What To Do About Woke Education?

Proposed solutions from an international educator and recovered Marxist

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

By Dan Clemens

Assuming that the problems of Woke Ed are at least somewhat clear, let’s consider a philosophical solution, in trying to play to my own strengths in the contribution I can make. I sense that despite a student centered or “SC” ideological stranglehold on pedagogy, there are many great teachers who are great in spite of, not because of, anything they learned in ed school viz. SC ed. And yet TC [teacher centeredness] is alive and well but only in classroom teaching practice. It isn’t taught or read or discussed. So what I am trying to do is fairly modest: rehabilitate TC in its theoretical form, to have real heterodoxy, a real contest of ideas in a free and open marketplace of ideas; rather than theoretical domination in an SC monopoly that, I think, all good teachers know to be flawed, and who practice TC in secret… but having ceded the pedagogical territory completely.  So are we losing the war of ideas in ed, or are we not even fighting?  This is partly why we are sometimes at a loss to articulate a positive vision for real education; we know what we’re against but we sometimes struggle to say what kind of education we are for.

Note: even though this heuristic doesn’t capture my meaning it may be useful in reading the TC vs. SC shorthand: teacher-centered “TC” is more Traditional/Classic while student-centered “SC” is more SocialistiC.

We can loosen the grip of the SC monoculture in ed, against the (un)holy trinity of Rousseau, Dewey, Friere with three counter-posed thinkers: Locke, W.C. Bagley, and P. Rieff. And I’ll add four more names, as advanced by Nicholas Tate in The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current – using the acronym “THEM”: TS Eliot, Hannah Arendt, ED Hirsch, and Michael Oakeshott. So there’s a whole great tradition we can rediscover or revert to. We don’t have to radically reimagine education, we just have to get back to what we knew [and what we still know, without knowing it] – just as we do what we know works in the classroom. There’s a wealth of pedagogical genius that’s been elided – intellectual heavyweights, all.

At a deeper philosophical level we can see two different sets of assumptions, which Jonathan Haidt has spoken to very well. SC is so appealing because of its Justice & Equality framework. However, it is not clear why this is superior to a Truth & Liberty framework, especially where these concepts can come into contest. Nevertheless, we have a dominant SC/Justice & Equality model without ever having had serious discussion or debate, just a passive, silent ascendancy - silent no more.  In order to have the possibility of a real debate about the deepest commitments or underlying assumptions in education, someone must at least make the case for TC/Truth & Liberty as pedagogically preferable to SC/Justice & Equality.  But the culture of education, as well as Canadian culture more generally, happens to see itself much more in terms of Justice & Equality and thus sees no reason to debate it. Unlike Canada, I think American culture (or, the American Way) much more strongly identifies with Truth & Liberty. Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing concern that anyone can do or say anything if it is done in the name of student-centeredness or justice or equality or equity etc. and feel completely justified, and even to project fault onto anyone seeking a justification for the new ethos. Education is too important to just ‘go with the one that sounds or feels right’ without deliberate contemplation and serious debate. And radical changes especially must require thorough, thoughtful, persuasive justifications; no one is above this standard.

My humble podcast is trying to address these problems and pedagogically rehabilitate TC based on my own dissatisfaction with SC, which I hope can be helpful to fellow teachers in the same boat. We can diminish the grip of radical, woke, progressive, SC as captured by DEI, CRT, SEL activism by instead advancing a pedagogical counter-narrative that is more: Traditional, Classic, Academic, Knowledge-based or Content-rich, Essentialist, Perennial.  One of my main ideas is “TVSC: teacher versus student centered.”

I’ve titled the podcast “Unchanging Education” for two reasons. One, we need to exorcise the specter of ‘Change’ that haunts education, it’s been saturated with (or, captured by) radically progressive notions of permanent or perpetual revolution that destabilize learning. We need to un-change the Changes and the obsession with Change itself. Two, we can revert to a more timeless approach to pedagogy. Woke/SC is obsessed with ‘timely’ education, ‘relevant and responsive’ – but much of the great wisdom of humanity experienced through education is (in some ways) unchanging and universal, from ABC’s to “what is the good life?”  Educational needs, problems in education, and what it means to be well-educated change slowly, and should be recognizable between generations. We can be open to small-c-plural “changes” while rejecting capital-C-singular “Change” that takes on a life of its own.

The niche I am ultimately interested in is: not diagnosing what’s wrong with this new ethos, other people are doing that better than me [Lindsay, Rufo, and many others] - doing the necessary work of pointing us to the need for some other paradigm. But what can we pivot to when we reach a critical mass? When we’ve had enough of woke Ed? The excesses of SC are, to my mind, part of the same problem as a deficit in TC… First of all, we need “checks and balances” to the new ethos/SC orthodoxy, which TC is standing-by to provide. However, a hungry ideology with considerable momentum and totalitarian tendencies will surely resist checks and balances.  

Nevertheless, the kind of teacher we knew and loved can re-become the norm if armed with better ideas.  Great teaching is alive and well mainly because so many reject or ignore SC but are barricaded from resonant pedagogy, by “Critical Pedagogy,” as if it were the only game in town - it isn’t. Our impetus to remove new-fangled SC ills from ed- is a good one, becoming more and more established all the time. But we also have to be ready with something better. And the really good news is we don’t have to start from scratch. The rehabilitation of TC ed is, I argue, the key to rehabbing ed itself – including the regaining of public trust.

