What’s Wrong with Woke Education?

Insights from an international educator and recovered Marxist

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I’m Dan Clemens, a Canadian-born international teacher (living abroad).

As an undergraduate in Philosophy I was indeed a Marxist atheist, now in ‘recovery.’ I wasn’t an activist but was friendly with the campus activists. I gravitated towards critical theory and The Frankfurt School and did my MA thesis on Marcuse and Fromm. Later as a PhD student in a woke program (Critique and Social Transformation, Ways of Knowing) I really became disillusioned and had a different kind of political awakening. For example, when I saw the activists I knew posting vitriol about the 2012 C. Hebdo/French cartoon incident, that they deserved to be murdered for the sin of racism, I felt I wasn’t on the right side anymore. And as for the PhD, I lost faith in the program, plus my (excellent) supervisor left the country for a new University in my second year and the research stalled as a result. I explored several options, voluntarily withdrew, and then went to Ed school…

Where again believing in the program was at times an issue, it was often reinforced that student-centered (SC) Ed was good and teacher-centered (TC) was bad. Yet, I had a dissonant experience in that I felt all of our SC readings and courses were philosophically unconvincing. So I started to seriously and independently look into TC more and more and found an affinity. My first suspicion was that SC made a straw-man out of TC. That TC [all education up to now, ostensibly] was bad – dually bad. Both normatively bad [harmful, cruel, and dehumanizing] and also descriptively bad [boring, unengaging, and ineffective]. I later learned of the term ‘hollow man’ which is even worse: while a straw man recasts arguments for easy refutation, a hollow man attack just invents a position it wants to attack ‘out of whole-cloth’.  How ‘bad’ education is is directly proportional to the urgent need for radical Change.

I never noticed SC making a case for itself on its own terms, it was tautologically good because it wasn’t bad. It seems totally predicated on not being (dually) bad by being unlike TC. But over the years I’d had brilliant professors who lectured, and I received great direct instruction, so that line didn’t work on me. It works wonderfully on new teachers who fixate on the worst teachers they ever had, and I think this attitude is actually encouraged. No surprise, as it’s Marxist in orientation: seeing the world as bad, oppressive, unfair; and any sense of appreciation or gratitude is itself a symptom of uncritical consciousness. But in K-8 my teachers saved my life. And then in University they gave me ‘the life of the mind’ – such as it is. So I wasn’t ready to roll-over on education as some oppressive force we need to re-imagine and transform. And now, complicated as it seems: I see it is the idea that we must ‘roll-over on education as some oppressive force we need to re-imagine and transform’ as the real culprit...

This problem mainly stemmed from a peculiar yet uncritically, universally accepted idea from Friere: the so-called banking model. That teachers merely ‘deposit’ knowledge to passive students rather than ‘transform’. Much later did it occur to me that transferring or transmitting knowledge was the heart of education. And that if we imagine the best depositor/transmitter teacher – where all of her students obtain all of the knowledge – she is probably the world’s best teacher. Yet, in the Friere/SC paradigm, this teacher is not doing enough because all she should do is make revolution. So there’s a real lack of respect or even hatred for education that has captured Ed itself. And the truth I came to see was that transmitting knowledge, whereby students receive knowledge or inherit wisdom, is already transformational. There’s no real need to ‘make’ education into something that transforms, it always already was – just not in the way Woke, Cultural/neo-Marxists want. This is why we no longer recognize the institution of education in our own country, but calling it out as indoctrination or re-education is not enough.

There’s another problem with SC, which we understand to be the therapeutic turn, well-meaning and masked as pro self-esteem and now SEL – and who can argue with this? In therapeutic education, the educator is empowered to act like a therapist, and thus confidentiality is deemed appropriate – keeping secrets. Teachers come to see themselves as better providers of social and emotional care and better at meeting these needs. This detail should be no surprise, because this entire enterprise, radically revolutionizing education, was achieved in secret, but as an open secret. This problem is intuitively felt but not expressed clearly enough.

‘They’ never championed or openly fought for these changes to education in the public square, they just did them, hiding them in plain sight in postmodern/post structural academic jargon or feel-good slogans. They never made a public case for why we need to adopt DEI, or CRT, or SEL – never tried to persuade the public because a) they’re unpopular ideas and b) they know best. They’ll make these major changes, in secret, as the silent ascendancy of a new ethos (see below) aka institutional capture via the long march through the institutions. They don’t need to struggle to make changes in an open, adversarial and above-board policy debate by stating their vision and making their case because they have the inside track: direct access to the next generation(s).

