by Eric J. Weiner
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know. —Albert Camus
From a Deweyan perspective, public education’s central role in a democracy is to provide the conditions for students to learn the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that are essential for democratic life. For Dewey, democracy is a form of associated living among heterogeneous peoples and therefore requires students to learn how to understand, interrogate, evaluate, and manage conflicts, big and small, democratically. The ability to evaluate, understand, and resolve our conflicts peacefully and respectfully are an important index of democracy’s health and viability. Just as the health of a nation can be measured by how well its children fare, the health of a nation’s democracy can be measured, in part, by how well it teaches its children.
Constrained by constitutional principles of justice, liberty, and rights, educating future generations to be able and willing to live democratically means that schools must stop privileging safe spaces over brave spaces and help students lean into the most difficult and challenging conflicts of the day. Conflicts should not be avoided and our students should not be protected from them. On the contrary, they are a vital pedagogical and curricular resource for developing syncretic knowledge and cultural literacies; an opportunity for dialectical and intersectional thinking; offer a check against coercive and indoctrinating pedagogies from both the left and right; and make the learning experience democratic, meaningful, and transformative.
Mirroring its societal context, schools today at all levels are politicized and polarized to a degree where democratic education is seen by many as a luxury we can no longer afford to practice because of the threat of authoritarianism. They believe that the drift toward some embryonic form of American authoritarianism demands a hard stop when it comes to teaching about issues from different “conservative” heterodox perspectives. These include White Christian Nationalism, MAGA, and other anti-democratic/pro-authoritarian ideologies and their associated ideas, practices, and policies about everything from immigration to abortion. For others, ironically, democratic education represents a threat to American Exceptionalism. They see democratic education as a form of leftist indoctrination and therefore believe it must be policed, disciplined, and restrained. For these folks, American democracy has reached its tipping point in which its excesses have overwhelmed its value as a check against monarchy, communism and totalitarianism. Both sides reject democratic education as a way forward, choosing instead to double-down on the politicization of education in the name of “freedom.” But their conception and practice of freedom is “negative” in that it is driven essentially by fear, avoidance and escape. Politicization of education is a tool wielded by those who fear that their ideas won’t hold up under critique.
In short, politicization is the process in which knowledge is explicitly self-interested and power and truth are cynically linked and indistinguishable. Learning becomes a zero-sum game in which a small disagreement can become a reason for a total dismissal or cancellation of an entire body of work. Throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater reflects a growing anti-intellectualism among educators and scholars of all stripes; it is animated by a general refusal to take a complex accounting of conflicting viewpoints across the ideological spectrum of ideas and cultural practices.
The learning environment of a politicized classroom—Left or Right—is rigidly ideological, anti-intellectual, coercive, and dogmatic. This turns the classroom into a war room; education into training and schooling; teaching into coercion; learning into indoctrination; assessment into a tool of discipline and punishment; students into ideological foot soldiers; deskilled teachers into technicians; explanation into justification and/or rationalization; and administrators into bureaucrats. The consequences for such theater, as philosopher Stuart Mills argues, go far beyond what or how our students learn, distorting knowledge itself: “Those who have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.” Within the politicized classroom, hegemony is the goal instead of the problem.
Politicization in schools takes many different forms. One popular initiative first designed by the Left, but soon co-opted by the radicalized Right, is in the creation of “safe spaces” in schools. It appears we are all “snowflakes” now. Safe spaces are typically animated by a demand for “trigger warnings” when controversial topics or language might be used; opt-out choices for course materials and discussions; the demand for, and creation of “comfort zones” before engaging in critical dialogues; and censorious demands on materials, language, tone/voice, and “the body.” Any kind of teaching or curriculum that might make a student feel uncomfortable is removed from the classroom.
