Zealots and Rick Santorum
By Henry A. Giroux / TruthOut.org
Democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry, and an
ignorant public is just what Santorum and his allies count on.
February 27, 2012 | LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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Right-wing fundamentalists such as Republican presidential
candidate Rick Santorum hate public schools, which he suggests are
government schools wedded to doing the work of Satan, dressed up in
the garb of the Enlightenment. Santorum, true to his love affair with
the very secular ideology of privatization, prefers home schooling,
which is code for people taking responsibility for whatever social
issues or problems they may face, whether it be finding the best
education for their children or securing decent health care.
Actually, Santorum and many of his allies dislike any public
institution that enables people to think critically and act with a
degree of responsibility toward the public. This is one reason why
they hate any notion of public education, which harbors the promise,
if not the threat, of actually educating students to be thoughtful,
self-reflective and capable of questioning so-called common sense and
holding power accountable. Of course, some progressives see this as
simply another example of how the right wing of the Republican Party
seems to think that being stupid is in. But there is more going on
here than the issue of whether right-wing fundamentalists are
intellectually and politically challenged. What makes critical
education, especially, so dangerous to radical Christian evangelicals,
neoconservatives and right-wing nationalists in the United States
today is that, central to its very definition, is the task of
educating students to become critical agents who can actively question
and negotiate the relationships between individual troubles and public
issues. In other words, students who can lead rather than follow,
embrace reasoned arguments over opinions and reject common sense as
the engine of truth.
What Santorum and his allies realize is that democracy cannot function
without an informed citizenry and that, in the absence of such a
citizenry, we have a public disinvested from either thinking
reflectively or acting responsibly. There is nothing more feared by
this group of fundamentalists than individuals who can actually think
critically and reflectively and are willing to invest in reason and
freedom rather than a crude moralism and a reductionistic appeal to
faith as the ultimate basis of agency and politics. What Santorum and
his appeal to theocracy longs for is a crowd of followers willing to
lose themselves in causes and movements that trade in clichés and
common sense. This is the Tea Party crowd with their overt racism,
dislike for critical thought and longing for outlets through which
they can vent their anger, moral panics and hatred for those who
reject their rigid Manichean view of the world. This is a crowd that
embraces the likes of Santorum and other fundamentalists because they
provide the outlets in which such groups can fulfill their desire to
be amused by what might be called the spectacle of anti-politics.
As the anti-public politicians and administrative incompetents in
Arizona made clear in their banning ethnic studies and censoring books
critical of a conflict-free version of American history, critical
pedagogy is especially dangerous. Not only does it offer students a
way of connecting education to social change, it also invokes those
subordinated histories, narratives and modes of knowledge in an
attempt to give students often rendered voiceless the capacities to
both read the word and the world critically. But the religious
fanatics and privatizing fundamentalists do more than censor critical
thought; they also substitute a pedagogy of punishment for a pedagogy
of critical learning. Too many children in America now attend schools
modeled after prisons. Schools have become places where the challenge
of teaching and learning has been replaced by an obsession with crime,
punishment and humiliation. Too many young people are being charged
with criminal misdemeanors for behaviors that are too trivial to
criminalize.
What are we to make of a incident in a Stockton school where a
five-year-old was handcuffed and taken to a hospital for psychiatric
evaluation? This hard-to-believe event happened because the child in
question pushed away a police officer's hand after he placed it on the
child's shoulder. What does it mean when young people are charged with
assault for engaging in behaviors that, in the past, would have barely
solicited a teacher's attention? How do we defend a public schools
system that warrants the pepper spraying of a child with an IQ well
below 70 because "he didn't understand what the police were saying?"
This is barbarism parading as sound educational and disciplinary
practice. As is well known, zero tolerance laws have become a plague
imposed on public schooling. In fact, they have become a shameless
quick and easy fix for punishing young people. For example, Texas
served more than a 1,000 primary school kids over a six-year period
with tickets for misbehaving and, in some cases, fines ran as high as
$500. In Chicago, Noble Street schools, run by Michael Milkie, set up
a dehumanizing discipline system that repeatedly issued demerits and
fines to students "for 'minor infractions' ranging from not sitting up
straight to openly carrying 'flaming hot' chips." In the course of
three years, ten Noble schools netted $386,745.00 in fines. The
Advancement project has called such disciplinary practices "pernicious
and harmful to youth."
