When I taught college-level philosophy, one of the biggest obstacles to teaching, and particularly to successful class discussion, was students’ fear of dealing with controversial issues in class. Despite the bragging that Americans like to do about “free speech,” American students were far more reluctant to speak candidly about anything (or handle constructive criticism) than the college students I briefly encountered in Pakistan or taught in Palestine. By comparison with students in these impoverished and highly repressive places, American students were discursively speaking afraid of their own shadows. They seemed to need “permission” to say anything beyond the safely anodyne and cliched.
The explanation, in my experience–and speaking only for that–was not left-wing wokeness. I don’t mean to deny that such wokeness existed, that it sometimes took obnoxious forms, and that it sometimes inhibited or deformed classroom discussion. It did. I just mean to deny that it did the lion’s share of the inhibition. The lion’s share came from centrist and right-wing attempts, originating in the K-12 public school system, to micromanage the classroom in the name of a false and pedagogically uninformed conception of “neutrality”: never make mention of your “personal” views in class, this dogma told the instructor; your job is to give neutral synopses of “all views,” and leave it at that, lest students be haplessly indoctrinated by you, or traumatized by their encounter with a living, breathing advocate of a view someone actually holds.
This story from a New Jersey newspaper typifies the relevant attitudes:
The Westwood Regional School board on Thursday moved one step closer to revising a district policy that critics said would prohibit teachers from expressing their views on controversial issues taught in class.
Westwood, New Jersey could be anywhere in the United States, red state or blue, and the Westwood Regional School board could be any school board presiding over any public school.
In a nutshell, the Neutrality Dogma makes this demand: Competence, fairness, and professionalism require the instructor to leave her personality and “personal beliefs” at the classroom door; any hint of the person behind the professional is anathema to the educational enterprise. The expression of personality leads straight to “grooming”; the expression of personal beliefs, straight to “indoctrination.”
Grooming and indoctrination, according to the Dogma, are–setting aside “active shooters”–either the only or the most important problems to be faced in a classroom. Every other pedagogical consideration can safely be sacrificed to them, including how to induce students actively to engage the material, how to induce them to participate in contentious discussion about the topics broached, how to get them to see the general relevance of what’s in the curriculum beyond what’s covered, and how to sustain their interest in the material over the long-run, once the exams are over, and they leave classroom altogether. The ideal student is a passive receptacle of neutrally presented, pre-certified information; the ideal instructor, an organic talking machine that gestures in front of Power Point slides and could in principle be replaced by a non-organic droid. Rebel against these prejudices, and you’ll soon find yourself out of a job, to be replaced by someone–or something–more willing to be a “team player.”
As it happens, the dogma I’ve just described is not the safeguard against indoctrination it pretends to be. (Indeed, “indoctrination” is not the transparent concept people so often take it to be.) Taken literally, it’s indefensible, unworkable, and ineffectual to the point of absurdity. No one can completely efface their personality and do a good job of teaching. No one can offer a literally “neutral” synopsis of “all views.” No one can teach without some degree of indoctrination on some things that are too basic to a given course to be examined from “all” sides. Some things have to be taken for granted, at least ex hypothesi, so that progress can be made on teaching other things.
And indoctrination in the undeniably objectionable sense doesn’t take place by the sheer fact of advocacy of a certain point of view, regardless of how it’s done or why. An instructor can candidly avow a belief and give reasons for it without indoctrinating anyone; conversely, an instructor can subtly indoctrinate his listeners without ever candidly avowing his beliefs. Beyond that, a conversation ceases to be one if it’s scripted or managed by authorities external to the conversation. But a classroom ceases to be a classroom if all genuine conversation is legislated out of it.
For all of the empty talk about “learning objectives,” “learning outcomes,” and the whole sad paraphernalia of “educational theory,” the preceding things are the basics of classroom life, known to anyone who’s actually spent any appreciable time in one. If you don’t know this from personal experience, you simply don’t know how to teach, and shouldn’t be dictating to people who do.
I’ve spent most of my life in classrooms, whether teaching or being taught. Given that, I’ve been the beneficiary of a long list of extremely talented, memorable teachers, and on the receiving end of a fairly long list of instructors who lacked both attributes. The common attribute of the best teachers I had was their rejection of the dogma I’ve been describing here. I’m tempted to say, in fact, that there’s an inverse relation between acceptance of the dogma and the best teaching I’ve seen: the better the teacher, the more emphatic their rejection of the dogma.