This desire for safe spaces is understandable as so many people, especially but not exclusively people from marginalized and/or under-represented groups, feel like victims and have been victimized because of their race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. For others, safe spaces must be policed because some students, when learning about the troubling truths of the country’s history, might see themselves represented by the perpetrators of a variety of horrors that contributed to the nation’s economic power and caste-like system of racial hierarchy. They need “safe spaces” in order to feel, well, safe. Safe from what, we might ask? Physical violence? Symbolic violence? Words? Ideas? Disturbing images? Troubling thoughts? Aggressive peers? Coercive teachers? In the educational context, safe spaces are meant to protect students from any knowledge that “they” determine, in any way, is offensive and threatening. Policed silences are the oxygen of ignorance and fear. And safe spaces, above all else, are defined by what can’t be said out loud. Another problem with safe spaces is that one student’s or tribe’s safe space is another student’s or tribe’s repressed space.
Safe spaces are a tribal response to conflict, not a democratic one. They are exclusive and normative formations that help people avoid conflicts that arise from their differences, not lean into them. By contrast, American democracy requires that citizens are able to work through their differences in a way that is respectful, principled and reasonable. Teachers need, by extension, to create “brave spaces” so that their heterogeneous students can be courageous in the face of heterodox ideas. By creating brave spaces for our students, we give them opportunities to be courageous, learn the skills and habits of mind that democracies demand, and stop seeing themselves as victims with no individual or collective power to confront and challenge, through debate and dialogue, those who have views that might be repellent to them. They should have the opportunity to consider historical truths that are disturbing because they challenge what they might have learned at home or in other private educational settings. This is the learning environment of a political classroom as opposed to a politicized classroom. It is democratic and associative, public, empathetic, compassionate, epistemologically curious, ethically constrained, morally grounded, and cognizant of the hegemony of official power. However uncomfortable that prospect is in our age of politicization and polarization, it is what is required if we hope to use education as a tool against the rising tide of authoritarianism on one hand and against the “excesses” of democracy on the other.
In the classroom, brave spaces are animated by what Michel Foucault referred to in his critique of polemics as reciprocal elucidation. In such a setting, “The rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion…The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on.” Within the serious play of “reciprocal elucidation,” social, political, and cultural conflicts provide an opportunity for deep and critical learning and teaching.
Creating brave spaces for our students to engage in reciprocal elucidation about controversial and taboo ideas is a rejection of coercive and one-sided curriculum and pedagogy, but is also a rejection of balance and neutrality in schools. “’Balance,’ writes Stanley Fish, “is a political, not an academic requirement; it looks not to the intellectual interest of a proposed topic, but to the political interest of appeasing various constituencies.” The move from politicization to the political therefore is neither neutrality nor balance, but a pedagogical and curricular commitment to a kind of radical epistemological curiosity.
An even more democratically radical suggestion comes from those who argue that we should not just be teaching about oppositional, controversial or marginal discourses, but we should be teaching, when possible, with those people who actually hold these views. We can see this being put into practice to varying degrees at places like the Program on Intergroup Relations (https://igr.umich.edu/) and the Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/), although it’s fair to assume that many teachers/professors are designing their curriculum and pedagogies to reflect this deep level of democratic practice in their classes. In practice this might mean facilitating open debates in which students are both observers and participants in critical dialogues, communities of inquiry, and discussions over conflicting viewpoints, conflicting methods of analysis, conflicting theories of interpretation, and conflicting approaches to framing and solving problems. This allows, as Henry Giroux has pointed out many times, teachers and students to ask: “What counts as social knowledge? How is this knowledge produced and legitimized? Whose interests does this knowledge serve? Who has access to this knowledge? How is this knowledge distributed and reproduced in the classroom?” These kinds of critical questions help decouple power from knowledge and encourage the development of what C. Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination.”
Within the democratic classroom, consensus is not the goal, nor is persuasion. This approach to teaching emphasizes both the “how” and “why” of thinking and knowledge. i.e., teachers do not tell students what to think, but shows them, through reasoned debate, analysis and inquiry, how and why thought-leaders in various fields and from various perspectives, come to think about the things they do while teaching students to use various discursive tools of knowledge and language in debates and during facilitated dialogues.
What does it say about the future of democracy when teachers and students choose safety over courage, security over agency, negative freedom over positive freedom, comfort over power, and silence over dialogue? During these times of intense and explicit politicization, one of the most important things we can do as educators is design, through our pedagogy and curriculum, the world we want to see for ourselves and our children. Policing learning and teaching in the name of safety only makes the us more fearful and less likely to deal with our fears peacefully.