Education is not "Political."

Critical Social Justice activists have used bad arguments to justify using education as a tool for political indoctrination. Let's take a look at those arguments and learn how to refute them.

One way that woke/Critical Social Justice activists were able to take over the education system and get away with it was to make the claim, phrased in various different ways, that education is and always has been utterly political. As such, the fact that activist are doing politics in the classroom is not just acceptable, but actually a good thing. That is, the move that they made was to claim that they were not politicizing education because education was always already political, and in fact has always been entirely political right to the core. This is why you will often see articles in academic journals dedicated to education that say thing like: “education is inherently political,” “education was always already political,” “teaching is a political act,” and so on and so fourth.

The American Philosopher John Searle explained their view as follows (emphasis mine):

“In its most extreme version the claim is not just that the purpose of education ought to be political in the humanities, but rather that all education always has been political and always will necessarily be political, so it might as well be beneficially political. The idea that the traditionalists, with their "liberal education," are somehow teaching some politically neutral philosophical tradition is entirely a self-deceptive masquerade. According to this view, it is absurd to accuse the challengers of politicizing the university; it already is politicized. Education is political down to the ground. From the challengers' perspective, the traditional approach tries to disguise the fact that it is essentially engaged in the political indoctrination of generations of young people so that they will continue to accept a system of hegemonic, patriarchal imperialism. The challengers think of themselves as accepting the inevitably political nature of the university, and they want to use it so that they and their students can be liberated into a genuine multicultural democracy. When they say that the purpose of the university is political, they do not see themselves as making a new proposal; they think of themselves as just facing up to the facts as they have always been.”¹

Armed with this line of thinking, Critical Social Justice activists in education set about developing a theory of teaching in which the values, goal, agenda, perspective, worldview, and ideology of Critical Social Justice/wokeness are built into the fabric of how teaching is done. On this view, since education is always political, and always has political effects, education ought to be used to help spread the “correct” (in their view, woke) political values, ideas, goals, aims, and perspectives. That is, the goal of education according to woke theorists is to teach pupils how to see the world through the lens of wokeness, and give them the tools to advance the political goals of woke ideology.

This is why “Stanley Aronowitz and Giroux’s Education Under Siege (1985), was dedicated to “Paulo Freire who is a living embodiment of the principle that underlies this work: that pedagogy should become more political and that the political should become more pedagogical.”²

This idea is deeply flawed, but it persists precisely because the woke theorists in education do what woke theorists always do: marry the truth to a lie. For this reason we must pull out the kernel of truth that they have, and divorce it from the lie that they have weaved into their argument.

The first thing we need to realize is that the woke have a very expansive definition of what constitutes “political.” In woke theory the term “political” does not just refer to things that go on in the political realm, but in fact refers to anything that has an impact on politics, social order, social hierarchies, income distribution, inequality of any kind, or who has social power. Anything that can have even the smallest impact on society or culture is thus “political.”

Further, the woke see everything in terms of “who has power,” “who gets to make decisions,” “who benefits from a particular idea,” “whose agenda is empowered,” and so on an so fourth. In the world of woke, anything that can or does create, distribute, re-enforce, maintain, uphold or transmit any principle, way of thinking, moral system, ideology, philosophy, religion, idea, thought, value, or perspective is an example of a thing that is political. Given that any and every social phenomena COULD be used to transmit a set of values, or uphold a set of morals, or maintain a particular status quo, the woke theorists conclude that everything that goes on in society is in some way political; including (and perhaps especially) education.

This is a fundamentally postmodern way of looking at the world.

Armed with this view of the world, the woke think that the goal of education is teaching students how to view the world through the lens of Critical Social Justice/wokeness. To put it bluntly, they want to use education to create left-wing political activists. To quote John Searle:

“Henry Giroux tells us the following about how we should teach “the canon”:

“How we read or define a “canonical” work may not be as important as challenging the overall function and social uses the notion of the canon has served. Within this type of discourse, the canon can be analyzed as part of a wider set of relations that connect the academic disciplines, teaching, and power to considerations defined through broader, intersecting political and cultural concerns such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. What is in question here is not merely a defense of a particular canon, but the issue of struggle and empowerment. In other words, the liberal arts should be defended in the interest of creating critical rather than “good” citizens. The notion of the liberal arts has to be reconsitituted around a knowledge-power relationship in which the question of curriculum is seen as a form of cultural and political production grounded in a radical conception of citizenship and public wisdom.”

