NY Times OpEd Article on New Ariz Ethnic Studies Law

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Pat
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NY Times OpEd Article on New Ariz Ethnic Studies Law

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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
By STANLEY FISH

The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash between two bad paradigms.

The first paradigm is embedded in and configures the bill’s targeted program, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic curriculum” and “a pedagogy based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny have been internalized by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical effort to liberate yourself from them.

That effort is education, properly reconceived not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”


To say that this view of education is political is to understate the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherents as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude so that they can join the effort to topple it. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.”

If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra in the world of educational theory.)

It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction.

This is one case, however, where the remedy is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandates the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial tone, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred.

This would be a great surprise to those communitarian theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence.

But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious purposes must be banished from public education.

The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize history and social studies.”

Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

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