pursue procedural justice if the underlying society is dramatically unequal. Similarly, simply redistributing all the property in a society does little to address the reasons the property was poorly distributed in the first place.

Whose speech really counts?

In Lukainoff and Haidt's view, there are only some kinds of speech that matter for free speech. First off, any kind of debate seems to quality because they promote the contestation of ideas under the burden of evidence and logic. Similarly, rebutting the ideas, whether internally or publically, of someone you disagree with is productive. Intellectualism, somewhat undefined but I think we can assume a general meaning, is also seen as a virtue. Almost no idea is too far because the worse the idea, the more there is to gain from challenging it. Meanwhile, some kinds of speech do not count. Protest appears not to count. Advocacy appears not to count. Attempts to make the non-course aspects of a school less racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, etc. also seem like they don't count. I find this odd, especially given their focus twice (chapters 2 and 7) on the ever-present nature of social media and how destructive that is to children. Wouldn't they also see why, at times where students wish to socialize, enjoy campus life, and maybe just be without having to confront ideas that question their very humanity? I mean, have you heard Milo talk?

Campuses are often residential, especially these elite coastal universities. Some of what proponents of safe spaces aim to do is cut down on the emotional labor of having to be different in a space where most people are the same. Students, especially those of color, aren't feeling stress and anxiety because they were coddled as children - which seems to be the only reason people feel stress in Lukianoff and Haidt's book. Often times they are in situations where the people and institution are not open or accepting of them. They are, in other words, confronting procedural injustice on a regular basis. These students and their allies are asking that their campus not become home to ideas which promote harmful behaviors and policies. Moreover, few to none of the protests and demonstrations were about courses. Instead, objections were most often raised to guest speakers invited by student groups or faculty. The role of guest speakers in a student's collegiate experience is minimal, at best. Yet, Lukianoff and Haidt treat these requests as a serious abridgement of students' educational opportunities rather than the work of people trying to build communities.

Putting it together

What do we do with this odd text? It's a mishmash of ideas that seem to go together very well. I said at the opening of this post that Coddling is a book that feels true. It's written in a way that responds to a lot of what's happening in the world, especially on campuses, but really falls apart under further examination. Not only are the problems chronicled not generalizable to "a generation" as the title proclaims but the crisis appears to have ebbed significantly. The authors advocate for free speech but seem mostly against kinds of speech we expect on college campuses. They mischaracterize both the aims of social justice and the purpose of intersectionality as being about divisiveness and mere redistribution or identity quotas. Anyone who disagrees with their premises is mentally ill and ought to be in therapy to learn about their cognitive distortions.

I'm left assuming the best of intentions on the part of the authors but deeply wary of the world they imply ought to exist were their ideas put into practice. Do we really want a generation of anti-emotional, procedurally obsessed, argumentative, risk takers? Do we want campuses where no ideas are off limits simply because we value the exercise of rebutting them? Clearly I do not, though I'm not sure why Lukianoff and Haidt do.

NCTE Convention notes

So, I've gone to the annual National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention this year. Worse still, I'm presenting. Jason knows this because his reflections on teaching plot helped inform some of my reflective activities for the presentation. tl;dr, a friend of mine and I submitted the proposal last year and then spent time this fall actually figuring out what we'll be doing in the presentation. The official title is "Talking their way to success: How to Establish an Environment, Introduce Tools, and Facilitate Practices to Support Deeper Student Talk." I do not like this title. Yes, that is exactly how it appears in the convention schedule, odd capitalizations and all. It was effectively designed by committee and it shows. But that's neither here nor there.

What I'm really interested in for this conference is actually less about what I do and more about what I learn while I'm here. There's a fairly activist stance implied in a lot of the sessions. The theme of the conference is Raising Student Voice. The headline speakers and numerous talks, presentations, and forums revolve around topics of self expression, advocacy, identity, and explicit politicization of education. I very much want to hear these arguments and think broadly about how they play out in schools. That many of the people presenting come from school systems in the South and Midwest also interests me because teaching in "red" states has a distinctly different flavor.