He concludes that this transformation of our attitudes toward the tradition will link the liberal arts to “the imperatives of a critical democracy.”

Notwithstanding its opaque prose, Giroux’s message should be clear: the aim of a liberal education is to create political radicals, and the main point of reading the “canon” is to demythologize it by showing how it is used as a tool by the existing system of oppression.”³

Searle states the point perfectly. The woke theorists have reasoned that if all education is political, then it is a perfectly good move to use the education system to create political activists who will agitate for the preferred political outcomes of the woke left.

Woke education theorists believe that k-12 classroom is and ought to be the site of political struggle. In other words, they do not think that the battle of ideas ought to be confined to the public square or to universities where the best professors discuss and debate various political ideas. They believe that the k-12 classroom is and ought to be a battlefield where the political war over the mind of children ought to occur. In their view, the idea that children are in some sense naïve and innocent and should be allowed to grow up before being asked to confront political ideas is wrong. They think that children ought to be taught the woke political worldview right from the get go. There is a reason why Ibram X. Kendi wrote a book called “Anti-Racist Baby”; because even babies are not to young to be socialized into woke ideology.

This result of this view is that they believe that it is good, right, appropriate, and correct to try to get children to accept and internalize woke ideology. For this reason one criteria for successful teaching according to Critical Social Justice/wokeness is the degree to which they succeed in using the classroom to create the political change they want.

I take it to be clearly false that education is political in the way that the woke/Critical Social Justice theorists say it is. However, the reason this argument has gotten traction in spite of it falseness is that The Critical Social Justice scholars are trading on an ambiguity in the word political. There is a legitimate sense in which education is political: Education is a public good and therefore we do have to make choices about such things as what kids will be taught is school, how education should be funded, how the education system will be set up, how subjects should be taught, and which things are better left to parents to teach. This means that in the sense of “education decisions are made by elected officials which we can throw out of office if we don’t like their decisions,” education is political. However, as we have seen that is NOT what woke theorists mean when they claim education is political, because the woke theorists use an expanded definition of the term “political” which says that everything in society is always inherently political and mediated by various power dynamics. Obviously, there are two totally different senses of the word “political,” and the woke have exploited this redefinition of the word “political” in order to help their views gain traction.

Most of us, myself included, see education as the place where children are taught the skills required to make it in the larger world. Accordingly, the goal of the teacher is to teach children reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking, and civics (how our liberal democracy is supposed to function). On this view the goal of the education system is to give children all the skills they need to be competent and productive members of society, while providing them with the necessary values and thinking skills to be good citizens who can competently participate in a liberal democracy. We teach them why our democracy is set up as it is both so they can participate in it, and so they can understand the reasoning behind it so they can, (when they grow up and as they see fit) argue for changes and improvements, or argue to maintain it as it is. This is an education meant to prepare student to have the skills to be competent and well functioning members of a participatory liberal democracy.

In laying out these two visions of education we can see that there is two totally different understandings of the purpose and value of education. My view (which is the liberal view) is to teach people how to think critically about the world using reason, evidence, logic, rationality, and the give them to civic skill set to participate in society and contribute to our democratic process of determining what kind of society we will have. The woke think the purpose of education is to indoctrinate students into woke ideology, and to give students the skills to transform the society so that it aligns with political goals.

With all that on the table we can highlight some of the problems with the woke view of education.

The first objection to woke education theory comes to us (again) from John Searle who wrote this about the challenges to the liberal vision of education:

“Another fallacious move made by the challengers is to infer from the fact that the university's educational efforts invariably have political consequences that therefore the primary objective of the university, and the primary criteria for assessing its success or failure, should be political. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. Obviously, everything has political consequences, whether it's art, music, literature, sex, or gastronomy. For example, right now we could be campaigning for the presidential election instead of listening to a lecture on higher education; therefore, this lecture has unintended political consequences because it prevents us from engaging in political activities that we might otherwise be doing. In this sense everything is political. But from the fact that everything is political in this sense, it doesn't follow that our academic objectives are political, nor does it follow that the criteria for assessing our successes and failures are political. The argument, in short, does not justify the current attempts to use the classroom and the curriculum as tools of political transformation.” ⁴

This is exactly correct. It does not follow from the fact that everything might have unintended political consequences that the criteria for assessment of a thing ought to hinge primarily on it’s political consequences. Turning our universities into sites of political struggle is going to turn our engine of knowledge creation and sense making into factories of political indoctrination.

