Monday, October 17, 2005
(2:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Advocacy in the Classroom
I really consistently dislike Robert KC Johnson's posts at Cliopatria. It's all I can do to resist sarcastically responding to every one of them -- but then I realize that all my responses would necessarily be the same, since all his posts are exactly the same ("these damn academic leftists are spouting off and creating an atmosphere of persecution among conservative students!"). It was deeply refreshing, then, to read Hugo Schwyzer's post today in which he explicitly states that while teaching his women's studies classes, he is specifically trying to raise up young feminists (or male feminist allies), as per the goals of women's studies as a curriculum. One commenter complains that, in essence, posing as an advocate is at odds with the power differential in the classroom and that in any case, it ends up unfairly putting conservative students (or those who don't agree with the dreaded pedagogical "orthodoxy") in a position of disadvantage -- even though Hugo claims that he grades based on the quality of the work rather than on the specific opinions expressed, and even though he also claims that he welcomes lively debate in class.I responded by asking why teachers shouldn't teach in a seductive way, hoping to lead others to embrace their own passionate beliefs. After all, what is the goal of instruction if not to change people's minds -- either to make them sharper and more rigorous in their reasoning or else to get them to discard certain beliefs in favor of others that come to appear superior?
Then I paused. I had been reading the Atlantic Monthly's college admissions section earlier this morning, so I was especially conscious of the fact that universities are often considered to be engines of economic opportunity -- in fact, lack of a college degree severely hampers one's economic chances. So it seems likely to me that behind all of this fuss about conservatives being made to feel uncomfortable in liberal arts colleges, there is an undercurrent of worry that this will unfairly disadvantage these students economically. I haven't seen anyone explicitly come out and say this, but it seems like the simplest way to make sense of the ways that people deploy the language of fairness, etc. -- and it also makes sense of the fact that so many of these people who are apparently advocating "neutrality" in education are basically advocating that we stop doing the "education" thing altogether. I mean, it seems disproportionate that one should give up one's deepest beliefs and convictions (or give the appearance of doing so), just so that one can get a decent middle-management job -- completely unfair!
If education was all just job training, there would be no trouble with any kind of advocacy at all, beyond the professional standards in each occupation -- for instance, insisting that students raised as pathological liars should instead use honest figures in their future work as accountants would not cause any controversy. These people could be made into good cogs in the economic machine, and their beliefs and convictions could escape unscathed. But in this situation, I would say that no meaningful education is taking place at all. Job training is valuable, and it's important for people to have satisfying jobs that they can do well, but it's not education, or at least that's a very impoverished concept of education.
I don't really know where to take this post from here, because I think that appealing to what "we as Americans" want -- whether we want the state to provide education for the full intellectual development of each person or to provide job training -- makes utterly no sense whatsoever in our current context. What we "want" doesn't matter, unless one of the two parties happens to put it in their platform and then follow through on it as well, and in any case, since many Americans are so poorly educated (even those with many degrees), I don't know that we can really trust what the public wants anyway. Treating political convictions as some kind of religious belief that must be respected and never challenged in the classroom, lest students feel persecuted, only makes the problem of inadequate education in America even worse.
