Toward an Activist Curriculum
Andrea Batista Schlesinger
The Death of Why? The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy by Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Berrett-Koehler (2009)
Awakened just in time to watch the 2008 presidential debates, a modern-day Rip Van Winkle might have been forgiven for thinking he had seen some sort of parodyrather than an election in motion, SNL rather than USA. Since they were nothing more than a sequence of scripted questions and equally scripted non-answers, the debates added little to what we brought with us to voting booths later that fall. But however little information we gained, many of us felt more firmly convinced of our previous choices as a result of having watched. We heard what we expected to hear based on what we thought we knew, and because what we heard conformed to our expectations, we took it as evidence that our prior views were correct. Though we may not intend to, we pseudo-think in this circular way all the time because we have, or think we have, too little time to thoroughly consider our positions.
But isn’t public education supposed to train us to avoid this kind of thinking and equip our children with the skills to stop this cycle? Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the author of The Death of Why? The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy is not convinced. In fact, Schlesinger seriously doubts that schools teach students how to question what they find in the world, and she doubts that the meal the media has made of public discourse offers any opportunity for developing such critical faculties outside the classroom. In her view, we have become an answer-centered community rather than a question-centered one in all respects, from what we value in education, to what we read and watch online, to what we expect of our political leaders. Schlesinger has spent most of her life making change happen on a local scale, and her first book reads more like a handbook for training progressive activists than just another lament for the demise of American intellectual culture.
1.
In a moment not so different from our own, John Dewey claimed that the role of education in a democracy was to “give individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.” Schlesinger follows Dewey in claiming this as the main objective of public education and defines Dewey’s “habits of mind” as the asking of “thoughtful questions” of those in power or those who would attain power. As she has in her work with the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI), she aims in The Death of Why? to offer opposition to the capitalist hegemony she sees as governing society by giving voice to the concerns of those most harmed by capitalist processes. Though she does see direct consequences—in the late 2008 collapse of the financial system in particular—Schlesinger seems most concerned with the indirect harms such processes perpetrate through 1) media and 2) public education.
Before turning to public education, the side of the equation of harm to which Schlesinger devotes most of her attention and through which, exclusively, she sees avenues for opposition, a quick review of her account of Internet thinking is in order. Picking up from Nick Carr’s 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Schlesinger argues that though we may be searching more and more and thus may seem to be asking more and more questions, our use of Google and other search engines actually ingrains in us and in our children new habits of mind detrimental to the asking of questions altogether. She describes watching classroom after classroom full of students clicking away, engaging information horizontally rather than vertically. Her complaint is not that today’s students lack curiosity, it’s that in the breadth of their engagement, they never reach deeply enough into a given article or blog post to form a genuine understanding of what information it presents. In the end, she concludes, young people navigate from place to place on the Internet, from search to search, questioning and absorbing nothing, until they find something with which they already have a demonstrable affinity. In most cases, that something has little to do with making the world, or our own country, a better or more equitable place.
She likens the grazing the young people do online to the voluntary partisanship of their parents’ television-viewing habits. In an insightful turn, Schlesinger criticizes viewers for seeking and supporting entertainment as news in the first place rather than demonizing Fox News and other cable outlets for promoting a given political agenda while claiming to report “news.”
Citing various surveys by interested and disinterested think tanks, she claims that a growing majority of Americans are choosing to listen only to voices from which they know exactly what they will hear, and within that set, only to voices with which they already agree. Not only that, but she finds many are also beginning to locate—or actively relocate—themselves, physically, within communities of others who share their views.
To combat these practices, Schlesinger requires her own students at the DMI Summer Institute to read and discuss two daily newspapers each morning. She argues that doing so helps students understand not only “what is happening in the world” but also to start to ask questions about “the role of the news [establishment] in interpreting and shaping [world] events.” In her discussion of her work at DMI and throughout her discussion of contemporary media, Schlesinger assigns great importance to newspapers. While her preference for the newspaper method of learning about the world might owe more to nostalgia or habit than to any real benefits derived, the point she makes in preferring newspapers bears repeating. When she reads her newspaper and when her students read theirs, she claims, each is confronted with an object that must be navigated physically. It’s not a coincidence that Schlesinger opens these summer reading sessions by teaching her students how to fold the newspaper for easiest subway reading. Managing the newspaper’s physical form moves it from “out there” to “in here,” from the ignorable noise of the outside world to the closer sphere of that which much be considered.
