Part 1:
This is the first post of my new blog, A lot More Questions, with No Answers. For those who have read my book, A lot of Questions, with No Answers? this first blog post and many others will expand upon the questions and themes explored in the book. You could consider this and many future offerings to be post publication addendums, much like the first essay in the book had an addendum to it. This piece will be a continuation of the questions asked in the final essay of the book, Written by the Victor. Before beginning, I want to point out as with everything in life, the issues being raised in this blog are multifaceted, nuanced, and complicated. A short essay or blog post is by no means comprehensive enough to cover every variable or explore every view. As I said in my book, I do not intend the following to be the end of discussion, but the beginning of it.
Recent events in the United States and around the world have left me wishing I knew more about the history of education. More specifically, they have left me wondering how schools and universities cope and then adjust when faced with tumultuous events, particularly tumult in the social or political order. How quickly does educational curriculum dealing with history and politics change in school institutions, and how do these changes effect societies? Can school education systems and the way they portray events have an effect on those events, for good or ill?
These questions are rather abstract so let me clarify with a quick hypothetical example so this makes more sense. Imagine an early modern absolutist monarchy. There is no universal education in this country. What schools do exist however, are strongly pro-monarchy and preach to their students this heavily biased view. Unfortunately for the monarchy however, a confluence of dozens of factors has created the perfect storm for a revolution to break out. Eventually, the old monarchy is overthrown, and a representative republic is created in the country. One of the many changes the republic institutes is a system of universal education.
When it comes time to instruct new students about recent events, what would one expect the republican government to do? Unsurprisingly, those who seized power in the revolution want to find every way possible to enshrine their system of values into the nation, so that the republic can become a permanent institution and not just a historical flash in the pan. One obvious way to disseminate propaganda is through the new universal education system. In a nutshell, when it comes time to teach younger generations about the revolution the school curriculum paints the overthrown monarchy with the blackest brush possible, and every teacher is quick to tell all the students that they should be overwhelmed with gratitude toward the republic for freeing them in the glorious revolution.
Now let us imagine that there are private schools run by a religion that were supportive of the deposed monarchy. Naturally, they have a different opinion about the revolution and the creation of the republic, and they aren’t afraid to voice that opinion loudly to their students. This, among other factors, leads to covert and overt conflict between supporters of the deposed monarchy and the new republican government. This conflict is threatening and continuous enough that republic is finally forced to offer concessions as a way to ratchet down tensions. One of these concessions is an adjustment to the education system. Conflicting sides agree that both public and private schools will implement new curriculum to teach students about the country’s history, a curriculum that is scrupulously neutral.
Part 2:
This idea, political neutrality in schools, is the subject I want to examine for the rest of the piece. Specifically, I want to examine political neutrality in schools in the United States. What are the benefits and downsides to neutrality and is neutrality even attainable?
What are the benefits of political neutrality? These are rather obvious, as a historian might tell you, trying to view events without bias can help one gain a more objective and clear view of events being studied. In addition, a politically neutral stance allows a school system to avoid both public and interpersonal conflicts between staff who might have differing political views. In this way, a school institution can maintain a certain interrelation harmony, even if it merely papers over divisions rather than confronting them.
I will save discussion on the potential downsides for just a moment, and instead focus on the question, is neutrality even possible? My answer would be no, not entirely, even if there is scrupulous enforcement (which I doubt there often is). I believe the ideal of perfect political and social neutrality dies under the double barrels of overt pressure and innate bias.
Overt pressure refers to when an institution is faced with insistent prodding to take a non-neutral stance toward some issue. For example, look at the widescale outrage when schools were first racially integrated in the United States, or the protests that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to masks and social distancing. Both of those examples involve social issues that also became (and remain) hot button political topics. In the case of the pandemic, the issue should have been one entirely in the purview of public health. But how many school boards across the country caved in an eased public health measures when faced with growing political pressure? How many people died because school districts across the country wanted to avoid a political fight rather than listen to the advice of public health experts?
The second and more insidious way that any potential neutrality is undermined is through every person’s own innate biases. I’ll give a quick example of what I mean. I once overheard a conversation between two public school teachers discussing a social studies unit that was upcoming concerning different religions of the past. The teachers weren’t sure how well their young students would understand the subject matter, which is fair. But what one teacher said next perfectly encapsulates the issue of bias. I’m paraphrasing but this teacher’s point was basically: “How do we make it clear to our students that this is what people believed in the past because they didn’t know any better” (this was said in a strongly Protestant Christian area of the US). The obvious implication being that people of the past were wrong in their religious beliefs (especially in relation to polytheistic religions). For me the very notion that one can know definitively that their religion is the correct one opens up a whole philosophical can of worms, and if readers are interested the idea of the “correct religion” is the subject of the first essay of my book. Even ignoring that, however, imagine that a teacher with this mindset has several students that are polytheistic Hindus. How might this bias of seeing past polytheistic religions as wrong affect the way they teach and the way they talk about the subject? What effects could this have on their polytheistic students? How scrupulously can a person mitigate their own unconscious biases (especially if they are blissfully unaware of these biases)?
Let us move on to the question set aside earlier, what are the potential downsides of trying to maintain a neutral stance towards politics and social issues in a school setting? My argument would be that at a certain point “neutrality” can easily become “refusing to speak out against injustice.” Anyone watching contemporary events in the United States has certainly noticed that our democratic republic is facing threats from the far-right that could topple democracy in the US. Far-right political organizations and sentiments have been growing in power and influence in other countries around the world as well, potentially calling the whole concept of western liberal democracy into question. Should US public schools remain out of this fight for representative government? It would certainly be much easier. But would that make it right or just?
Once again, we need to return to an earlier idea, are school curriculums neutral in the first place? Countries throughout history have had their own set of national myths to tell themselves how great they are, and they hold up certain values that they believe represent their society or culture. As I mentioned in the hypothetical above, when nations have compulsory public education, they expend a lot of effort trying to instill these national myths and values in the minds of younger generations. The US is no different. The US education system mythologizes the founding fathers to such an extent that they become one-dimensional caricatures representing certain national values, like liberty and justice for all. This isn’t a neutral position; this sort of mythmaking clearly supports one set of political ideals over any other. Now how much the reality actual fits the one-dimensional myths and propaganda is beside the point. If US public schools assert that the revolutionary war and democracy and the founding fathers and everything else are laudable and righteous, that is a political stance. What happens when a neo-fascist movement gains popularity in the United States? Should this just be ignored as if it isn’t happening, should public schools remain “neutral?” Will US schools ignore the fact that they have been pushing politically charged propaganda this whole time? Do US schools and the people who work in them actually support the ideals of freedom and democracy?
What if US democracy falls to an authoritarian coup, how long before public schools pivot to a new “neutral” stance that says that democracy is overrated anyway and aren’t we happy that it was gotten rid of by our new authoritarian overlords. This line of inquiry leads us to ask just how strong the average person’s principles and convictions really are. Is the average person like a strong tree, rooted firmly enough that they can withstand powerful storms or choking droughts, or are most people like a leaf on the wind, blowing here and there to wherever the wind takes them? That could be the subject of future discussion.