Rick Hess makes a point about civics education, specifically, how the real world lessons of civics are teaching an entire generation the wrong lessons.
There’s a lot of handwringing about what the hell America’s young people are thinking. They’re deeply anxious about the future. They’re shockingly comfortable saying that it’s okay to use violence to stifle speech. They’re skeptical of democracy. They exhibit a disturbing affinity for socialism.
This isn’t good. And while it can be easy to slip into grumbling—“Damn kids, get off my lawn!”—every generation goes through this handwringing. As we turn into our parents, it’s easy to forget how worrisome our parents found us.
That doesn’t mean the concerns are misplaced, though. I think they do go beyond the inevitable “kids today” grumbling.
We might also throw in the mental health issues and general air of dread. We're going to wrangle over some details (I still haven't located that school where the teachers are all teaching that America is awful), but I have to agree with his larger thesis:
A reasonable observer could conclude that America’s leaders are striving to deliver a lesson in dysfunctional democracy, irresponsible stewardship, corrupt capitalism, and disdain for the rule of law.
Add fear and panic to that list. You can list all the examples yourself, and while Hess may reach a little too Both Sides this, again, he's fundamentally on point. If you are a young American, it's been a while since you've seen the government actually work, or even seen more than a handful of politicians attempt to act out of principle and patriotism rather than opportunism and tribalism. We haven't seen government perform its basic functions (pass a real budget on time lately?) and we haven't seen it respond effectively to a crisis.
Covid is only the most recent example-- I'm not talking about the flatfooted response to it in real time which is in many ways understandable, but the immediate work of turning it to political advantage, an impulse so overwhelming that Donald Trump doesn't dare brag about his one legitimate accomplishment in getting a vaccine out quickly and helping life get back to slight-more-normal.
We can look back at the housing collapse of 2008 and the recession it spawned, or cast back to the Enron scandal (only 2001, and lots of folks have already forgotten). In so any cases, institutions failed, and our civic institutions focused on getting use from the damage rather than mitigating it.
We are drowning in debt and dysfunction, a malignant late-stage capitalism dominated by make-nothing rentiers, watching government harnessed to nothing more profound than one man's thirst for fealty and vengeance. I have to nod when Hess writes,
Honestly, if I were a teen or a twentysomething watching this unfold, I might have trouble mustering much faith in our institutions or values, too. I’d certainly be skeptical of educators who yammer about foundational principles when our leaders evince such blatant disrespect for those values in practice. Indeed, I might regard faith in democratic norms or free markets as a sucker’s game, best left to those ill-informed or naïve enough to ignore the evidence they can see with their own eyes.
This dovetails with another piece from the free market axis of reformerland. Robert Pondiscio returns to the point that teaching should embody humility and neutrality, his familiar point that teachers are not supposed to enter the classroom as "change agents" or "architects of democracy."
Public education is, however, an essential government service. It exists not to change society but to sustain it—to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends. That mission requires restraint, not evangelism; humility, not heroism.
I actually agree with Pondiscio; teachers should enter the classroom as agents of the community, not crusaders for their own ideology.
Except...
In the world where under-thirty folks have grown up, as described by Hess, where would they have identified the "shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms" on which the country depends. When the President has spent a decade trashing civic and legal norms, when a vocal part of the body politic is hollering to undo the civil rights movement. If you are of Certain Ages, as Hess, Pondiscio and I are, it may be easy to remember the ideals and norms central to this country on its best days. If you are under thirty, I'm not sure those things are obvious. If MAGA is correct in their general set of beliefs, then there are a bunch of old norms to be thrown out; if they are wrong, what is there for teachers except to be self-directed rebellious "architects of democracy." (You can substitute your favorite far-Left bete noir if you like; I just don't think that voice is very loud right now).
