The Folly of Politicized Education

More than twenty years ago, Nancy and I attended a public forum at Yale that explored the ever-expanding role of technology in education. The e-world was in transition. Y-2K had proved a bust, which had increased both the suspicion of technology and the awareness of society’s reliance on it.

As the panel convened, the internet was about to become even more indispensable, with nascent social media, first MySpace and then Facebook, poised to burst on the scene. Hand-helds were on the near horizon as well. Although BlackBerry, introduced a few years earlier, was used mostly by professionals, more advanced and seductive “personal digital assistants,” PDAs, as they were then called, were widely seen as inevitable. As such, users had yet to begin slamming into each other on the streets or in shopping malls while staring at their screens, but kids, to the chagrin of parents and educators, were already spending inordinate amounts of time glued to their home computers, generally engaged in pursuits frustrated adults considered…unproductive. In 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow had referred to television as a “vast wasteland,” which seemed like a vast understatement when compared to most computer content.

How to turn this inexorable e-progress to good use was the subject of the meeting. The group on the stage was diverse, but in keeping with the subject, most were from the education rather than the technology side. Of the two or three panelists that did have some technological knowledge, only one was what might legitimately be thought of as a “techie.” He ran a software company, had been involved with computers since the punch-card days, and was behaviorally reminiscent of the obligatory nerd in a heist film.

The discussion was wide-ranging and rife with jargon, most, oddly, from the educators. It was the first time either Nancy or I had heard the term “long form text,” at which we suppressed chuckles, wondering why they couldn’t just say “book.” But cutting through the affectation, there was substantial agreement that, despite its obvious potential for dysfunction, computers would be a boon in schools. Students could be taught far more efficiently, and teachers and parents, often the weak links in the educational process, would be largely supplanted by computer learning. In addition, given how hard—and expensive—it was to entice good people into the teaching profession, computers could allow school districts to pay less because the human in the classroom would take a more custodial role.

Only one of the panelists disagreed…the computer nerd.

These kind of shortcuts to learning, he insisted, were actually dead ends. Students who were taught in this largely rote manner might be able to complete tasks more quickly, access information more effectively, get better grades, and even make themselves more appealing to college admissions boards, but with all that, there were two key aspects of education in which they would surely fall short.

Critical thinking was one. The ability to concentrate was the other.

As computers in schools proliferated, he postulated, education would be divided into two distinct camps. Most districts, especially in poorer and rural areas, would rely on the new, modern approach that the other panelists extolled. The second, more “traditional,” would be the standard in elite schools. Students would read long form text—that phrase again—be required to rigorously complete assignments with limited use of technology, engage in vigorous classroom debate based on their conclusions, and revise their work as flaws became apparent.

While 160-character messaging was still years away, the trend toward shorter and shorter communication was already manifest, and the computer nerd lamented that not only were most kids in the first category not reading books, but they were losing the capacity to do so. As a result, the ability to stay focused was diminishing as well. If schools did not stem this trend, or worse, exacerbated it, the result would be a growing segment of the population limited to an almost robotic thought process.

Those whose education focused on critical thinking and developing the aptitude to concentrate on a problem, he continued, would race ahead, while the first group fell farther and farther behind. Being steeped in technology himself, the nerd was the most aware that computers could enhance the learning process but should not replace it. (It does not seem a coincidence that this discussion is eerily similar to the current debate about the uses and limits of AI.)

It is difficult to observe the stunning degree of ignorance now rife among Americans and not conclude he got it totally right.

The point is that real education is not so much to teach students how to gather and compile information as for them to learn how to learn, how to solve problems that are not straightforward and obvious. In a very real sense, it is to give students the skills to ask the right questions, not to show them a quick and facile route to an answer.

But asking questions has become increasingly unpopular at both ends of the political spectrum. Instead, the current trend in both the far-left and (especially) the far-right is to turn schools into vehicles of indoctrination. In Florida, for example, rather than present American history as it happened, teachers are required to trumpet perceived successes while being forbidden from mentioning actual failures. Thus, rather than teaching students how to think, they are telling them what to think, and the “what” must hew to a political and sometimes biblical point of view.

Where the right is attempting to manipulate content, the left has chosen to manipulate language, insisting, for example, that emails contain parenthetical pronouns under the name of the sender, even when the appropriate gender is obvious. To proponents, this is merely a way to show respect for those who consider themselves “non-binary,” another newly coined term, but to the right, this represents one more manifestation of wokism being shoved down their throats. Another example is the elimination of the word “actress,” replaced by the androgynous use of “actor.” Film people ran into problems with award categories, so they are now experimenting with “female actor,” which does not seem to differ a whole lot from “actress.”

But from whichever end of the tunnel one enters, attaching politics to language is to limit it and limiting language is limiting complexity and limiting complexity is limiting thought.

Whether it be from technology or politics, the decline of the ability to think clearly, critically, and independently has infected the United States to perhaps a greater degree than in any time in our history. It has just been vividly displayed in the election of a president who would previously have been laughed off the stage even had he been running against Millard Fillmore.

The world is getting smaller, more intricate, and more dangerous, and we’re going to need all the clear thinking and original problem solving we can get.

Without an educational system that is about education, it is not only our students that will fall farther and farther behind.