For one, we need to get back to education for its own sake, as a good in itself. Not as a tool to be used to achieve some other end or aim, certainly not as an arm of radical politics or globalist policies. We all know well-educated people, so we know what the goal of education is: to produce as many well-educated people as we possibly can. We know for one that “well-educated” excludes activists’ acts of arson. We reject any notion that ‘well-educated’ is some kind of oppressive bourgeois-privilege private-property in patriarchal white/male/cis/able culture. The woke Anti-education education-system, devouring itself, is a late stage in the long march through the institutions and we have to walk it back.

And there are two ways we can do so, both can be accomplished within five years:

1. Exceptions and exemptions [or, expanding them further] from ‘ed school’ for otherwise well-educated and/or well-qualified new teachers (e.g. holding any recognized graduate or Master’s degree or considerable experience in a related field) – to break their monopoly of accreditation and ideological indoctrination of teachers [“end the monopolistic stranglehold over teacher certification granted to Faculties of Education and deal a fatal blow to the woke long-march-through-the-institutions radicals” – Jordan B. Peterson]

This is just the first step.

2. New, rival ed schools that are a) explicitly teacher-centered and b) apolitical or non-proselytizing – you leave your beliefs at the door.

As an international teacher my contract forbids proselytizing, to wit:

The Teacher agrees to refrain from promoting or proselytizing any form of religious or political ideology either within or outside the classroom.

So it is a violation for me to engage in any proselytism i.e. attempting to instill or convert religious or political beliefs. We know use of the term "groomer" has increased and depending on the definition or how it is used, it can have a similar meaning to proselytizing. I suppose the term groomer has both a secret and a sexual connotation, while proselytizing is done ‘out loud’ and does not pertain to any physical act. Refrain from proselytizing: a useful starting point or precedent as a sound professional standard to be broadly adopted and enforced.  It doesn’t affect my teaching because teaching is unrelated to any attempt to instill or convert (or compel) any kind of belief, be it political or (gnostic) religious or otherwise. I never think about it, except insofar as I am glad to know my fellow teachers are bound by this standard, too. Shouldn't teachers “leave it at the door,” and do activism on their own time in voluntary spaces?

Such ‘New, rival ed schools that are explicitly teacher-centered and apolitical or non-proselytizing’ should also commit to transparency in partnership with (and no secrets from) parents, and also having ‘abandoned and to completely forsake’ the nine-letter DEI-CRT-SEL initiative.

{In jest, if we were playing Scrabble we’d use these nine letters to spell: DERELICTS: “abandoned by the owner and in poor condition”... from the Latin derelictus ‘abandoned’... from de- ‘completely’ + relinquere ‘forsake’. Triple word score #derelicts}

In all seriousness, in as short as five years, the only new teachers who go to woke ed-schools could be the ones who choose to, and admin/school boards can have a real choice if they want to hire a teacher or an activist. And if SC is pedagogically superior, the powers that be ought to welcome the competition.  In less than ten years every parent can have a real choice, and we can anticipate the school-choice trap where every school is staffed with woke teachers thus making an apparent free choice a false choice – by broadening exemptions from woke ed schools while also introducing rivals to compete with them. Then, woke parents may still choose to send their kids to woke institutions…and other parents can send their kids to school – and we will know them by their fruits.

Education doesn’t have to be SC: timely [relevant & responsive] therapeutic-activism for equality & justice to subvert & disrupt what-is; a sword to attack social ills & revolutionize culture.

Education could otherwise be TC: timeless [perennial & essential] disciplined & academic, for truth & liberty to conserve & preserve what-is; a shield to uphold the culture of civilization.  As it was from Socratic up to pre-Deweyan time.

Education used to have a Great Debate and respected the versus-tensions of different priorities [outlined above] as an in-built check/balance against becoming a radically monopolistic-orthodoxy or dogmatic ‘cult’. When one way of thinking dominates [unchecked and unchallenged] any one field [e.g. education] for 100 years, it is bound to become myopic.  It is only reasonable to demand results and judge the fruits of 100 years of progressive education. Moreover, we should expect educational improvements and even breakthroughs that accentuate the essence of Ed - not its endless ‘reimagining.’ As a convenient [albeit non-Canadian] example from one century ago, consider Coolidge’s 1923 National Education Proclamation where he speaks of duty, responsibility, obligations, citizenship, burdens, maintaining, patriotic devotion, results – nine words very different than found in DEI-CRT-SEL:

“Those who had the duty and responsibility of government, must necessarily have the education with which to discharge the obligations of citizenship...The willingness of the people to bear the burdens of maintaining these institutions, and the patriotic devotion of an army of teachers, who, in many cases, might have earned larger incomes in other pursuits, have made it possible to accomplish results…”

We have been lapse in our duty [responsibility, obligation] to bear the burdens of maintaining the institutions of education and citizenship with patriotic devotion, and we’re seeing the results. 

Reasonable people can disagree whether or not an army of devoted patriotic teachers is a cure, but more and more it seems that reasonable people can agree on this: an army of woke teachers is a pox.

We can save education, from itself, in our lifetime.

Because if we don’t, it’ll be our own long (funeral) march...through the institution we once held so dear.  And in parting, dear reader, I remind you of words you may know well:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep…”

___

Thanks for reading. For more from this author read - What’s Wrong with Woke Education?

Please support Woke Watch Canada by becoming a paid subscriber.