That way madness lies.

I would go further and make the point that the argument made by the woke theorists does not justify their agenda in another way. Even if I accepted that everything was political in the way they say it is, they still need to provide an argument for why specifically woke politics ought to be the politics that are taught to children. The woke theorists have accepted a postmodern understanding of truth and as such they can’t make an argument in favor of their politics. If everything is really mask for political power, self-interest, cultural biases, hidden agendas, power-seeking, and clout chasing, then any argument the woke theorists themselves provide ought to understood as a mask for political power, self-interest, cultural biases, hidden agendas, power-seeking, and clout chasing. Their argument can be turned against them.

We could, for example, argue that the Critical Social Justice minded academics write their book in the pursuit of money, write articles in the pursuit of tenure and all the benefits it provides, and seek to win teaching awards in order to accrue prestige and clout for themselves. As such we could then dismiss the Critical Social Justice literature as nothing more then a mask for a woke power grab.

A second problem that arises for woke theorists comes from Critcal Social Justice scholars having adopted postmodernism. One of the most radical Critical Theorists of education, Henry Giroux, writes this in speaking about his friend and mentor, the Marxist critical theorist Paulo Freire: “Freire invokes and constructs elements of a social criticism that shares an affinity with emancipatory strands of postmodern discourse. That is, in his refusal of a transcendent ethics, epistemological foundationalism, and political teleology, he further develops a provisional ethical and political discourse subject to the play of history, culture, and power.”⁵

Giroux highlights three things that are very important in the work of Freire:

1. No transcendent ethics

2. No epistemological foundations

3. No political teleology.

I shall deal with these in turn.

The problem with having no transcendent ethics is that if there is no transcendent standard of right and wrong Freire has no objective reason why we should accept his moral prescriptions. To put it another way, by what standard does Freire make his moral judgements, and on what grounds am I required to accept them? If his moral standards are socially constructed what is to stop from other groups from ignoring him and constructing some other standard that they like better? Without an absolute standard by which to judge moral claims all that is left is a power struggle over which standard will rise to the top of the social food chain and be enforced.

This is nihilism.

The problem with having no epistemological foundations is even larger. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge and how we know what we know. If there are no epistemological foundations then there is nothing which grounds Freire’s claims to knowledge. If Freire accepts that there are no epistemic foundations which anchor knowledge claims then we have no reason to accept Freire’s claims about education, society, truth, knowledge, democracy, or anything else. Put simply, Freire is making a number of truth claim while denying that he has any epistemic foundations on which to build such claims.

Timothy McGrew Writes: “Foundationalism is the position that all justified empirical beliefs are either basic, in something like the final sense given above, or else have supporting lines of reasons that can be traced one way or another back to beliefs that are basic. It doesn't matter that no two sane people would have a conversation like this: the important point for foundationalists is that for justified beliefs the underlying reasons are there and could be produced, under ideal conditions, if necessary.”⁶

After considering some objection he writes: “strong foundations are necessary if we are to have justified inferred beliefs.”⁷

But Freire denies that there can be any foundations at all. Freire cuts off the branch on which he sits. By denying that there are foundations which can be used to justify his beliefs he is left with his feet planted firmly in mid air. If he can’t justify his beliefs then there is no objective reason for us to accept them. If he goes the social constructivist route and constructs subjective foundations that does him no good because other groups can just ignore Freire and create their own competing socially constructed subjective foundations.

Freire’s position is self refuting, he makes claims about how he thinks the objective world really is, but then tells us there are no epistemic foundations available to justify his claims. His position refutes itself.

The problem with Freire saying there no political teleology is that Feire has his own political program that he wants us to accept, but he can’t give us any objective reason to accept it. Teleology refers to the purpose, ends, or goals. If there is no political teleology then that means there is no purpose inherent in politics, the goal of politics is whatever we make it. The question then is this: what guides Freire’s politics if there is no inherent political teleology? Given that Freire denies the existence of any transcendent ethics he can’t provide an objective moral reason for us to accept his politics, and since he has no epistemological foundations he can’t argue that his political views are objectively moral or objectively true. So if truth and morality can’t and don’t ground Freire’s politics, and if there is no political teleology, then why should we accpet Freire’s political goals as legitimate?

