The Trump administration has assaulted the entire institution of education in its attempt to silence dissent against its tyrannical MAGA agenda.
The president’s moves to withhold research and operational grants and restrict academic freedom and rights of dissent have resulted in the forced tightening of campus policing and the deportation of non-permanent U.S. educators and students.
Related
Donald Trump’s order to eliminate Dept. of Education offers no details
He claims he wants to let states decide their own schools’ curriculum. They already do.
While some of these draconian policies have been reversed or held up in the courts, they continue to jeopardize our nation’s economic and technological development and our reputation as a leader of higher learning worldwide. They also seriously challenge our democratic values and traditions of free speech and academic freedom.
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Trump’s policies are targeted at full force through his firehose of executive orders demanding the dismantling of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. His orders result in conformity, inequity and exclusion in curricular development, admissions, hiring policies, and social initiatives. All of this hate has culminated in Trump’s decree to fully abolish the federal Department of Education.
What we see coming from the Oval Office, while extreme, is unfortunately nothing particularly unique. Authoritarian regimes throughout time have attempted to restrict not only the free stream of information, but more importantly, have used every imaginable means of preventing the enhancement of critical thinking skills among the populous, since that type of thought could jeopardize the status quo and, therefore, authoritarian power and control.
My life in social justice education
I share with you my philosophy of education and an example of the pushback I received as a tenured professor in a large Midwestern research university over a decade ago.
“And we taxpayers pay YOUR salary! That is a waste of money. You are not educating our students, you are trying to indoctrinate them towards your views. Since you are an ‘associate professor, you are unfortunately tenured. But at least your department has not promoted you to Full Biased Professor yet. You have the right to express your views. You do NOT have the right to try to force these on students. I do hope natural selection works for such biased persons as yourself.” -James Wright, 2/2/12
This response to my monthly column titled “Letter to Iowa Republicans” in Iowa’s Ames Tribune reflects a number of assumptions. First, Wright underestimated the critical thinking capacities of college and university students by belittling their intelligence, while he overestimated the degree of control any professor has to “indoctrinate” students.
In providing no rationale or reasoning for his outburst, the author, himself, also displayed a lack of critical analysis. If he had been a student in one of my courses, I would require a higher standard of discourse for him to receive a passing grade.
I am a multicultural education scholar and educator who researches, writes, teaches, and lives through a lens of critical multiculturalism/social justice education.
Though the concept of “social justice” has been defined in a number of ways, I have synthesized my definition as: The concept that local, national, and global communities function in a way where everyone has equal access to and equitable distribution of the rights, benefits, privileges, and resources, and where everyone can live freely unencumbered by social constructions of hierarchical positions of domination and subordination based on social identities.
Within this framework of critical multiculturalism/social justice education, I probe three major topic areas: the relationship between societal inequities and how they are related to social identities; the ways that societal inequities as they relate to social identities are reproduced in educational environments; and the forms of and ways to mitigate resistance to multicultural education in teacher education programs.
I have never forgotten one essential point my educational psychology professor related to my class back at San José State University when I was working toward my Secondary Education Teacher’s Certification. His point crystallized for me the intent of true and meaningful learning.
My professor explained that the term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
“Education,” he said, “is the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge, rather than putting or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the student’s waiting and docile mind” (what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education”).
I believe that for genuine learning to occur, for it to be transformational, it must be student-centered, as in grounded on the shared experiences of the learners, and composed of at least two essential elements or domains: the “affective” (feelings) and the “cognitive” (informational).
I design and implement my classes on a dialogic approach within a critical multicultural/social justice framework in which students and educators cooperate in the process, whereby all serve simultaneously as the educator and the learner. Educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky referred to this process as Obuchenie.
Education, as I have gained from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, is a path toward permanent liberation in which people become aware (conscientized) of their positions, and through praxis (reflection and action), transform the world.
To be truly effective, educators must spend many years in self-reflection and must have a clear understanding of their motivations, strengths, limitations, triggers, and fears. They must thoroughly come to terms with their positions in the world related to their social identities, both the ways in which they are privileged as well as how they have been the victims of systemic inequities.
They are not afraid of showing vulnerability and admitting when they are wrong or when they don’t know something. They have a firm grasp of the content area, and they work well with and are accessible to students and their peer educators and parents.
Realizing that students come from disparate backgrounds in terms of social identities and that students learn in a variety of ways, educators must develop “cultural competence” and must understand the historical and cultural backgrounds of diverse student populations, pedagogical frameworks, theories of cognitive development, personality types, preferred sensory modes of learning, and others.