And so, of course, they’re perfectly content to engage in the same spirit of secrecy, directly, with kids. This is why the term “groomer” has become so commonplace. Anyone who wants to keep details of their relationship or communication with your kid a secret is exhibiting grooming behaviour. They see themselves as entitled to a therapeutic exemption, and this is why SEL is, for many critics, the greatest threat. And we have been duped into applauding teachers who see themselves as social workers, therapists, or care-givers. As if we let them make us forget what their job is, so they stopped doing it, and started doing something else.

“The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education confronts the silent ascendancy of a therapeutic ethos across the educational system... therapeutic education is turning children, young people and adults into anxious and self-preoccupied individuals rather than aspiring, optimistic and resilient learners who want to know everything about the world.”

And when you notice it, and object, it is you who must be punished...they’re already inside, they hold the raw institutional power now [despite seeing themselves as ‘activists’] and they will not relinquish power because of reasoned arguments. If they were interested in reasoned arguments they would have outlined and argued for their plans, but they didn’t because (again) they know how unpopular their ideas are, and they (ostensibly) know better; they’ve decided for the rest of us. They feel entitled to act directly in the service of the God of History, of whom they are on the right side [or, at the right hand].

In business terms, this is a hostile takeover. But, it seems that cultural revolution is a better term. This is not the garden-variety ‘easier to get forgiveness, than permission.’ When they’re caught red-handed, do you sense any contrition? No, it’s your fault for catching them, because when you see what they’re doing you’re supposed to rejoice, but because you’re unable to Witness the Righteousness of it, unable to look upon their Mission with the eyes of the God of History, you’re guilty. No, you’re a heretic, because the True Believers know that The Kingdom, Power, and the Glory are Theirs; here on Earth, but first in ‘their’ [not “our”] schools. Heretics can lose their parental privileges because: teacher [as therapeutic SEL technician] knows best. You have no place in their new utopia as they ‘immanentize the eschaton’.

The good news: there are a lot of teachers who are not true believers. But the true believers know how intimidate to maintain their silence or simply render them unwitting accomplices; it’s their greatest strength. The true believers keep them quiet, when any word spoken against them means they’ll militantly mobilize to ruin your life. Not just your career – again, they don’t respect professional boundaries: not in transparency before launching their divisive programs, not when it comes to secrets with kids, and not when it comes to neo-Inquisitionism.

We like to think that we study history to avoid repeating it, and to be ready when the bullies come next time, not to let them get too far, ideas implicit in phrases like “Never Again.” But the unmitigated success of the silent ascendancy of this new ethos suggests otherwise: “So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own.” The woke are not Nazis, but they’re more than just authoritarians, they’re totalitarians who want to re-make the world in their image.

In the culture of Ed there’s a tremendous social pressure to pay lip service to woke/SC ed and the holy trinity: Rousseau, Dewey, Friere. And I say ‘holy’ because of the religious or zealous fervor, especially the newly-minted teachers who are led to believe that education has been forever evil and they’ve arrived to be the saviours. In this perverse presentism, Educators as acolytes and zealots (from a-z) Know They have The Answer.  It’s a powerful and inspiring message that works wonders on impressionable, optimistic young teachers – searching for meaning as we all do, and given a mission. And it’s less important for them to be technically sound teachers respecting parents’ wishes if they’re part of a vanguard to remedy the evils of History itself, even if through re-education or indoctrination. The ends justify the means, and they don’t have to justify anything to you.

We lack a real debate in education – a debate as vigorous as it is unafraid. But if they won’t debate, if they’d prefer extreme tactics such as emotional-blackmail by telling you that your kids may die if you undermine them, and/or keeping secrets from parents under the guise of protecting kids (i.e. assuming the need to protect your kids from you) then such tactics must be communicated to the public as having lost that debate.

Dan Clemens is a based teacher-centered inactivist podcaster and substacker @Rieffian
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Thanks for reading. We have another essay by Dan Clemens coming this Thursday which will discuss what he feels are the right tactics for countering wokeism in education. Until then, for more on woke education, read Ontario’s Kindergarteners as Critical Theorists by Chanel Pfahl.

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