Race for the Lowest Common Denominator
The 2022 midterm elections are upon us and things are not looking good for America. The challenges the nation faces are many, both internal and external: issues of inflation, Russian aggression, investigations of the January 6 Insurrection, global growth of autocracy and its vocal advocates domestically, climate change and opposition to fixing it, just to name a few. Then, there are the non-issues that are consuming the news bandwidth, or what passes for news in some cases: critical race theory, parental bills of rights, election fraud, the Big Lie, Let’s Go Brandon vs. You Dumb Son of a Bitch, and onward in a downward spiral.
One of the interesting moves on the political Right is the targeting of education, seeking to control curriculum at the micro-level by putting curricular decisions in the hands of parents. Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, includes draconian punishments if a faculty member transgresses bans on critical race theory, or teaches anything parents don’t like or find ‘obscene’, like evolution, resulting in termination, decertification, inclusion on a no-hire list, and loss of retirement benefits. This is an ongoing example of the use of vigilantism to enforce the Conservative agenda in Texas. It is political theatre at its worst and doubtful that this would stand in courts. Or, courts appointed to be non-partisan. These days, who knows.
What the Right gets right here is that gerrymandering and voter suppression are uncertain ventures. While they may work in the short term, over the long haul the probability that the electorate will eventually tire of the same story increases. At that point, the opposing party will begin to win in spite of the engineered elections. The only way to combat that is to control the narrative of politics, to imbue the future voters with a default notion of what politics are, who is correct in policy and law, and which party is the right party. Controlling education is the way to do that. Specifically, engineering curriculum to, sotto voce, emphasize right wing talking points, lionize the political figures that uphold the right’s political values and allow the opposition figures to fade into the dustbin of history with a faint patina of demonization, sows the seeds of right wing victories for some time.
It isn’t a fool-proof strategy as the trend in homeschooling that developed under conservative auspices can reverse and be used by liberal parents to insure their children get, if not a more objective presentation of history and fact-based reality, perhaps one only slightly slanted leftward. Or a lot leftward, because this is the problem with homeschooling and with a ‘parent’s bill of rights,’ these parents are not educators.
While learning occurs informally in the family through casual conversation and through work projects, structured learning of academic material requires special training and education in the discipline taught. The curriculum in the humanities and social sciences isn’t a collection of pretty words and inspiring success stories, it is fundamental to the development of critical thinking skills, skills that allow for the exploration and expansion of knowledge. The mathematics and science curricula require a skilled teacher who can help students see past abstractions and inspire students to practice. Learning to ask questions early on is critical. Logic, reasoning, critical reading skills, deep reading skills, composition and argumentation skills, communication of complex ideas, all of these fundamental abilities suffer under the politicization of curriculum.
At the moment, the Right is fairly consistent in their message regarding education, there isn’t much drift between the politicians state to state other than regional variations. But, eventually, the narrative will become too large to manage from the RNC and some enterprising Conservative will propose a rational solution that everyone will think is great as it leverages an existing federal bureaucracy: the transformation of the Department of Education into the Department of Information Integrity, or some such. This creates federal-level control over what is truth, what is allowed in the narrative from information to education. Because, obviously, we all want to live in the truth, we all want accurate information.
We can hope such a thing doesn’t happen, but as the right spirals downward and zeroes in on their 2022 taking points, the emphasis on education as the Great Satan, on knowledge as opinion, on truth as a thing to be decided by parents where education is concerned thus laying the ground for the government to control what is truth for the rest of us, the nation could be looking at a reset that will take generations to repair, if ever.
While many may think this a far-fetched scenario, and I hope it is, we can’t be blind to the fact that the United States is fast approaching a ‘four legs good, two legs better’ moment. The death of our democracy is aborning in the conversations of the conservatives in coffee shops where old white men discuss the virtues of dictatorship and how America would be better off under one, or in the news room where pundits advocate for the autocrats of the world with impunity. One wonders if this is only for ratings, or if they are currying favor for the future they are creating.
And will there be cries of federal overreach when national education policy overrides local decisions in curriculum. Where will states’ rights be in those discussions? Will the uncivil war of the 2020’s in pursuit of autocracy be followed by the liberal civil war in the 2060’s to restore what should never have been lost?
While the movie was a bit tongue-in-cheek and the book not so much, it’s beginning to look a lot like ‘Starship Troopers’ around here, a fusion of technology, narrative control, rigid criteria for citizenship, transformation of knowledge to science and technology with humanities and social science relegated to curiosities used to further control the narrative in restrictive ways, and the use of behavioral science to further control the masses. The algorithms have been written and they are in use now. One wonders where the wormhole leads.
Certainly, drawing parallels with a work of speculative futuristic fiction can border on hyperbole. Then, sometimes it is not. As we move through the 2022 election season, we’ll see what direction this country will take. Do we become an autocratic conservative theocracy or do we maintain and deepen our liberal democratic roots? The good news is we’ll know in November 2022. The question is, for whom will be news be good?
After almost 250 years of carrying the torch of freedom, of lighting the way for people of the world to find self determination, our light is waning, our will to be free eroding under the pressures of politics as privilege over politics as service. We have forgotten how to be ‘one from many’ because we have allowed self interest to eclipse the common good. In the end, this divide and conquer strategy has worked, we have atomized in our pursuit of individual expression, of individual existence, of individual experience, to the point where we cannot find sufficient common cause in the threat of autocracy, more interested in arguing our differences than in recognizing our common interests. And now, we cast aside the freedom of thought that gave rise to our greatest accomplishments, harnessing our education system to the political plow. In the end, we are willing to sacrifice our political self determination on the alter of our egos and allow the rise of an autocratic system of government in exchange for the destruction of our enemies. A Faustian bargain if there ever was one. However, if they win, no one will know who Faust was, so the allusion really doesn’t matter.
Copyright © 2022 Lee Butler. All rights reserved.