2.
Formed in 1999 in Hampton, Virginia, a mid-size city near the Chesapeake Bay, the Hampton Youth Commission provides a means for high school-age students to influence decisions taken by the city as a whole and to direct town funds to support student projects. Comprised of twenty-four student members and an adult director, Cindy Carlson, the Youth Commission works with the Hampton City Council on issues that affect young people such as plans for a new vocational high school and teen center, and organizes forums where students question candidates for local office. Though it is not a school-based program, Schlesinger offers the Hampton Youth Commission as a model for the types of school experience she believes would better prepare today’s students for full participation in the processes of their democracy. She argues that, in addition to providing hands-on experience, the commission gives students, especially underprivileged ones, the confidence they will need to seek change in the world they’ll soon inherit.
Schlesinger contrasts the productive experiences students gain through involvement with the Youth Commission and similar projects—including the work done in schools by New Jersey’s Center for Civic Responsibility, for example—with statistics from recent nationwide surveys of civics knowledge. In one 2006 survey, only 28 percent of eighth grader’s could explain the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence, while in another, just fourteen percent affirmed that criminal defendants have the right to legal counsel. As Schlesinger explains, while these results are terrifying enough in what they show about what our children don’t know, they are even more terrifying in that they are trending downward at the same time that most national politicians claim education as a top priority. This latter point she reads as one result of the privatizing of schools and school functions carried out under the aegis of the stricter accountability standards of No Child Left Behind. While she rightly applauds the investments made through No Child Left Behind, she offers nothing but criticism for the testing regimes and the unprecedented degree of private sector influence the act has produced.
Schlesinger’s anger and criticisms on these two fronts join in her account of the rise of “financial literacy education.” Under the cover of ensuring that students leave high school with basic skills for managing their own finances, she explains, America’s largest financial institutions, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch, to name three, have invaded high school classrooms across the country giving lessons about savings accounts, securities, and other investment tools that explicitly promote their own products. Beyond voicing the obvious concern that time spent discussing theoretical investments with interested advisors is not time spent preparing critical thinking skills, Schlesinger argues that this kind of preparation measurably harms the students it means to prepare because it feeds their already primed appetites for quick answers to problems. In her view, the lesson these sessions teach is nothing more than “To buy more things, you need more money! Choose a JPMorgan Chase CD—don’t worry what CD means, or how JPMorgan Chase makes money using your money for their own purposes.” She argues that these programs simply install consumerist values rather than engaging students in conversations about the relative value of different forms of economic organization. The fact that the students she observed swallow the financial industry’s lessons unquestioningly only heightens the contrast between the question-centered classroom Schlesinger demands and the answer-dominated ones we’ve created.
While she agrees that the Internet allows today’s students more opportunities to connect with one another to resist this sort of indoctrination than ever before, Schlesinger views the current generation’s embrace of networked social life with skepticism. Comparing web activism with the in-person variety, she says:
Much has been said and written of late about the new ways that young people are expressing their commitment to changing the world: they are using the Internet, organizing their friends through online social networks, raising money for causes through Facebook. However, speaking as someone who started as a student school board member and has advised two candidates for mayor of New York, I know there is no substitute for involvement in politics at the local level. That is where we truly learn how to ask questions of those in power, develop the habits of mind of engaged citizens, and assume the posture of agents who have the power to make a difference—because we already have.
Her claims are certainly accurate. There is no substitute for experience, and in the convoluted world of policy and appropriations, even at the local level, past success is all but a requirement for future success. However much she doubts that the Internet will be the place where tomorrow’s progressive activists cut their teeth, it seems equally unlikely that city council chambers will be the places they learn to ask questions about the society they inhabit. Before they step out politically, students should learn to think out, as it were, in their own minds. They need to ask “why?” as they learn, not just when they are directed to by teacher-activists interested in their mobilization.