The best teachers I had were authentically themselves in class, not robots replaceable by other robots. Being authentically themselves, they candidly spoke their minds, whatever the topic (assuming a certain degree of relevance to the material to be covered). But given a fundamental respect for the autonomy of their students, they never lapsed into indoctrination, intimidation, mendacity, or dogmatism. They were candid, not overbearing; respectful of diversity, not encouraging of uniformity. Above all, they saw the value in modeling the expression of “personal beliefs” in front of their students in such a way as to encourage criticism of those beliefs–in the full knowledge that the criticisms they were inviting from their students was undiluted criticism of them. Many teachers claim piously to have “learned” the profoundest life-lessons from their students, but the ones who really did are the ones who permitted those students to school them in front of other students, or better yet, in front of other faculty. No one forgets a public ass kicking.
Feel free to follow the Neutrality Dogma if you want education to be a forgettable experience of no consequence to anything beyond the classroom. If what you want are students who will swallow nuggets of timidly curated information, regurgitate them on a test, then forget the whole exercise so as to live out the banalities of a fundamentally uneducated life, well–you’ve found the perfect recipe. But if you want education to be more than an exercise in futility, you have to start by rejecting a basic impediment to the success of the enterprise.
The effects of adherence to the Neutrality Dogma at the K-12 level will first be felt in the college classroom, where discussion of controversial topics–in philosophy, psychology, political science, economics, and history–becomes an enterprise halfway between group therapy and dentistry: part hand-holding, part teeth-pulling. It’ll then be felt in the workplace, where substantive dissent is ubiquitously forbidden, and MBA-inspired babytalk is the norm. Eventually, it will be felt in whatever passes for “civic life,” including the parts of it that take place on social media, from its allegedly most respectable sectors to its discursive cesspools. Before long you’ll discover that almost no one is capable of saying anything of interest…for fear of saying something of interest. Interest means engagement. Engagement is bad. Best not to go there.
Students need to be taught at an early age that–to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Sarah Schulman–”conflict is not abuse.”* The world is a place of conflict. Get used to it. Deal with it. Stop pretending you can wish it or legislate it out of existence. You can’t. When you try, it just returns in increasingly grotesque forms, like the return of the repressed. The repression of the repressed is a problem, not a solution. Being a problem, it can’t be resolved by adding a little more of it to itself.
*For a nice summary of Schulman’s views, check out this interview.
Policy of Truth 
Or as the Buddha says in the Qur’an:
“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3: 15-16)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m trying to imagine you as a Buddhist, a madrasa Qur’an teacher, or a Presbyterian Vacation Bible School teacher, and somehow failing on all three counts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s because you’re trying to imagine an “or” rather than an “and.”
LikeLike
There is pretty much no such thing as a good teacher who does not put their personality on display in a way that helps engage. Often, this comes with quite a bit of personal conviction and belief, but the issue of when expressing such (and which such) is appropriate is pretty complicated. Here are some cases from my experience (related without drawing much in the way of specific lessons).
(1) Chris Rainey, 6th grade math, 7th & 8th grade history (RIP). Full of personality, would joke around with the students to the point of insulting them publicly (in a way that, strangely, to this day, does not seem inappropriate). But as far as his personal views, we got a lot of baseball and current events, but not really any political or ethical or social commitments (though he was, no doubt, quite liberal).
(2) Alan Seagull, 6th grade language arts. Great teacher, very engaged. Memorably, played Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” for us, asked us to interpret, got agitated when we did not get it, had to tell us it was about the poor and marginalized left behind by society. At the time, I just thought ‘what is this guy up to, why is he so agitated?’. Looking back, I think it was (probably) an appropriate exercise, very much tied to his own convictions, that failed.
(3) Julia Davis (RIP), 11th grade world history. One of my best teachers. Later in life, realized that she was a pretty radical Black civil rights activist. She had been a college instructor or professor. We learned quite a lot of African history in her world history course. And about the conditions of chattel slavery in her American history course. I suspect that, even back then, she was told to “reign it in” (I remember having a conversation with her about the difference between college and high school history learning, with her stressing that, in college, you learned many different perspectives and that, in high school, such complications were often omitted). I remember her as turning history into stories and being quite passionate about her teaching. And doing many today-inappropriate things in class. She took some special interest in African-American students with promise, being particularly hard on them to “shape up” if they were misbehaving and not doing the work.
I think these teachers would get in trouble today (partly due to “neutrality” concerns).
LikeLike
That you remember these teachers so vividly suggests that they succeeded as educators. What you’re describing is exactly what these Boards of Education are trying to run out of town.
I liked all of my grade school teachers, but the three most memorable were Marilyn Bornstein (second grade), Emily Glickman (fourth grade), and Benjamin Estilow (sixth grade).
Mrs Bornstein was an old-fashioned second wave feminist and advocate of civil rights. She taught both things in an unapologetically vindicatory spirit: the civil rights movement was right, and feminism was true. Those assumptions structured the story she told about both, and gave them both coherence and poignancy. That’s why I remember them. As I think about it decades later, I don’t I’d say that she taught anyone anything that ended up being false. I had to take a detour through libertarianism to see why some of the issues she raised were more complex than she made them. But I mean, it was second grade. Even if some of it had been false, the way she taught was self-correcting: she motivated you to seek truth, and indirectly, to correct any mistakes she made. So no harm done. The reverse, in fact.