I've looked through my notes and here are a few of my thoughts on the sessions I've attended:

Session A - Teachers as First Responders: 911! Students Need Their Voices Heard 

I was worried this session would be super depressing and, in some ways it was. When I saw "first responders" in the title, I wondered if the session would focus on school shootings and how teachers can better be prepared to deal with a shooting shoulder happen in their school. Because that's the world we've made. (If you want to be upset about how we respond to shootings, read this article about a school safety convention in Florida and the hucksters who are looking to make a buck off taxpayer dollars.)

Thankfully, that was not the point of the session. Instead, teachers from the North Star of Texas Writing Project Their website is undergoing renovation so be aware that it's tough to find recent information. This is a common issue with teachers seeking to be resources for other teachers. There's only so much time in the day and after school often means continuing to work on other aspects of your teaching - these writers run PD and writing camps for kids several times a year so I'd imagine hosting a website is low on a list of priorities. There's something to be learned here about what it takes for teachers to truly be a solid resource for each other and co-develop ways of education without relying on less-than-helpful universities, non-profits, and foundations. One of the presenters mentioned she keeps a blog so I will leave a link right here.

Anyway, (can you tell I've not slept!) these teachers wanted attendees to think on the idea of teachers as first responders. What do first responders do that is similar to the work educators do? From audience responses, I recoded a few answers. Teachers and first responders respond to many kinds of crisis. Teachers and first responders allay the fear of not knowing what to do in a crisis - this came with a personal story of being rescued during Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston. Teachers and first responders have specific skills for specific kinds of crises. Teachers and first responders make sacrifices of time, money, emotional capacity, family involvement, and safety to help during a crisis. Listening to the responses really drove home the power of this metaphor.

As the panel discussed how they came to this conclusion, we were told other stories. One teacher had knowledge that a student was being beaten by his father. Their family were undocumented. If she reported the abuse, the family and child would all be deported, likely together. She knew this because it had already happened twice to students at her school when well meaning teachers complied with laws meant to protect children. Another teacher confronted the fallout of sexual abuse in a student's life as the student body gradually came to know about it and responded in ways both virtuous and vicious. They had been sharing stories like this with each other for months when they came to the conclusion that self-care was now a necessary component of their PD. Beyond teaching teachers about writing, they needed teachers to be able to care for themselves so that they could care for their students in crisis. You put the oxygen mask on yourself first. First responders do not always respond during active and dangerous events but only once the situation is safe enough that they can do their work effectively. After all, first responders would not benefit anyone if they also needed rescuing.

The focus of the second half of the session turned to writing. The skillset which supports writing also supports working through difficult and personal issues. It supports sharing and seeking help. It supports teachers' ability to know their students deeply so they can give help. It also supports the teachers' own self reliance and growth. Crises can be deeply generative and a source of creativity so long as an environment exists to support that kind of expression. When they teach PD now, these teachers often look at the social and emotional support systems for both teachers and students before they ever think about instruction and methods.

In the end, the session wasn't asking for a particular practice or action so much as the realization that teachers face tremendous difficulties because of the nature of their work. Nationwide, teachers are moving closer and closer into the role of social worker and therapist and first responder despite the fact that none of the responsibilities are considered in frameworks of accountability and achievement. It's up to teachers to be aware of their changing roles in society and to take care of themselves so they can take care of others. Not a bad way to begin a conference.

Session B - Sharing Student Stories through the Arts 

Originally, I was not going to attend this session but I caught one of the presenter's name: Michelle Zoss! My old professor from my teacher training MAT at Georgia State University was leading a series of roundtables which sought connections between the arts and work in language and literacy. The general theme was that incorporating "the arts" enhances learning because content is more multimodal, engaging, and it creates space for inquiry and conversation. I attended a pair of roundtables.

The first was about writing songs. There are obvious connections between music and poetry which probably every ELA teacher can grasp. The point was more about how to make the class more musical by using melodies and beats throughout the writing process. The presenter played the same chords over and over with only slight variation while we discussed the mood of the piece which might accompany it. We each wrote some lyrics which we tried to fit into the melody and then workshopped the each other's writing a bit to develop a single song. The final product was rough but I could see how the work laid out the process of writing in a different way. If I made that process explicit for some students, I might really stick with them. The presentation closed out with some possibilities for incorporating music if you can't play an instrument. He recommended garage band which is free on any apple phones or iPads and can act as a variety of musical instruments. Depending on the age group, students might play an instrument. One teacher recommended asking the school's music teacher to either come by for those lessons or record a few minutes of play for use in the lesson.

