Educating Citizens, Not Activists

Restoring civil dialogue, pluralism, and critical thinking to public education

As a new high school teacher back in the late-1990s, I had the good fortune to land in an English department that included a brilliant, pugnacious veteran whose politics leaned so hard left as to make Bernie Sanders seem like a milquetoast moderate. This teacher did not pull punches when it came to his political convictions, but he was also fiercely ethical. He knew his job was to teach, not proselytize, and that it was a teacher’s responsibility to dedicate every minute of classroom instruction to helping students develop the knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions they needed to graduate ready for college, work, and citizenship. So he channeled his convictions and talents into building an integrated English-social studies curriculum model that centered on knowledge and skills-building animated by robust civil dialogue. He called it “teaching the conflicts,” pulled from the subtitle of a then-recent education treatise by education professor Gerald Graff.

The curriculum emphasized core knowledge, critical thinking, and civil dialogue. The most audacious component of the curriculum was a series of quarterly schoolwide issue forums featuring students, teachers, and invited guests, to which parents, community members, and local newspaper reporters were invited. These were true community events—forums that included creationism vs evolution, immigrant rights vs border security, and the ethics of using animals in genetic research. It was an exhilarating and formative professional experience. After five years of teaching and five more of graduate school, I joined the national school reform movement, where for the next 20 years I sought, supported, and helped replicate the most innovative high school models in North America. Yet I never encountered a curriculum as powerful as the one I participated in as a novice schoolteacher.

My experience instilled in me the idea that openness to pluralism and a commitment to informed, carefully reasoned civil dialogue in pursuit of the common good were progressive educational values. So it has been disheartening to witness the ascendance of more strident forms of progressivism over the past decade that suppress dissent and eschew the common good. The most vivid and virulent embodiment of this lamentable trend is Ethnic Studies.

As many FAIR Substack subscribers know by now, “Ethnic Studies” is not a generic term referring to the study of the experiences and contributions of various ethnic groups under an ethos of multiculturalism. It is an academic field guided by an ethno-nationalist political agenda that peddles a reductive and dystopian way of interpreting ethnic group experiences. It encourages students to view themselves and each other primarily as ethno-racial beings trapped inside an illegitimate settler-colonial ethno-racial caste system that they must work to disrupt, dismantle, and transform in order to overcome putative collective psychosocial trauma caused by that system. It cultivates some of the worst tendencies in the human psyche: a penchant for nursing grudges and resentments along with a tribal mindset that divides humanity and pits different groups against each other.

Worse, this tendentious historical narrative is presented by its champions as “true history,” declaring alternative interpretation false and even racist. Therein lies profound threats to liberal democracy and liberal learning: the self-righteous certainty of its claims to truth, the evangelical zeal with which it promotes them, the intolerance of and unwillingness to countenance alternative perspectives, and the refusal to enter into good faith dialogue with persons who hold such perspectives in favor of misrepresenting and demonizing them.

Schooling dedicated to conditioning students to become political dissidents pursuing a doctrinaire social vision violates two core imperatives of the education profession: to help students cultivate their individual talents and interests, and to prepare them to thrive in a diverse, pluralistic democracy. It also betrays the fundamental purpose and chief raison d’etre for publicly funded schools: to serve society’s needs, not subvert them.

So when asked to join the talented team of writers creating FAIR’s American Experience Curriculum, I saw an opportunity to return to the kind of instruction that inspired me as a young teacher while helping restore some sanity to my profession. The curriculum supports healthy student individuation while equipping them with the tools they’ll need to contribute to a vigorous civil society. Whether one considers it an alternative to Ethnic Studies with a civics focus, or a civics course with an emphasis on the experiences of ethnic groups, it is a curriculum grounded in American founding principles, respect for pluralism, and commitment to the pursuit of common ground through robust and respectful civil dialogue. These features animate every course unit and lesson in the curriculum.

The features of the course that distinguish it from conventional Ethnic Studies will furnish states and districts that require or offer Ethnic Studies with a sorely-needed alternative. What excites me most are features that distinguish FAIR’s curriculum from most other high school Social Studies and Civics courses:

• It introduces students to basic concepts in political theory most pertinent to understanding the conceptual underpinnings of US government and of the civil rights and liberties many Americans take for granted;

• It goes beyond a superficial preoccupation with diversity by helping students accept and cope constructively with the more demanding challenges posed by pluralism;

• It equips students with skills, tools, and protocols for participating in civil dialogues on contentious topics, including how to spot and avoid common pitfalls and fallacies that afflict even seasoned partisans and career politicians, such as straw-manning, either-or thinking, and ad hominem attacks;

• It gives students scaffolded opportunities to practice their new civil dialogue skills through participation in end-of-unit civil dialogue exercises grounded in the course content, on controversial questions such as:
  – Is the U.S. Constitution pro- or anti-slavery?
  – Should we judge historical figures according to the moral standards of their own time or the present?

These dialogues are structured not as debates to be won but as dialogues designed to sharpen thinking, clarify differences, and identify areas of agreement. The course concludes by pivoting from past and present to the future, with a capstone project that invites students to draw on course learnings to explore how emerging technologies might be leveraged to mitigate the challenges of pursuing the common good through democratic deliberation in an increasingly diverse, pluralistic, and tech-mediated society.

These knowledge and skills are essential for upper secondary students on the cusp of adulthood, yet are too often neglected in schools in favor of a safe careerism, fearful avoidance of controversy, or doctrinaire belief that there’s one right answer to complex socio-historical questions.

FAIR’s American Experience Curriculum points the way toward a revitalized high school Social Studies experience for students, and a reinvigorated professional experience for any teacher eager to reclaim the founding legacy of American education and the ideals that make teaching such an important calling.

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