In the ideal classroom, the overriding climate is one of safety. This is not, however, the same as “comfort,” for very often, comfortable situations might feel fine but are not necessarily of pedagogic value.
By “safety,” I am suggesting an environment where educators facilitate a learning process: one in which one can share openly without fear of retribution or blame; where one can travel to the outer limits of one’s “learning edges” in the knowledge that one will be supported and not left dangling.
The multicultural classroom poses exceptional challenges, or more importantly, opportunities to find creative solutions to address not only potential but actual student resistance to course materials and concepts, for we touch upon some very personal and potentially triggering issues related to identity, social inequities, and critical histories that for many reasons are not often investigated in other coursework.
A foundational element in critical multiculturalism is a social reconstructionist or transformational education in which the educator’s role is to help prepare future citizens to reconstruct society to better serve the interests of all groups of people and to transform society toward greater equity for all.
Therefore, in my classes I expect students to think “outside the box” of their previous experiences – in other words, to think critically/reflectively/ creatively on the concepts in class discussions, readings, videos, and written assignments. This sometimes requires students to think or respond somewhat differently than in some of their other educational experiences.
I require students to justify and back up all of their thoughts. Opinions without justification are just that — opinions.
In his book, Teaching for Critical Thinking, Dr. Stephen Brookfield discusses three interrelated phases in the process of critical thinking:
1. Discovering the assumptions that guide our decisions, actions, and choices (What do I think and why do I think of it the way I do?)
2. Checking the accuracy of these assumptions by exploring as many different perspectives, viewpoints, and sources as possible (Talking with others, taking courses, reading, researching, etc.)
3. Making informed decisions based on these researched assumptions (informed decisions are based on evidence we can trust, can be explained to others, and have a good chance of achieving the effects we want). This is an ongoing process as new information and research ever expands our knowledge base.
For me, critical multiculturalism/social justice education is far more than my academic interest and focus. On a number of occasions, I have been asked the following question: “Are you a professor/educator, or are you a community organizer/activist, a writer, a theorist, or a researcher?”
I always answer, “Yes, all of the above,” for I view critical multiculturalism as providing a seamless connection to all of these elements in my life. And I practice what I teach.
While some of my activities in this area have proven to be controversial, I am proud of the efforts I have taken, like writing a number of Letters to the Editor and Guest Editorials on a variety of topics in a number of forums, calling for the erection of state and local peace monuments, advocating for the rights of same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, and exposing the homophobic and racist actions of political and civic leaders. I led efforts to defeat the hiring of a Christian evangelical pastor proposed to serve as the so-called “Life Skills Assistant” for the football team at my university, and I spearheaded a campaign to remove religious symbols from the Memorial Union Chapel at my tax supported land grant institution (this included a floor-to-ceiling wooden Christian cross and carved crosses in the chapel pews, as well as a menorah and Torah from the chapel stained glass window).
My intention was to help ensure that my university did not promote, either intentionally or unintentionally, one or two religions, which I believe runs contrary to its land grant mission as a public state supported institution of higher learning.
Apparently, Marc Hansen, a columnist for the Des Moines Register, agreed. In his editorial titled, “Cross debate at ISU prods young minds,” dated September 6, 2007, he wrote: “In firing up the discussion, he’s [me] doing his job—one of them, at least—as a college professor. He’s getting young people to think. He’s challenging them, forcing them to examine and articulate their beliefs. I’ll say it again: College isn’t a mainstream kind of place. Most kids in Iowa grow up paddling blissfully down the mainstream. They don’t need more mainstream. They need prodding and stretching. They need to be exposed to different philosophies and new ideas. College is more than picking up job qualifications… Do not board the next ship out of the Port of Ames, Professor Blumenfeld. Stick around. Continue to tell young people, and the rest of us, what we don’t always want to hear.”
I have conducted all of my work in the service of social transformation. Without experience in the humanities and social sciences, students’ education will not fully prepare them to live in a continually changing global environment. The traditional three Rs are indeed important, but we need to include the fourth R, respect for cultural differences.
In addition to teaching the “3 Rs” (reading, writing, ‘rithmetic), we need to teach students how to investigate issues around self awareness: how to “read” the self and “solve” social, emotional, and ethical problems. We must provide students with what Jonathan Cohen discusses in his work, “Social, Emotional, Ethical, & Academic Education” (SEEAE).
With all this, I hope we can join together to create a better educated and more perfect world, especially today as the United States suffers the tightening grip of authoritarianism.
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