Author: New focus needed in education on what unites us

As a first-generation college graduate, I was not suspicious of higher education or smug about becoming a member of an elite cabal. Like most students at my public university, I both worked and went to school and never felt estranged from my blue-collar roots or relatives.

Yet, this year I blocked cousins from Facebook, tired of tirades about lying journalists, snowflake protesters and President Obama’s failings. I’ve given up trying to prove the Irish were not brought to America as slaves, that photos of the Obama family in “Che” Guevara T-shirts were Photoshopped and that congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never said there was no difference between trillions and billions of dollars except three meaningless zeroes.

William Egginton examines the tensions dividing families and the country in his new book, “The Splintering of the American Mind.”

I will interview Egginton on Saturday as part of the AJC Decatur Book Festival at 5:30 p.m. at the Marriott Conference Center B. Please come if this topic interests you or check out the more than 300 authors appearing at the Labor Day weekend festival. All events at the festival, the largest independent book festival in the country, are free.

Egginton and I talked on the phone last week about his book, which confronts the degradation of civil discourse, the growing inequality in education and the rise of identity politics on campus. His contention: To combat this fragmentation and tribalism, we have to seek common ground, to rally around, if not the flag, then the American tenets of family, faith, community and national obligation. This revitalized national community must incorporate the range of individual, political, cultural, ethnic and sexual perspectives that make up our society today.

”We need to understand that the rage isn’t going to dissipate if community isn’t rebuilt. We need a new set of stories about what Americans have in common, about our common past and the great things we have done together,” he said. That doesn’t mean whitewashing the corruption, oppression and discrimination in

our history, but elevating edifying stories where communities overcame self-interest and hands were extended in kindness rather than raised in fury.

Despite being a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Egginton doesn’t defend the ivory towers, dissecting their contribution to what he describes as “a mostly white, sometimes rural, often male America that simmers in despair and resentment at the privilege of the university-educated, coastal elites who seem ready to give every group a leg up except them.”

He agrees higher education faced a moral imperative to address gender- and race-based inequalities but points out an unintended consequence, a debilitating fragility that demands “safe spaces” from dissenting opinion, dis-invites controversial speakers and imposes trigger warnings on content students might find objectionable. As an example, Egginton cites the 469 students and faculty who signed a letter of protest when University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan quoted “of all people, the University’s founder, Thomas Jefferson,” forcing Sullivan to issue a proviso that “quoting Jefferson (or any historical figure) does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time.”

The problem, maintains Egginton, is that this “hypersensitivity on campus bleeds directly into the kind of politics that has the Democratic Party focused on which bathrooms can be used by transgender people while Middle America’s jobs get shipped overseas, thus opening the door for a populist demagogue to come to power.”

Egginton sees education as critical, believing schools must reorient to their original purpose of producing engaged citizens. He recommends a return to high-quality liberal arts education in which students are not taught what to think but how to think.

He recognizes schools cannot mend America alone, and that investments have to be made in broken communities. “Some students are going back home to real war zones and investments have to be made in the community,” Egginton said. “It doesn’t fall only on schools, but it can’t (be) done without them.”