Only way to change toxic politics is to teach alternatives in schools
If you pretend that your own position is the gospel truth that every right-minded person must follow, you’re no longer an educator; you’re a propagandist.
Most of the people who read this newspaper dislike Donald Trump. A smaller number of readers like him. In other words, we disagree.
That’s exactly as it should be, in a democracy. But we seem to have lost the ability to communicate across our differences, which is something that our public schools are supposed to teach. Alas, they’ve fallen down on the job.
Amid all of the talk about getting kids “college and career-ready,” we have forgotten that schools are also supposed to prepare them for democratic citizenship. So, millions of us don’t have the knowledge or skills that we need to govern ourselves.
In a 2016 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, more than twothirds of respondents could not name all three branches of government. Another poll showed that nearly half of Americans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
Shortly after that we elected as president Donald Trump, who has openly flouted long-standing democratic norms. He has threatened reporters and judges who criticize him. And he has ridiculed opponents of every stripe as “morons” or “dummies,” echoing the snarky tone of the reality-television world where Trump’s public persona was born.
But we can’t blame our civic ills solely on Trump. Long before he came to the fore, cable television networks created a set of echo chambers that cater to our group prejudices and predilections. So did social media, which lets us flame at each other with reckless impunity.
Meanwhile, our real-life communities have become as politically separate as our media lives are. In 1976, 27 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties” that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percent or more. By 2008, 48 percent of us lived in such communities.
And the more educated you are, the less likely you are to discuss politics with someone from a different ideological camp. It should be the opposite, of course. But colleges and universities create their own bubbles, isolating us still further from each other.
So the burden really does lie with primary and secondary schools, which are the only educational institutions that every American has to attend. They must teach students a more reasonable, fair and humane form of politics than kids encounter on TV or the Internet. In that spirit, I offer five simple rules: 1 Address controversial questions: Some teachers have been reluctant to lead class discussions of Trump’s immigration orders or state referenda on same-sex marriage, out of fear that immigrant or gay students might be offended. But these kids already know that their rights are at risk. We won’t do them any favors by pretending otherwise. 2 Avoid questions that are not truly controversial: When the best-informed people agree on a subject, we shouldn’t debate it. So there’s no reason to discuss whether humans share an ancestry with other mammals, for example, or whether our behavior has warmed the Earth. What to do about man-made climate change is a subject of controversy, by contrast, and of course we should debate it. 3 Advocate for the devil, if necessary: Given the political polarization of our communities — and the way that
kids echo their parents — a teacher might find herself in a classroom where only one side of an important issue is represented. It’s incumbent upon her to take the other side, so our students see that not every good or reasonable person agrees with them. 4 Don’t impose your own views: Teachers are political beings, just like the rest of us. It’s OK for them to voice an opinion in school, but only so long as students understand that it is an opinion — and that the kids don’t have to share it. If you pretend that your own position is the gospel truth, which every right-minded person must follow, you’re no longer an educator; you’re a propagandist. 5 Maintain strict rules of mutual respect: We shouldn’t allow our kids to imitate the nasty invective that so many politicians and pundits have exhibited, from President Trump on down. Students need to learn basic principles of decorum, which oblige us to listen to other points of view without mocking or denigrating them.
To be sure, these rules are easier to proclaim than to follow. They require skilled and open-minded teachers, who are willing to let the class diverge from their own deeply held positions. And they require time, which is in short supply in our era of high-stakes testing. If your job is to prepare students for multiple-choice exams, you might not be inclined to debate questions that have many correct answers.
But what real choice do we have? The only way to change our toxic politics is to teach a better kind of politics in school. That’s a test for our entire democracy, not just for our kids. And the stakes could not be higher.