Second, I joined Dr. Zoss's table for crafting mosaics. Now, I'd done this about 8-9 years earlier with her in one of our classes but it's interesting how it meant a lot more now. At the time, I felt like it was a bit gimmicky and served little purpose. Now, and perhaps because I am attuned to questions of student talk, I found myself interested in the conversation as much as in the artwork itself. Zoss was asking a combination of simple personal questions about the conference attendees and deeper questions about the meaning of teaching, our ethical responsibilities to our students, and how we might make classrooms spaces where low-stakes activity can occur. As I ripped up a sheet of orange paper, I realized that the mosaic itself was really a vehicle for talk and that talk became a way for the teacher to confer with her students, a way for the students to co-construct knowledge (I learned about the geometric foundations of Moroccan murals, how ASL's use of movement makes using stationary images of sign language problematic, and why teachers felt there was still hope for the future). If the mosaic was connected to a classroom activity, Zoss argued we should just sit in the mess with our kids and participate ourselves. Chat away and guide the conversation but don't keep it too locked on a single activity. Often times kids make connections by straying off into another domain before returning to the task at hand. And sometimes kids just need to tear up some paper - that's okay too.

After the session I had a chance to catch up. She did not remember me but I did no expect her to since I have not done anything to keep in touch with GSU since graduating and getting a job. I still have a lot of harsh feelings toward the program but recognize that a 1 year accelerated course aimed at getting recent college grads certified and into a classroom entails making tough choices. In part, I just had to go teach for a while before the lessons from GSU really sank in. Sometimes those weren't the lessons Dr. Zoss or others were actually trying to teach but were, instead, the hidden curriculum at work. However, I plan to send an email her way in a little while with some info about my life since she las saw me and see if I can't be a better networker. This was a good chance to start!

General Session - Chimmanda Ngozi Adichie (look her up, especially this TedTalk)

Chimamanda Negozi Adichie is kind of a big deal. I'm probably the wrong person to express that sentiment because I have not read any of her fiction and only an occasional piece of her nonfiction work. Leading up to the conference and throughout the first day, everyone was talking about her keynote address with anticipation and excitement. I would describe it as the sort of feeling you get when you go to a concert with someone who is a superfan while you yourself haven't really heard their music. It's just not going to mean the same thing to you as it does to everyone else. That said, her address was fantastic. I think I'm still unpacking the layers of wit and insight in her words. Indeed, I probably should read her fiction because, if she writes like she talks, I'm going to enjoy it very much.

Adichie began with her privileged upbringing in Nigeria. Her father was a statistics professor and her mother the first woman to work as the registrar at a university. As such, they pushed her to read and do well in school from an early age. She claims her father kept files on his children and that she recently snooped through her file to find a report card her kindergarten teacher had written about her. In the comments he'd written, "She is a brilliant child but refuses to do work when annoyed." Reflecting on this, Adichie said she initially felt surprised her teacher knew her so well. The speech turned toward other teachers she'd had, good and bad, who shaped her desire to write and be a writer. At each spot, she paused for a moment and mused on what each teacher knew about her and how they really saw her.

Moving back to the present day, Adichie argued against the prevailing notion of schools as teaching "STEM or" - she pronounced this quickly the first few times to make the audience wonder what this stemor thing was. She called out statistics about how learning the arts, and especially reading and writing, was a clear way to teach critical and complex thinking, communication, and conflict resolution. She also said it was the best way to fight against being misrepresented. Telling your own story, developing your own voice, meant nobody could tell you who you were.

She drove this point home with a few examples from her life of people refusing to be curious. A bookstore clerk assumed she wanted children's books for her daughter with black characters but seemed to think it odd that she'd also want white and brown and yellow ones too. An academic friend of a friend who said he doesn't read the kind of writing she writes - implying she writes about black things and woman things and he, as a while male, will have nothing to learn from it. None of these people were allowing themselves to face what Adichie called the "true purpose of books" which is to make you uncomfortable. We should seek out ideas and experiences other than our own because without that comparative knowledge, we can't legitimately evaluate the world around us. Without knowing things about others, we can't know ourselves. That, she argued, is what contributes to conceptions of identity as something only subordinated people have and something only oppressed people care about. White Americans, she pointed out, like to ignore that they are actively engaging in ideas of identity all the time and it is a disservice to them because they can't know themselves. This went beyond a philosophical self knowledge and into some very practical considerations like our politics, teaching, consumerism, and worship.

