A few days ago my sister brought her homework to me asking for help. She’s in fourth grade, and in Kentucky that means you learn about state history and government. The question she was having problems with had little to do with Kentucky state government (which is what the work sheet was on). Instead, it was a piece of political propaganda:
”Why is it important for the National government to be stronger than any state government?”
Now, as public school propaganda this is pretty mild (I’m about ready to graduate from a public high school after twelve years of public schooling, so I’ve seen much worse), but it’s representative of an ill near ubiquitous in public schooling – the closure of lines of dissent. Note the other possible ways the question could have been worded, “Why do you think the National government is stronger than the state governments?” “Do you think it is important for National government to be stronger than state governments?”
And so on. However, the worksheet writer (consciously or unconsciously, taking his or her views as a given) did not open up the question, instead you were left to rationalize someone else’s political views. Not a good idea with fourth graders, most of whom still believe everything they’re told in school. This kind of teaching automatically suggests that larger governments should be in place to eliminate pesky things like sovereignty. Take a minute to think about this. Conservatives and Libertarians alike complain about the oft bizarre world of multiculturalist, NEA controlled public schools, but this kind of teaching is more, we’ll say, subtle than a few of the more egregious incidents we’ve heard of and it’s potentially more dangerous.
When students come out of schools with few critical thinking skills and plenty of subtle propaganda pieces suggesting that the way things are now is not only preferable, but natural, hopes of dissent fall. Remember the mantra: “Everyone’s idea is just as good as anyone else’s.” Add to that saying an Orwellian twist, “But ours are better than others.” This is all part of the politics of group.
Hitler’s Nationalist politics of group were to use the schools to create his perfect soldiers and Aryans interested in pushing forward the German people. “I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is to ruin my young men.” Stalin would have concurred too, schools in the Soviet Union were geared towards this sort of group-identity too (a cautionary tale to left wing scientists – Stalin thought evolution was anti-Communist and sought to ban its teaching). This same aversion to intellectual training and individualism is found in today’s public schools.
The ills are not just in the subjects that are most obviously easy to propagandize like English and History, but go even into the math curricula. One aspect of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) is a fifth grade mathematics portfolio. Thanks to arcane grading procedures and the fact that the results can influence teacher salaries, a large amount of class time is spent on these. If it encouraged the teachers to go above and beyond the normal fifth grade math curriculum it would be excusable; however, the results are a lessening of actual time spent on learning math. In my fifth grade class, time where we should have been mastering fractions and division was spent with class math projects, learning how we would be graded, and learning our little golden rule: “The answer doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you write about it.” In the upside-down world of public schools objective mathematics has become secondary to subjective explanation. Imagine the engineer who didn’t get the answer right but wrote it up prettily. This causes a misconception about how math works with these students that even lasts until high school. When having the open response section of the AP Calculus AB test explained to her one student I know asked if getting the correct answer mattered. Math education is in this way taken away from concepts and brought into a subjective manner more easily influenced by group policy.
Public school has given me a valuable true-life metaphor for the dangers of group-identity. One feature of public schooling is an aversion to meritocracy: children from special-ed to gifted are all in the same classes (at least in Elementary schools) and are also instructed on group projects regularly. Now, I’ve heard the rationale behind this from teachers (who are usually mocking it). It is this, “Grouping children of all sorts of backgrounds and abilities will lead children to accept each others’ differences and strengths thus learning to work as a unit.”
Now, group work is necessary in schooling to develop the social skills that will be useful in the workplace, but anyone who honestly believed that rationale was being foolish. Inevitably, as in real life, one person ends up controlling and guiding (and usually doing all the work for) the entire group – mostly because children (and adults) are lazy. Group identity is the path to tyranny. Those who subscribe to a group-identity sign over their wills and consciences to the guiding lights of their chosen “identity.” Deprived of their individuality, they naturally allow someone to rule over them. Hemmingway, in his classic work on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, said this:
“I believe, after experience and observation, that those people who identify themselves with animals, that is, the almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts, are capable of greater cruelty to human beings than those who do not identify themselves readily with animals.”
Besides the obvious truth of this statement to anyone who’s familiar with the insanities of PETA and the Animal Liberation Front, this also demonstrates the dangers of group identity. People who choose to identify themselves with groups will, of course, have fewer scruples against committing cruelties to others, especially members of other groups.
The greatest threat to them is to proclaim yourself an individual. Multiculturalism might try to align you into a group, and conservative nationalism may try to bring you into a different kind of group consciousness. However, you cannot choose the lesser of two evils in this case. As the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard warned us, being an individual is the hardest thing in the world, but there is no other choice.
March 17, 2003
