OK: Walters Wants To Explain Woke

Oklahoma's head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question--what the heck does "woke" mean? (I'll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don't recommend clicking through). 

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I'm a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the "to wit" and remember that "restore back" is more clearly "restore." 

But he's right. The term "woke" does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, "restore American education back to its foundation" is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don't Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn't. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at "opponents of this movement." If we don't know what the movement is, we don't know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let's press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they're terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It's a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it's okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what "woke" actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well....

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don't even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he's talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he's not going to do that. He's going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that "naturally, this faction of individuals" is after schools to spread their "radical propaganda." Still no definition of woke in sight. No--wait. This next start looks promising--

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That's not helping, either. "Projection" is an odd choice--when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn't change. There's "projection" when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here ("I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world") but that's probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one "forces" projection. "Inaccurately-held" is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they're being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple "inaccurate" would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are "anti-education," because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect "education" means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of "nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means" which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

He does finally offer two specifics. 

We are going after books like “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” that are nothing more than thinly veiled porn pushed onto our students. We are going after classroom lessons telling students that people should be treated differently because of their sex and race.

So, sex stuff and race stuff. "Books like" is doing the lifting here. Gender Queer is a fine (and popular) example of a book that reasonable people can disagree about--who is it appropriate for, and when? But is And Tango Makes Three a book like Gender Queer? Is it really porn? And is someone "pushing" it onto students, or is it just sitting on a shelf in the library? 

And on the race side, Oklahoma's record is not stellar. Last year some Oklahoma districts banned books by Black authors including I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Raisin in the Sun and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Do those books tell anyone that some people should be treated differently (from whom? from what? from the way you would treat people not like them? from the way you intended to treat them before you read this book?). 

There's a thing I used to tell my older children when they were growing up--just because something makes you feel bad does not mean that the person who did it meant to hurt you. The hurt may have come inside from you, not outside from them. Your result does not prove their intention. I think of this often when I'm reading about a white person who is upset by a story about racism.

But back to our search for a woke definition.

"There is no place," says Walters, "for this sort of teaching in any part of society, much less in public schools." Is he going to tell us what sort of teaching he means, exactly? Np. But I am curious about the use of the word "public." This sort of teaching has no place in society at all, so will he be cracking down on any private schools that dare to harbor this sort of thing. Or is the autonomy of private, voucher-grabbing schools, more sacred than these values?

He names some culprits pushing in this direction. The teachers unions "attempting to consolidate more power," because in right-to-work bright red Oklahoma, that teachers union wields so very much power--that's why so many officials in the state are teachers union selected (I will bring you that list just as soon as it is delivered by unicorn courier). Also, President Biden "desperately trying to win re-election by listening to his far-left handlers." These are the people who have decided this is what should be taught in school. How the President has any say over what is taught in school is unclear. 

Instead of radical taxpayer-funded indoctrination, we need an actively anti-woke education system that is rooted in traditional values and practical subject matter.

Indoctrination into what? For what purpose? Which traditional values? What practical subject matter? Will he explain. Well, some. Hold on for the next paragraph.

In order to achieve this goal, we need to actively root out and remove any elements of indoctrination present in the school system and push for an education system that returns to a traditional model that ensures that the goal of every aspect of the school system is student success, rather than a radical political agenda.

What "traditional model"? Segregated schools? Warehousing students with special needs in some special room? 

We need more support for subjects like the science of reading, math, and other concepts that provide real, tangible educational value for the students. We need curricula that will prepare kids for the workforce, no matter which career path they want to pursue.

So, strictly vocational? But is women are going to follow a traditional path of stay-at-home mom, does that mean they don't need schooling beyond Home Ec? And if you're going to talk about college and career workforce prep--well, wasn't that what Common Corfe was going to do? Don't you already have that in your state standards? And anyway, weren't business leaders on your conspirators' list at the top of this piece-- should these future employers be trusted?

We need a value-based education system that ensures students come out of the school system as beneficial members of society.

What value will it be based on? And the idea of students who are ready to be beneficial members of society is such a grandly vague notion that you'd be hard pressed to find A) one person who disagree with it and B) any two people who agree on what it means.

Our kids shouldn’t be taught what a company, union or elected official feels like is the cheapest way to garner support at the time.

But- but- but-- how will you make students workforce ready if you're ignoring all these people? Is there some way to sort out their insincere ignorable utterances from their useful career education guidance?

Yet unfortunately, In pursuit of desperately trying to win the approval of and clout from the social media “smart set”, woke corporations and officials like Biden have decided to use our education system to score woke political points. It is foolish, superficial, anti-student, and it is sacrificing our children’s future on the altar of public approval. Students deserve better than radical, taxpayer-funded brainwashing, and so does America.

Clout from the social media smart set, charges the guy who has posted videos from his car regularly as a way of raising his profile and political fortunes. All of this sacrifices our students "on the altar of public approval," but if this isn't what most of the public really wants, how can one get public approval for espousing it. This seems to be a feature of wokitude--it is both powerfully omnipresent in every corner of life, and also a minority opinion of a small handful of people. 

We've arrived at the end, and there is no actual definition of woke in sight. Just a word salad of key phrases, trigger words, and empty constructions that sound cool but don't actually say anything.

If Walters somehow ended up reading this, he'd likely dismiss me as a bad faith social media clout-seeker. But I've at least said what I meant. I accept that a certain percentage of anti-woke crowd can't define exactly what it is that troubles them, and another percentage probably could, but if they said it out loud--well, they know on some level that that would be disturbing. And a certain percentage of the anti-woke crowd is deliberately vague, because that keeps the anti-woke tent big and inclusive. 

But Walters--well, I can't quite figure out his deal. He projects as a right-wing Christian nationalist dudebro, but he's an educated man. He taught, and did, from what I hear and read, a pretty good job. So how did he come to this place, so recklessly anti-teacher, anti-public school, anti-government

The headline for the piece says "If we can't define woke, we can't win the battle for our schools." And then he fails to define woke. I don't know if he can't, or he just doesn't want to. I don't know how far he wants to ride this anti-woke train, nor is it clear how far this cloudlike train on its vaporous tracks will actually run.

But the failure to define is largely a feature. Like the broad definition of critical race theory and the vaguely worded laws passed to stop divisive concepts, it empowers conservative folks to take aim at all the things that make them uncomfortable--the race stuff, the gender and sex stuff. And by making about The Children, it makes their desire to lock the country into a Golden Past that never was a noble undertaking and not something more selfish.

I'd still like to see a clear definition of woke, a clearer explanation of what exactly the panic is about. Hell, I'd love to see an actual honest conversation about it. But I don't know if either will ever happen. They certainly aren't happening in this piece.