No doubt, but they are also harmful to poor families who have to
choose between buying food and paying school administrators for
punishing and cruel fines. In many respects, this amounts to a tax on
poor people, one that Matthew Mayer, a professor in the graduate
school of education at Rutgers University, described as "almost
medieval in nature. It's a form a financial torture, for lack of a
better term.... because it likely has no bearing on students' academic
performance and disproportionately hurts poor families." Clearly, this
practice cannot be defended as a disciplinary measure, however
stringent. On the contrary, it is a form of harassment, one that is
aimed at both students and their parents. And what is the pedagogical
rationale for this illogical and cruel practice? Students in this
pedagogical scenario are reduced to Pavlovian dogs, while the
anti-public privateers extend the reach of the punishing state into
the school and make a large profit to boot. What is it about critical
schooling and pedagogy that is so dangerous to the religious and
ideological fundamentalists?
The most obvious answer is that critical pedagogy believes in forms of
governing that respect both teachers and administrators on the one
hand, and students on the other. That is, it supports those
institutional conditions that extend from decent pay to equitable
modes of governance that make good teaching possible. Second, it
argues for modes of education that extend the capacities of students
to both critique existing social forms and institutions and transform
them when necessary. Put bluntly, it insists that knowledge is crucial
not merely to thinking critically, but also to acting responsibly in
the service of civic courage. What the critics of critical pedagogy
refuse to accept is that as a moral and political practice, rather
than an empty and sterile method, critical pedagogy offers the promise
of educating students to be able to reject the official lies of power
and the utterly reductive notion of training as a substitute for an
informed mode of education. Paraphrasing Bill Moyers, critical
pedagogy is, in part, part of a project whose purpose is to dignify
"people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political
agency." In this instance, critical pedagogy opens up a space where
students should be able to come to terms with their own power as
critical agents; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom
to question and assert one's voice, however different, is central to
the purpose of public education, if not democracy itself. And as a
political and moral practice, pedagogy should make clear both the
multiplicity and complexity of history as a narrative in which
students can engage as part of critical dialogue rather than accept
unquestioningly. Similarly, such a pedagogy should cultivate in
students a healthy skepticism about power, a "willingness to temper
any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness." As a
performative practice, pedagogy should provide the conditions for
students to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to
the on-going project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely this
relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to
conservatives such as Santorum, Sarah Palin, and other religious
advocates of the new theocracy as the only mode of political
governance and learning.
Education as a critical moral and political project always represents
a commitment to the future and it remains the task of educators to
make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just
world, a world in which the discourses of critique and possibility in
conjunction with the values of reason, freedom and equality function
to alter, as part of a broader democratic project, the grounds upon
which life is lived. This is hardly a prescription for political
indoctrination, but it is a project that gives education its most
valued purpose and meaning, which, in part, is "to encourage human
agency, not mould it in the manner of Pygmalion." It is also a
position that threatens right-wing private advocacy groups,
neoconservative politicians and religious extremists because they
recognize that such a pedagogical commitment goes to the very heart of
what it means to address real inequalities of power at the social
level, and to conceive of education as a project for democracy and
critical citizenship while at the same time foregrounding a series of
important and often ignored questions such as: "Why do we (as
educators) do what we do the way we do it"? Whose interests does
public education serve? How might it be possible to understand and
engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? In spite
of the right-wing view that equates indoctrination with any suggestion
of politics, critical pedagogy is not simply concerned with offering
students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents
in the classroom; it is also concerned with providing students with
the skills and knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities
both to question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the
most archaic and disempowering social practices that structure every
aspect of society and to take responsibility for intervening in the
world they inhabit.
Education is not neutral, but that does not mean it is merely a form
of indoctrination. On the contrary, as a practice that attempts to
expand the capacities necessary for human agency and, hence, the
possibilities for democracy itself, the public should nourish those
pedagogical practices that promote "a concern with keeping the forever
unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all
attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human
possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and
preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared
finished." In other words, critical pedagogy forges both critique and
agency through a language of skepticism and possibility and a culture
of openness, debate and engagement, all elements that are now at risk
in the latest and most dangerous attack on public education.
The attack on public schooling and critical pedagogy is, in part, an
attempt to deskill teachers and dismantle teacher authority. Teachers
can make a claim to being fair, but not to being either neutral or
impartial. Teacher authority can never be neutral, nor can it be
assessed in terms that are narrowly ideological. It is always broadly
political and interventionist in terms of the knowledge-effects it
produces, the classroom experiences it organizes and the future it
presupposes in the countless ways in which it addresses the world.
