WHEN EXTREMISTS ATTACK: PUBLIC SCHOOLING vs. TRUE BELIEVERS by Gary K. Clabaugh

Well, I got my window shield so filled

With flags I couldn't see.

So, I ran the car upside a curb

And right into a tree.

By the time they got the doctor down
I was already dead.
And I’ll never understand why the man
Standing in the Pearly Gates said …

But your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more …

John Prine, Lyrics: “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Any More”

A super-patriot in my community plasters his car with American flags and right wing bumper stickers. His latest reads: “Liberalism = Socialism = Communism = Treason!” I’ll bet most liberals don’t even know that they are socialists, much less communists and traitors.

By fanatically embracing the black and white world of dogmatic ideology, this fellow escapes the irksome burdens of freedom. He knows all the answers and keeps his mind as tightly closed as a bear trap.

Imagine him showing up at a school board meeting, accompanied by a coterie of like-minded fanatics, and fueled by righteous indignation about, say, the “un-American” content of a history text. His dogmatism would make reasonable discussion impossible. Conversation would inevitably become confrontation because his blind embrace of the politics of the end-time forbids the give and take required for democratic living.

It is the nature of true believers to allow no room for compromise. In their world one can chose only from false dichotomies: white or black, God or Satan, true Americanism or treason. They will not grant that their opponents might even be a little right. Anyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong; they are either a fool or a scoundrel. And if the true believers are of the religious variety, those who disagree with them can only be dupes or agents of Satan.

America’s diversity makes it difficult to establish in-depth consensus about much of any thing. That’s why school policy is debated, then re-debated. In a diverse democracy this is to be expected. But that is not what happens when true believers hijack these debates. Then things quickly turn ugly. Insisting that they, and only they, have been entrusted with absolute truth, these dogmatists quickly destroy all thoughtful deliberation and attempts at compromise. And their arrival is typically accompanied by anonymous hate mail, harassing phone calls, character assassination, deliberate lies and non-negotiable demands. When it comes to end-time conflicts, the end justifies the means.

Public schooling is a favorite target of true believers — probably because locally elected school boards are relatively easy to pressure. Reelection concerns and an understandable desire to avoid ugly confrontation can encourage board members to try appeasement. If religious zealots charge that including the Harry Potter series in the district’s libraries serves Beelzebub, for example, board members are tempted to quietly remove them.

If they do so, however, they soon will discover that true believers are never satisfied. With Harry Potter gone their attention will turn to other books, then to more vital matters.

When school leaders cave in to these coteries of true believing fanatics, it disembowels public education. Board members must take a stand against these zealots wherever and whenever they appear. Should they lack the guts to do so, or should they actually be one of these zealots, toss them out on their ear. Today’s educators have more than enough problems. They don’t need the school board abandoning them when extremists attack.

-- GKC

Sacrificing Public Education to “Pursue Excellence”?

There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness. -- Liberty Hyde Bailey, American Botanist (1856 - 1954)

There are two “impediments” to achieving excellence in American public schools: diversity and compromise. The problem is that both diversity and compromise both contribute positively to our pluralistic, democratic society.

Diversity is a fact, an historical development. Luckily, it has been for the major part -- tightly shutting our eyes to slavery and aboriginal annihilation -- benign. As the United States of America has grown and become more “free,” so have we become more diverse: in religion, culture, gender roles and ethnicity. Indeed, it has been the result of the struggle of minorities, all kinds of minorities, to have our Constitution protect their citizenship rights, which has brought about the extension of our liberties.

The mechanisms have been de facto segregation and compromise. People who really hated, or were hated by, their neighbors could move out into the vast frontiers and isolate themselves for protection. Those who could not escape suffered and had to struggle, with the help of majority members, to bring about the legal articulation of their constitutional rights.

But many people, even those who have benefitted, have little tolerance for diversity and compromise. You’ll hear them complain about diversity as “conceding too much to those people.” You’ll hear them put compromise down as showing a “lack of standards” or as “a sellout.”

The reason public schools have not been able to “achieve excellence” is that there are diverse and often incompatible ideas about what schools are and what “excellence” is supposed to be. And the reason we Americans can’t reach a compromise on this issue is that compromise is not seen as a win-win situation; but, as a sellout, a yielding, an inferior position.

Private and parochial education has long been able to live, thrive, even with the opposite of diversity, a sort of “cultural multi-unitarianism.” It remains to be seen whether public education can survive with diversity. More than a hundred years of recurrent school reform suggests that it is unlikely.

For references and to examine these issues further, see School Image: Expectations & Controversies


Cordially
--- EGR

Cultural or Ethnic Difference: which is more easily tolerated?

It is difficult to spell out what cultural difference is, yet cultural difference is not the same as ethnic difference. African-Americans, for example, are not culturally homogeneous; yet in some politically important respects they are different from both Anglo Whites and African-Hispanics.

But upper middle class English-speakers have much more in common as a class than a difference in ethnicity, Black, White, WASP, Polish, Irish, etc. might suggest. Ethnicity is a socially acceptable form of cultural difference because it involves little if any real cultural difference.

Ethnic leaders are leaders precisely because they have been assimilated enough to want to trade off cultural difference for a piece of the social pie. To the extent that other members of their groups are willing to make similar compromises and get involved politically, to that extent will their group achieve ethnic status.

The alternative is to risk being treated as deviant beyond the range of acceptable variation and, like the Amish, or any number of small religious sects, invite the importunities of the State.


To examine these issues further, see Edward G. Rozycki, " Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance. Why public schools fail.

Cordially,

-- EGR