I'm trying to dance around a lot of rabbit holes here, but if you are someone who has been holding the wrong end of America's diversity shtick for years, none of this is new. The Youngs are not the first to deal with the idea that the government might not be trustworthy and the dominant culture might not be hospitable, even as there is constant battling over what the "dominant culture" really is. Is it the loudest one? Is it the culture that a well-connected ideologically-driven government-linked organization insists is the "true" one? The one that gets most media coverage, or the one that saturates the interwebs? Is it the locally dominant culture that a teacher should represent?
In short (ish), I think teachers should serve the community and not their own personal agenda (up to a point but not, say, requiring LGBTQ persons to pretend they are straight). But that's a pretty complicated tangle of stuff to sort out.
But I have a thought. I think there's something the culture is promoting that may be even worse than messed up civics. I may have a professional bias here, between years of teaching English and writing, but we have a big problem with language.
We are drowning in an absolute ocean of bullshit and lies, so much so that we implicitly understand that there are times when words simply don't mean what they say, or even anything at all. My siblings and I have to explain to our 91 year old mother that all the things that pop up on her computer screen are simply lies and can be ignored (thank God her phone is now out of circulation and she no longer gets calls from lying marketeers). I am daily amazed at how we have accepted the idea that to simply function and get through the day, one must assume that a huge percentage of the language one encounters is deliberately dishonest.
Mike Johnson can offer some absurd statement and he knows he's lying and all of us from all the tribes know that he's lying and he knows we know, but this is language used as a sort of jousting match that doesn't resemble the actual purpose of language. AI uses language as a sort of constructed tool that is in no way related to the idea of one intellect trying to communicate with another. Dear Leader long ago embraced the notion that language is a stick you use to poke other people, and that said poking can be done more effectively if one lets go of the antique notion that your words should be connected however loosely to reality.
At the same time, the playing field is loaded with people whose whole professional career is about selling a particular idea or accomplishing advocacy goals, regardless of what they have to say or do to get the job done. Or consider the feckless Democrats, who too often end up paralyzed because are trying to craft language that will push the voters in the right direction, instead of trying to communicate what they actually believe.
Language is our most basic tool for bridging the gap between humans, yet we increasingly accept that it is also useful to manipulate others or fend them off. Is it any wonder that the Youngs are struggling with feelings of isolation?
We can say, correctly, that this is not new, that language has always been used at times to manipulate and manhandle, but I'll argue that for whatever reason (politics? internet explosion? modern media?) it is now way way worse than ever, and dangerously so.
So yes-- we would be better off as a country if people worried more about the lessons they are teaching the Youngs when it comes to civics, but I say the same for language.
We won't, as a culture. do it, because too many people find the abuse of language too useful, and because it would be hard to win their favorite arguments if they argued honestly, with words that actually say what they mean. That in turns brings on a lot of conjecture about what someone is up to and why, with that conjecture also wrapped in layers of dishonest baloney. So instead of talking about what we're really talking about, we get trapped in endless arm wrestling over how to "frame" the discussion aka redefine the language so that it means what we want it to mean.
So if you're in a classroom, make the use of accurate and honest language a daily, explicit value. Value language as a tool for communicating and understanding rather than manipulating and attack. Cool thing about this is that it requires zero ideological baggage, but if we want to argue about the ideological baggage we have, the deal is to discuss it with honest and accurate language. There are so many days when I look at what is going on in the country and think we could do some much better if we would just talk about what we're actually talking about instead of trying to leverage bullshit as a sort of force against opponents.
We can't have a real discussion about or display of civics without accurate and honest use of language. But with honest and accurate language, there's not much we couldn't talk about; even if we couldn't settle it, we would at least emerge with a better understanding of what's going on.
It's a big dream, like dreaming that we'll have a culture that values civics and culture and considers what effect adult misbehavior is having on the children. But it's a dream worth having. And if all that seems too complicated, I'll leave you with a simple principle that I try to use with my own children. It's not complicated, but when I'm making my choices about what to do and how to do it, I boil it down to a simple question--
What do I want my children to see me doing?
If only we could get a few more people to try that out.
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