She actually went out of her way to argue some of the boys out of their unreflective sexism and into a very moderate sort of feminism. My mother was a physician (which seemed totally uncontroversial), but I was, in second grade, somehow disturbed at the idea that women (“girls”) could be construction workers, pilots, cops, fire fighters, or soldiers. It just clashed with my sense of the conventionally intuitive. I remember the specific conversation in which Mrs Bornstein and her aide, Miss Chirash, ganged up on me and deftly argued me out of that “intuition” (or set of them). It was brazen advocacy on their part, but in the service of truth. I don’t regard it as indoctrination in the problematic sense at all. She did me a favor. No amount of “neutralist” teaching would have guided me to the truth as adeptly as her advocacy.
The funny thing is that Mrs Bornstein turned out to be the mother of the Israeli propagandist Michael Oren. She had this contest in which any student who read 100 books would get the honor of being invited to her house for dinner. I read 100 books and was invited to her house one Friday–on shabbat. Her son Michael was in college at the time, but she showed me his empty room filled with books and said, “Someday, Michael will become a great man.” I was awestruck. Twenty years later, I figured out who he was and got depressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oren
Mrs Bornstein is 95, by the way, still lives in the same house she lived in then.
In fourth grade, I had Mrs Glickman. At first glance, Mrs Glickman might have appeared a practitioner of “neutralism,” but I wouldn’t say she was. She was an old school disciplinarian with old school pedagogical habits: memorize your times tables, memorize the continents, memorize the famous European explorers, diagram sentences, etc. There was nothing overtly political about her teaching style, but it wasn’t neutral. It flew in the face of every pedagogical fashion that prevailed at the time: rote memorization was supposed to be bad. She didn’t give a shit, and I’m glad she didn’t. She had her own (moralistic, vaguely Christian) teaching style, and it worked. We learned a lot. This, by the way, is what I regard as indoctrination in the benign sense. When you memorize your multiplication tables, you’re not taught the pros and cons of doing so, or of multiplication itself. You just sit there and memorize them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Indoctrination in this sense is not on par with being manipulated into mouthing/believing/alieving some ideological dogma.
My all-time favorite teacher was Mr Estilow. I wrote a tribute to him for the West Orange Chronicle, my hometown paper. He was a combat veteran of the Korean War, and basically obsessed with war and world history. He taught all the humdrum subjects in an ordinary way, but came alive when he taught history. When he found the kids in class who were motivated enough to work independently, he simply sent us on our way to the school library, and ordered us to come up with long-term projects that we would write up as papers and present, in effect, as conference presentations. So three of us did this monster presentation on the Pacific theater of World War II, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (that’s what it was called, actually). Two of us didn’t like the third kid, so we gave him what we regarded as the bullshit exercise of covering “The Battle of Alaska,” only to discover, to our chagrin, that there had in fact been fighting over the Aleutian Islands. Who fucking knew.
Mr Estilow had no qualms telling war stories in class. The moral of every story was: “I was there, and war sucks.” He told this riveting story about his participation in the Battle of Inchon-very factual and clinical. Finally, with some trepidation, we asked him what the battle was “like,” to which he matter-of-factly told us he didn’t know, since he’d collapsed from heat exhaustion on the first march and missed the whole thing, but read all about it later when he got home. I think it was the best single story I’ve ever heard anyone tell. Call it indoctrination, but the truth is, I often wish I’d learned his lessons as consistently as he’d taught them.
Take this kind of thing out of education, and you’ll kill it altogether. But they’re trying.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“only to discover, to our chagrin, that there had in fact been fighting over the Aleutian Islands”
Dashiell Hammett was stationed there during the war and was actually co-author of this report about the battle:
Click to access McGinnis-Battle-of-the-Aleutians-508.pdf
LikeLike
Thanks! I guess I’m grateful that our erstwhile colleague Brian Geltzeiler didn’t have access to this in 1980. Armed with it, he would, so to speak, have blown our piddling reports out of the water.
LikeLike
John Huston also made a documentary about the u.s. Army’s activities in the Aleutians, though it focuses more on daily military life than on combat (although it does show some combat).
According to Wikipedia: “Huston included shots showing the monotony of Army life, e.g. latrine digging and cigarette smoking, and Army authorities objected to the inclusion of these scenes. However, Huston fought for the inclusion of these scenes and eventually prevailed ….” Never pick a fight with Huston.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You should have titled this post “Gross Neutrality.”
By contrast with, y’know ….
LikeLike