Closing on a high note, she returned to her teachers arguing that none of them were free from stereotypes or bigotry but that they'd pressed themselves hard to see her as an individual with her own needs and desires. Adichie feel like the best work teachers could do today is to build that knowledge of their students into everything they did. "Let your students know you see them," she ended. The audience rushed out of the hall, even though there were more speeches to hear, because the first 200 people in line would get an autographed copy of Adichie's latest book.

Elementary Session - Luis C Moll 

I'm not much for elementary, even with my experience last year working in elementary environments, it's just not a model of schooling that fits me well temperamentally. I went to this session for only one reason and that was to see Luis Moll. His work in Funds of Knowledge is in the DNA of the way teaching is being changed for the better. Culturally responsive practices, home-school connections, building and sustaining student identities, disciplinary literacy, and discourse theory all originated with Moll's work on Funds of Knowledge in the 80s and 90s. In short, a Fund of Knowledge is a family or community's knowledge about a specific task passed formally and informally from generation to generation and across families. His work traced examples of agriculture, automotive repair, engineering, construction, business management, and numerous other areas where immigrant and Native American families in the American Southwest held deep pools of knowledge which allowed for their success and survival in an environment which was, at best, indifferent to them. One strand of his work brought him into the classroom and called for building meaningful connections between students' families, their Funds of Knowledge, and school curriculum. Since that time, Funds of Knowledge work has been done in communities throughout the world.

Moll walked the session attendees through his way of viewing and identifying the funds of knowledge on display in several videos recoded during some of his research. His point to us was that we needed to know more about our students than their academic performance. This means teachers ought to know about the occupational history and recreational history of a family. What do children's parents do for work? For fun? Their grandparents? How is that knowledge passed down? What can we develop from knowing about their Funds of Knowledge that might make school more relevant, meaningful, and representative of students' cultures?

While there, I lucked out and won a copy of one of his books. When it came time to meet the guy, I totally chickened out and bailed without getting him to sign it. His work is so influential to my thinking about the practice and ethics of teaching that I got a bit starstruck. What can I say?

Session E - The Power and Efficacy of Reading: What Reading Can Do for Homeless and Socially Challenged Students

This session was led by a friend of mine from my literacy specialist cohort, Dulce-Marie Flecha. I'd seen a "draft" version of this presentation that Dulce had given in one of our classes; however, that was 10 minutes and at NCTE she had to fill an hour and a half. It was excellent. The major point of the activities was how universal the challenges of teaching homeless students and students in crisis really is. There are more than a million homeless students nationwide and, although they are clustered in five states, one of the major paths out of homelessness for children is placement foster homes nationwide. Dulce's role is at a transition center in NYC which accepts local homeless students and students from migrant populations which have been processed by ICE. They are potentially in her school school for only a few weeks at a time before being sent off to homes around the country. She listed off Texas, Oregon, Illinois, Mississippi, and said she's sent students to twenty states in the few years she's worked there. The point being, even if you're not teaching students who are currently homeless, there is a change that some of your kids are formerly homeless.

Here are a pair of slides she shared about strategies for teachers who work with "highly mobile" students. I apologize about the angle and the quality, it's the best I could do given the circumstances. 

  

 













 Afterward, Dulce and I caught up and went to Session F together.


 Session F - #DisruptText: Dismantling and Rebuilding (Reimagining?) the Literary Canon

It's difficult to capture the fervor of the both the room and the presenters in the #DisruptText session but everyone was quite excited and motivated. I hear you can use hashtags on Twitter to locate these people so feel free to give that a try. There are a number of links I will be including, as well, like this one to their website. Disrupttext.org. One way I felt this presentation had a lot of credibility is because the three presenters were current high school English teachers and taught with a justice orientation in vastly different schools. One taught in the "typical" inner city school in Denver. Another taught at a diverse charter school in Philadelphia (iirc), and the third teaches in an elite suburban public school in Texas. Despite different contexts, they had all found a way to incorporate diverse voices and critical pedagogy in their classrooms.