Teacher authority at its best means taking a stand without standing
still. It suggests that, as educators, we make a sincere effort to be
self-reflective about the value-laden nature of our authority while
taking on the fundamental task of educating students to take
responsibility for the direction of society. Rather than shrink from
our political responsibility as educators, we should embrace one of
pedagogy's most fundamental goals: to teach students to believe that
democracy is desirable and possible. Connecting education to the
possibility of a better world is not a prescription for
indoctrination; rather, it marks the distinction between the academic
as a technician and the teacher as a self-reflective educator who is
more than the instrument of a safely approved and officially
sanctioned worldview.
The authority that enables academics to teach emerges out of the
education, knowledge, research, professional rituals and scholarly
experiences that they bring to their field of expertise and classroom
teaching. Such authority provides the space and experience in which
pedagogy goes beyond providing the conditions for the simple acts of
knowing and understanding and includes the cultivation of the very
power of self-definition and critical agency. But teacher authority
cannot be grounded exclusively in the rituals of professional academic
standards. Learning occurs in a space in which commitment and passion
provide students with a sense of what it means to link knowledge to a
sense of direction. Teaching is a practice rooted in an
ethico-political vision that attempts to take students beyond the
world they already know, in a way that does not insist on a particular
fixed set of altered meanings. In this context, teacher authority
rests on pedagogical practices that reject the role of students as
passive recipients of familiar knowledge and view them instead as
producers of knowledge, who not only critically engage diverse ideas,
but also transform and act on them. Pedagogy is the space that
provides a moral and political referent for understanding how what we
do in the classroom is linked to wider social, political and economic
forces.
It is impossible to separate what we do in the classroom from the
economic and political conditions that shape our work, and that means
that pedagogy has to be understood as a form of academic labor in
which questions of time, autonomy, freedom and power become as central
to the classroom as what is taught. As a referent for engaging
fundamental questions about democracy, pedagogy gestures to important
questions about the political, institutional and structural conditions
that allow teachers to produce curricula, collaborate with colleagues,
engage in research and connect their work to broader public issues.
Pedagogy is not about balance, a merely methodological consideration;
on the contrary, as Cornelius Castoriadis reminds us, if education is
not to become "the political equivalent of a religious ritual," it
must do everything possible to provide students with the knowledge and
skills they need to learn how to deliberate, make judgments and
exercise choice, particularly as the latter is brought to bear on
critical activities that offer the possibility of democratic change.
Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging and
independent - qualities that are indispensable for students if they
are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in
and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform
and governmental policy. Hence, pedagogy becomes the cornerstone of
democracy in that it provides the very foundation for students to
learn not merely how to be governed, but also how to be capable of
governing.
One gets the sense that right-wing pundits, politicians and religious
bigots believe that there is no place in the classroom for politics,
worldly concerns, social issues and questions about how to lessen
human suffering. In this discourse, the classroom becomes an unworldly
counterpart to the gated community, a space for conformity and
punishment as a tool for perpetuating dominant market-driven values
and white Christian religious values. This is not education; it is a
flight from self and society. As Eric Fromm has pointed out, this type
of education embodies a flight from freedom, produces authoritarian
personalities and punishes those who refuse to live in a society
modeled as a fundamentalist theocracy. The outcome of this type of
anti-enlightenment education is not a student who feels a
responsibility to others and who feels that her/his presence in the
world matters, but one who feels the presence of difference, if not
thinking itself, as an unbearable burden to be contained or expelled.
Santorum and his fundamentalist allies argue for a notion of education
that supports the notion of the teacher as a police officer, clerk or
pitchman for privatization rather than an understanding of educators
as engaged public intellectuals. That is, as intellectuals and civic
educators who work under conditions that enable them to embrace the
authority, respect and autonomy necessary for making education a
worldly practice and critical pedagogy an empowering experience.
The current assault on young people, public education and critical
thinking is first and foremost an attack not only on the conditions
that make critical education and pedagogy possible, but also on what
it might mean to raise questions about the real problems facing public
education today, which include the lack of adequate financing, the
instrumentalization and commodification of knowledge, the increasing
presence of the punishing state in the schools, the hijacking of
public education by corporate interests, the substitution of testing
for substantive forms of teaching and learning and the increasing
attempts by right-wing extremists to turn education into job training
or into an extended exercise in patriotic xenophobia and religious
fundamentalism. As the right-wing juggernaut destroys the social
state, workers protections, unions and civil liberties, it is easy to
forgot that a much less visible attack is being waged on young people
and especially on public schools and the possibility of critical forms
of teaching. Critical pedagogy, that arch enemy of fundamentalists
everywhere, must be understood as central to any discourse about
educating students to be informed, skilled and knowledgeable critical
agents, but, more importantly, it must be understood as the most
crucial referent we have for understanding politics and defending all
aspects of public schooling as one of the very few remaining
democratic public spheres remaining in the United States today.
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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