Conservatives Angry about School 'Indoctrination' Are Telling on Themselves

[appalachiablue]

- 'Conservatives angry about school ‘indoctrination’ are telling on themselves,' The Guardian, Feb. 4, 2023. -Ed.

- Ideologues like Ron DeSantis aren’t angry at politics in education; they’re angry their politics don’t have a monopoly -

The rightwing governor of Fla., Ron DeSantis, and his administration recently blocked a proposed black studies course for advanced placement high school students, as well as announced policies that would inhibit state universities from teaching programming about racial diversity, equity & inclusion or so-called “critical race theory”. These moves follow on the heels of Fla.’s “don’t say gay” legislation, last year, restricting teachers from discussing sexual orientation. DeSantis and other conservative politicians argue that they are saving America’s young from leftwing indoctrination, and that students should instead be exposed to “civic education” that extolls a patriotic vision of America.

When DeSantis & his growing number of acolytes present themselves as champions of civic education, they are in fact undermining the whole point of civics: not to make children “patriotic” or just fill brains with facts (how many branches of govt.?), but to enable individuals to be fearless, critical citizens.

That very enterprise is threatened by these systematic intimidation campaigns. In fact, DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and observations information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another. It is an open question whether the College Board did cave to pressure from conservatives when they removed supposedly controversial material from the new African American history AP course. It is also an open question to what extent civil rights lawyers & free speech advocates can stop DeSantis’s censorship laws in court.

But one thing is clear: damage to US democracy is being done already. Despite valiant resistance, on the whole, teachers and professors are intimidated.

As we know from the rise of authoritarianism in other countries and periods, all-out repression is not always necessary: people obey in advance, make small adjustments, or altogether vacate a territory where the red lines which must not be crossed are left purposefully vague. We also know from anti-education crusades disguised as culture wars in states such as Hungary that defenders of academic freedom are faced with a dilemma, one that is being reproduced in the US today. On the one hand, defenders can try to deny that anything they do is political at all. Education, they might insist, is about science and telling the kids what’s what only in terms of facts. They also might seek to escape politics by emphasizing worthy enterprises like “service learning.”

As John Hopkins president Ron Daniels has pointed out, students are ever more willing to volunteer, which is great, but less eager to engage democratic politics more directly – and colleges seem complicit in this trend.

Add to that the sense that we are falling behind globally in STEM, and hence should not waste time on soft subjects that won’t help us compete with China. Education is political not because everyone gets to teach their politics to innocent charges, but because it is indispensable for democracy. As John Dewey, the greatest 20th c. philosopher of education put it, “democracy has to be born anew every generation and education is its midwife”. Countries with well-functioning democracies also do well on civic education scores. But that is not just a matter of knowledge about democracy, but doing democracy...https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/04/conservatives-ron-desantis-florida-education

(Jan-Werner Müller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules).
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Reading the Numbers: 130 Million American Adults Have Low Literacy Skills, But Funding Differs Drastically by State, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

[Thomas Hurt]

1. There are untold numbers of private conservative christian schools in this country.

Any parent who is offended by the "indoctrination" of public schools can send their spawn to those "proper" schools.

So the complaints aren't about kids, it is about christofascist hegemony in our country. They don't just want to assure their kids are appropriately indoctrinated in the fascist ideology, they want to impose on everyone in this country.

[appalachiablue]

2. IK, private Xtian K-12, then Fascist Univ. (FU) for biz, tech, etc. The Agenda.

[Mopar151]

3. De Santis, and millions of other boneheads....

Don't like paying a friggin' dime for their kids to know what idiot losers they were, and what they turned away from and said nothing.

[Timeflyer]

4. Great essay, thanks for posting. US needs to fear DeSantis as 2024 approaches.

And a lot of political involvement in the charter school movement is to privatize public education for wealthy conservative donors to skim tax dollars with corporate charter school systems that can really indoctrinate.