So, it's not a stretch to say that some English teachers have been trying to move away from the idea of a literary "canon" for many years. Reading old dead white guys is a sure-fire way to kill engagement, push your students to dis-identify with school, and basically encourage a pedagogy of exclusion. The presenters made this case well but, more importantly, they modeled some quick ways in which teaching in a CRP/CSP way is possible even when you're working within a fixed curriculum. 

I felt one of the most interesting points they made was simply paring a required text like The Tempest with other texts to create a conversation around issues of social justice. Adichie is known for her speech about the danger of a single story, so why not teach multiple stories which inform each other? Perhaps a text from the Caribbean which makes Caliban's status as a colonized native more apparent? Maybe look at historical documents or maps which show where ships in Shakespearean times were sailing so student could see that Prospero's island isn't just any imaginary place but a location informed by the real world. These recommendations create space for deeply critical (and cognitively demanding) analysis. Here is a Disrupt Shakespeare Twitter "moment" (these are held regularly and compiled on their website and are a great resource, also you can see Dulce-Marie is an active participant - respect!).








Another resource shared with us was a"living document" of Diverse, Multicultural (Biopic) Voices in American Literature. It's definitely worth a look given that there are also some methodological tabs in there. Yet another interesting resource was a list of types of curricular bias. I envision this a working in two ways: first as a sort of self evaluation tool; second as an inquiry tool for the kids. Why not incorporate this kind of thinking into the fabric of each unit? For example: Why are we reading about the Harlem Renaissance in February? Why is that the only example of black culture we address throughout the year? etc.

Finally several links for discovering new literature, most offer curated or user-curated lists which can be organized around decolonizing your curriculum:

Epic Reads


Riveted

OurStory

Overdrive - Rent Electronic Texts (eBooks, audiobooks, etc). A note about Overdrive: it is not free but many school districts, school libraries, and local libraries have access through a variety of subscription services. 

Session G - James and Carl's presentation

I don't have a lot to say about our presentation on supporting student talk. It went well and was attended by about 30 people, such that we ran out of copies and our participants had to share some of the materials - which was fine. The basic premise was to begin with a reflection on how talk was going in each of their classrooms, then move into two exemplar activities. First was an interactive read aloud from a picture book in which Carl modeled when and why to pause and pursue talk. Second was a group activity where the "students" read a paired text and discussed the text in groups with instruction to compare and contrast with the read aloud text. Carl and I circulated to the groups and basically coached in about different activities. I coached them in setting conversation goals based on a hierarchy of talk. Carl coached them in digging deeply into a particular theme or idea with conversation aids. This went long and we ran out of time for the final activity, which was a discussion about the talk hierarchy and giving them an If,Then chart based on the hierarchy with some prompts included which they could incorporate into their own lessons. Afterward several teachers staid behind and thanked us, so I will choose to believe the presentation was a success. Later we had some rye and hung out with a few of the people from TC. 

Self Reflection Checklist (not that great but if you don't do talk at all, maybe helpful).

If, Then chart (seemed like everybody liked this) 

Carter G Woodson and Black Thought in Modern Education

At the close of my recent post about Modern Educational Thinking, I lamented that Kleibard’s overview of curriculum and education in the early 20th century contained no examination of the theories or practices affecting people of color. So, I turn to Brown & Brown & Grant’s Black Intellectual Thought in Education.

Although there is much to consider in this time period, I’d like to focus briefly on the work of Carter G. Woodson. Woodson is often thought of as the “father of Black History” but situating him in the intellectual currents of the time helps give a clearer view of the uniqueness and innovations of Black thinkers in the early 20th century. In some ways the challenges facing Black people in Jim Crow America necessitated the generation of cultural and racial theories which seem at home in discourses around race and society today.

It’s important to recognize the expansiveness of the White Supremacist project of this era. Following reconstruction, it seems as if almost the entire nation engaged in an aggressive purposeful forgetting of the causes of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Textbooks, for example, promoted racist attitudes and race science to “settle” the issue of including Blacks in American society. There’s a great article in the Chronicle of High Education about how the academy worked to sustain white supremacy. I recommend it because it gives a good view of just how fucked up we really are. Also, these attitudes constructed the racist discourse currently active in our politics and society.