3.
To say that I share Schlesinger’s dissatisfaction with the shallowness of political discourse, on the one hand, and the overwhelming emphasis on test-based pedagogy, on the other, would be a vast understatement. Indeed, to say we should all be terrified of the current trajectories in both these realms and what they might mean for the next generation’s American democracy probably doesn’t overstate the case by much.
Given that more and more of us tend to value quick answers over long inquiry, the intervention that Schlesinger attempts is more than welcome. However, while she claims to offer both an assessment of and solution to this decline in the asking of “why?” at its source, she focuses most of her efforts on creating schools that will serve as seedbeds for activism rather than as places where inquiry-filled lives or learning might begin. She argues for schools as agents for encouraging direct political engagement among middle and high school students rather than advocating for teaching methods that foster broad consideration
of ideas.
While there may be merit to encouraging students to involve themselves in movements for social change, Schlesinger pushes too hard. The proto-progressives and veteran teacher-activists she celebrates in Hampton might have found success in steering plans for a new vocational high school, but she offers no evidence that these students have learned any lesson but ones about the mechanics of local government and the collective power of students in such an arena. These are valuable lessons, but they do not promote the asking of questions as questions Schlesinger seems to value, and they do not assure the future of American democracy. Schlesinger is so focused on making change now that she confuses subject matter with method.
In his discussion of the proper subjects for school instruction, Dewey warns that, regardless of the subject, there is a fundamental difference in what that subject means to the educator and to the student. Rather than teaching “subject matter in itself,” Dewey argues, the better educator will teach a given subject matter’s “interaction with [her] pupil’s present needs and capacities.”
In a way, Dewey seems to call for exactly what Schlesinger calls for. What could be more relevant to the Hampton students’ needs and capacities than the construction of a new vocational high school? But however much Dewey wants pedagogy to depart from rote instruction and insularity, he stops short of calling for direct political engagement, and for good reason. The real subject matter in Schlesinger’s Hampton example is not a vocational high school and it’s not even social change or progressive politics. Rather, it’s local government in operation, the work of professionals who have been trained for, or at least elected to, their positions and who are burdened with maintaining the interests and fulfilling the needs of a population much larger than those who roam the halls of Hampton’s high schools.
Hampton’s teacher-activists, and Schlesinger herself, are trained political actors. They are experts in the subject matter of government in operation. Their senses of duty to the underserved should be admired, but their call for student participation in local government misses the mark. In calling for such participation as the ideal form of education under democracy, they confuse something that affects their students’ lives with something that pertains to their “needs and capacities,” in Dewey’s terms. Not even Schlesinger’s students at the Drum Major Institute, college students who have chosen to spend part of their summers learning to be better and more progressive citizens, qualify as experts in the subject of government in operation. Like the Hampton students—and, I would argue, like Schlesinger when she sat on the New York City school board—they don’t know enough, or care to know enough, about the broader context of the policies they are encouraged to support or that they choose to support of their own volition. They are not experts; they are learners. They should be encouraged, as Schlesinger encourages students in her DMI summer sessions, to observe actively, but they should not be tasked with doing the work of experts.
To the degree that Schlesinger calls for more critical thinking on the part of all citizens as they interact with information they find on the internet, more criticism of private corporate influence on education, and more of actual debate in the media circus that serves as our politics, she succeeds and should be heeded. To the degree that she claims to provide a template for improving our system of education, and thereby, a template for returning “why?” to the center of public discourse, she will need to supplement her work here with less of the real world and more of the classroom.
There’s no doubt that Schlesinger has and will continue to change our democracy for the better. And so will her students, but not because she teaches them activism. Rather, provided that she teaches with the same passion that comes through this book, her students will surely engage whatever they find in their studies and their lives because they learned with a model learner, with someone who values their ideas as the beginnings of critical thinking rather than as kindling that might flame into the fire of
progressive politics.
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