Freire has his own political program with its own goals and ends, and he asks that we all participate in achieving these goal and ends. He then tells us that there are no transcendant ethics, no epistemological foundations and no political teleology. Well if that’s that case then Freire can provide no objective reason for us to accept his political program, and all the only motivations for accepting his program is subjective moral convictions, naked self-interest, or the pursuit of political power.

That’s no way to run a political program.

What we see here is that all of the objections that Critical Social Justice launches against the liberal vision of education can also be turned back on the woke vision for education. The arguments that Critical Social Justice scholars use to undermine the liberal vision for education also undermine their own vision for education.

So the answer to the woke theorist who politicizes education in the way Giroux and Friere do, is to point out that all their arguments fail on their own terms. In light of the failure of woke arguments for politicized education, we have no reason to accept the postmodern claim that all education is political right to the ground.

This leaves us with one final question. Given that absolute neutrality in the sense of giving every idea and every view equal time is not possible (here are too many ideas and not enough time in a day, or in a lifetime, to give every single idea full and proper treatment) what are we to do? The answer is to accept the classic (and I would say common sense) idea that what we ought to do is give children the skills needed to think about the world and to engage the world thoughfully and carefully with an eye to truth. We want to create a system that incentivizes the search for truth and rewards those who do the best job of pursuing the truth.

In this sense we want a sort of legitimate elitism. That is, and elitism of the most talented people, doing the highest quality work, working the best they can to teach our children and young people. We do not want to accept the relativistic and nihilistic claim that all ideas are equally valid and that saying some ideas are better than others is nothing more then a mask for power. What we want to do instead is try to put together the best possible ideas that we can, and then give people the best possible tools with which to think about those ideas and develop new ideas. To (yet again) quote Searle:

“It is important that we keep emphasizing this point, because I frequently find in discussions, especially with people in politics, that you have to emphasize that elitism in this sense is not a defect of the universities, it is precisely the condition of their successful operation. We must not for one moment be bashful or ashamed of our elitism. I tell people in California, and this they can understand, that we are elitists in precisely the same sense that the San Francisco 49ers are elitist. They try to get the best players and the best coaches and get the best performance they can out of them. Analogously, ideally we are trying to get the most brilliant faculty and the most promising students and give them the highest level of education we can. In intellectual life there is no substitute for quality.”⁸

If you have given up on saying that some things are better then others, and some things are worse, if you have given up on which work has the quality and which work does not have the quality then you have given up on the whole idea of education. At that point school and universities no longer become communities for the creation of critical thinking, and instead become assembly lines for the production of standardized thought.

That’s no way to educate the next generation.

The woke argument for politicizing the classroom rests on the idea that all education is political right to it’s core, and that therefore the primary goal of education is to teach politics. As we have seen, this idea is deeply misguided, and rests on a number of bad and self-refuting arguments. The goal is to teach students how to think critically and clearly so they can become competent, thoughtful, productive members of society. Only once they have the skills necessary to think clearly about the world and competently pursue truth are students capable of freely engaging in political thought and action in a thoughtful and careful way.

The woke have it exactly backwards, truth is not political…Politics is downstream of truth.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

@Wokal_distance

1. John R. Searle, "Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education?" Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Jan., 1993, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1993) p.34

2. Gottesman, Isaac. The Critical Turn in Education (Critical Social Thought) (p. 24). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

3. John R. Searle, "The Storm Over the University," The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990

4. John R. Searle, "Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education?" Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Jan., 1993, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1993) p.38

5. Henry Giroux. “Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism.” Journal of Advanced Composition 12, no. 1 (1992): 15–26.

6. Timothy McGrew, A Defense of Strong Foundationalism, from: Louis Pojman, The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed (New York: Wadsworth, 1998)

7. Timothy McGrew, A Defense of Strong Foundationalism, from: Louis Pojman, The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed (New York: Wadsworth, 1998)

8. John Searle, “Politics and the Humanities,” Academic Questions, Fall 1999, p.48