In short, white academics constructed racist justifications for suppressing Black citizens. This included appeals to “science” to prove that Black children were incapable of learning anything beyond what was required for manual labor, that Black people were inherently lazy and needed white supervision to accomplish anything, and that Black men were constantly lusting after white women. It’s an incomplete list but you get the picture. This is ground better covered elsewhere, as in the article linked above, or the exhaustive work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Yes, that one!)

So, what response did Black people have to such ideas, at an academic level? There were a few. One response was the call for Black intellectual leadership. W.E.B. duBois argued that there needed to be a class of talented, educated, and eventually wealthy Black individuals and families to lead the masses of Blacks still relegated to sharecropping and manual labor. Opposed to this view was Booker T. Washington who felt that approach was too limited and, possibly, created a class of leaders who had little in common with their people. Instead, he felt there should be broad programs to focus on education. He specifically felt that education should help laborers gain skills which could be used to better their local communities. If the average Black person had to rely on skilled white labor, they were forever subject to the capricious and racist attitudes pervading white society. So, the argument became over whether to develop the capacity for self sustaining communities from the top down or the bottom up.

The racist stereotypes and the preeminence of the Dunning school of thinking intruded on these debates and created a more urgent need to challenge racialist thinking. Flowing from the work of Alain LeRoy Locke, the argument for a “New Negro” emerged. This was a view not far from what we would probably call cosmopolitan today. Locke felt that people of all races, and whites especially, would benefit from more contact with people unlike themselves. He urged the increasing presence of Blacks in media, journalism, and the arts. Through this social and cultural interaction society at large would develop a “new psychology” of Blacks in America and around the world. This is only a portion of Locke's work so please do not construe this as the whole of his thought.

Woodson critiqued this idea as failing to undo the harm of these stereotypes. If, as Woodson felt, the white view was one in which Black people had no history beyond that of enslavement and barbarism, how does saying ‘look how far we’ve come’ negate that view? The “New Negro” in some sense legitimized the white racist stereotypes and, therefore, was unable to adequately combat them. Woodson felt that instead of showing the world how great Black people were now, or could be soon, that the world needed to know that Black people were always great. Woodson’s life work grew out of this idea. Informed, in part, by the lack of any attention to Black history while pursuing his doctorate (the first African American to earn a doctorate in history) Woodson began to document Black history in detail.

Beyond publishing academic articles, he started journals, weeklies, newspapers, and other publications meant for consumption by the general public. Woodson wrote dozens of textbooks for use in segregated schools, and instituted Black History Week as a way for any school to focus exclusively on and celebrate the history of Black people. This later turned into Black History Month. He was specifically critical of the idea of “mis-education”. He felt that neglecting to teach Black children about their history denied them a chance to build a sense of self, place, and purpose in the world. Curriculum which purported to be educative was, in fact, precisely the opposite and only served to push Black children out of school.

Woodson's view of history of Black History was to its totality. He would write one day of the ancient metallurgists in Ethiopia who smelted iron before any Greek or Latin culture had emerged and then turn the next day to discussing how white universities could not hope to train teachers of Black children because they had no sense of the immediate conditions of Black people in their communities or in the country. In some ways, I feel like Woodson outlined the idea of culturally responsive pedagogy decades before it entered the mainstream of educational thinking. He may be one of the earliest thinkers to recognize that classrooms weren't simply communicating cultural norms and values but were active participants in constructing those norms and values. Hence his critique that "the 'educated Negroes' have the attitude of contempt toward their on people" because "he went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity" (Woodson, 1933, p1.). Curriculum, he felt, was central to communicating and reproducing the ideology of white supremacy and, crucially, even approaches which were not outright racist contributed to white supremacy through omission. This was just as true in Black schools as in white ones. Woodson articulated the groundwork of the hidden curriculum and the null curriculum some 70 years before they were published by white men in largely still white institutions of higher learning.

To return to my first statement, I think it's a stunning encapsulation of Woodson's critique that Kliebard's historical overview of educational thinking neglects to mention even a single important Black educator, administrator, or intellectual of the era including Woodson himself. It is made even more gobsmackingly omissive by the fact that its first edition was published not in 1926 but in 1986. The third edition was published in 2004!

I'll leave you today with Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South which begins,

IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,

                         An infant crying in the night,
                         An infant crying for the light;
                         And with no language--but a cry.

        The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation,--the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted.