Why Pluralism In The Classroom Matters

There's a theory out there that allowing families to sort themselves into separate schools based on shared values and ideologies would be a good thing. It's a bad idea, a dangerous idea, and we are exposed to the evidence all too often.

It's not the polarization of American politics-- it's the surge of a particular idea of how to deal with it.

While we like to talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were some sort of fully unified body, they disagreed on many issues (including whether or not we should be a single country or not), and much of the shape of our Constitution and early history comes from those opponents figuring out how to launch a country that included all of them.

Abraham Lincoln famously included many of his political enemies in his own administration, forcing them to work together.

These days, a prevailing idea in politics is that the way to deal with people who oppose you is to silence them by whatever means at hand. Don't like the election results? Storm the capital and force the government to erase the vote. Don't like the idea of LGBTQ persons? Simply erase all references to them. Gerrymander districts so that your opponents' votes don't matter. When people say things you don't like, bully and threaten them into shutting up. 

Right now we have a President who fully believes in making his opponents shut up and disappear, who has regularly called for violence against people who bug him. We're certainly not the only culture to suffer from this mindset, that it's okay to try to brutalize Those People into silence, and Trump's list of strongmen he admires is a quick guide to other leaders who subscribe to the same notion.

Combine the ideas that 1) you deal with people who disagree with you by silencing them and 2) God wants you to have a gun; the result is predictable political violence.

So the idea the world and this country would be better places if we gave young humans fewer chances to practice co-existing with other human with whom they disagree.

I recognize there are a host of intertwined issues here, including outrage machinery, amoral leaders, feckless politicos, a media environment that is fifty years behind the curve, and an overabundance of fear and hatred. I also recognize it gets complicated to talk about because not all sides carry equal weight of responsibility. And lord knows that we need to work on that whole gun thing.

But damn-- it couldn't hurt to operate schools and classrooms on the premise that there are people around that you dislike and disagree with but you still have to find ways to coexist with them because vanishing or silencing them is not a real option. It can be a tough sell, because many students are coming out of homes where the message of silencing those with whom you disagree is sold hard. And what is the anti-DEI movement except a push to silence the voices of people who disagree. 

But if schools don't do it, where else can young humans hope to pick up the message that while you may believe that certain people are really really wrong and you may not like them or approve of them, you still need to coexist with them somehow.