A Moral Education
Random thoughts on the woke classroom debate
In one of his last plays, Euripides gives us maybe our earliest depiction of moral panic. Despite living most of his life in a cave on the island of Salamis, the Greek playwright was a student of humanity who saw into the nature of tragedy, madness and women.
There’s Medea who murders her own children to wound her cheating husband, Phaedra who kills herself and falsely accuses the man she loves of trying to rape her in her suicide note, the Trojan women now enslaved and awaiting rape and other grim fates, and the Bacchae whose leader kills her own son by mistaking him for an animal.
The Bacchae were women who followed the wine god Bacchus and worshipped him by getting shithoused on wine and dancing in the woods. They hunted and tore wild animals apart with their bare hands then ate them raw in a ritual known as sparagmos, after which they danced by the fire their faces and limbs painted with blood.
Euripides tells the story of Bacchus returning to his birthplace Thebes disguised as a mortal, only to find Thebans are forbidden from worshipping him because their ruler is worried about the influence the Bacchae cult will have on Theban society.
The furious god exacts revenge by making the city’s women hysterical, causing them to dance off into the mountains. He then convinces the king to check on them in disguise, so the king follows dressed as a woman, but rather than accept him as one they mistake him for a beast and rip him to pieces. In the end, his own mother returns to town proudly carrying his head under one arm, convinced she has the head of a lion.
One reading of this is that when conservatives suppress liberal behavior, it comes back twice as hard. Consider the history of communism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 ended in nightmarish cruelty. The German Revolution of 1918 ended with its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkneckt shot like dogs. The Hungarian Soviet Republic was founded in 1919 and ended months later.
In 1923, a wealthy young Marxist named Felix Weil founded the Frankfurt School to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Why weren’t the workers of Western Europe rising up in revolution and transforming their nations into communist utopias?
The Frankfurt thinkers concluded that the economic analysis of Classical Marxism had revealed truths about the exploitation of workers but ignored the sociological reasons why such truths failed to inspire action. Folks did not prefer capitalism because it was better, they reasoned, but because they were all brainwashed.
The main Frankfurt thinkers were sociologist Max Horkheimer who said science should not observe society but change it (Eclipse of Reason), sociologist Theodor Adorno who said the “culture industry” brainwashes us to revere the Enlightenment and enjoy capitalism as passive consumers (Dialectic of Enlightenment) and philosopher Herbert Marcuse who said industrial societies create simple-minded, one-dimensional folk but that revolutionary potential exists within marginalized groups (One-Dimensional Man).
They believed rather than waiting for people to rise up, they had to get their hands dirty and “do the work.” Rather than scientists, they wanted to be activist scientists. Rather an economic system, they saw capitalism as a pervasive cultural influence as well, requiring endless critique of its imprint on movies, music, literature, fashion and so on. Rather than appeal to the working class, who they saw as comfortable sheep unlikely to break free from their “false consciousness,” they believed only marginalized groups could become awake. These ideas eventually became what we know as critical theory.
If capitalism is all around us then we have to constantly question our environment and think critically about everything in it. Did you choose to buy that product or were you manipulated by clever advertising? Are movies a form of storytelling or a business that encourages support for the system the business is founded on? This is the critical part.
In the 1990s, Black activists found themselves in the same position as Felix Weil, not seeing the progress they wanted to see. The Civil Rights movement had come and gone but problems remained. For one thing, there was the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in which the Supreme Court ruled against the use of strict racial quotas in medical school admissions but allowed for race to be used among other factors in the admissions process.
The lawyer and rights activist Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, was not happy with this result and wrote about it in his now famous 1979 article “Bakke, Minority Admissions, and the Usual Price of Racial Remedies.”
Just as the Frankfurt School initiated a cultural turn in Marxist analysis, what I call the Los Angeles School (Bell taught at USC Law School while Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term “intersectionality,” Cheryl Harris and Mari Matsuda taught at UCLA) initiated a race turn in Marxism. It goes like this. If you assume capitalist oppression is inseparable from colonialism and racism, critical theory becomes critical race theory and instead of activist scientists critiquing capitalism in every aspect of culture to help the marginalized awaken with class consciousness, you get activist teachers critiquing racism in every aspect of culture to help nonwhites “get woke” with race consciousness.
Just as Frankfurt thinkers found Classical Marxism inadequate and turned from economic Marxism to cultural Marxism, L.A. thinkers found the Civil Rights movement inadequate and turned from legal Blacktivism to cultural Blacktivism—both because they realized you’ll never get your revolution if you don’t change how people think.
This helps explain why everything in our culture today is deemed racist and why the battle over racism moved from the courts to the classroom. My point is, moral panics are dangerous not just because they are overreactions but because they can trigger over-counterreactions. The Theban king had a point about the Bacchae but he pushed too hard and lost his head. The Marxists had a point about labor rights but instead they witnessed the rise of fascism so they doubled down and gave us cultural Marxism. Civil Rights leaders told the truth about racism in America then endured two decades of pushback and the result was woke antiracism.
Every correction is an overcorrection. But that also means every overcorrection contains a needed correction.
Think of the children
In modern American history, moral panics tend to focus on whatever the kids are up to these days, which usually means the latest music trend: jazz in the 20s, big band music in the 30s, swing in the 40s, rhythm and blues in the 50s, rock and roll in the 60s, punk rock in the 70s, heavy metal in the 80s, hip hop in the 90s. But it’s not always music. We also had freakouts over comic books in the 50s, video games in the 80s and social media today. “Think of the children” is the most powerful genre of moral panic because we value few things more than our kids.
In America today, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is playing the part of the Theban king pushing back against the Bacchic cult of teachers drunk on antiracism and gender ideology. As I have said before, the fuel for this fire was the 2008 financial crisis, which make skeptics of people on both sides, contributing to woke and MAGA. For this reason, I think both would probably be weakened if we had better labor laws and if more Americans had more secure and better paying jobs. I therefore think the best weapon DeSantis has against woke ideology is his economic policy—which is good.
Florida unemployment hit a record low of 2.6% for the 4th straight month in the first quarter of this year and had the lowest unemployment rate among the 10 largest U.S. states. Florida accounted for 23% of the jobs gained nationwide in September 2021. Also, private sector growth increased by 0.5% in July, which was five times faster than the national average. In May, the Tampa Bay Times celebrated DeSantis’s economic victories. That same month, Florida announced a record budget surplus of $20 billion.
But as we all know by now, Florida overcorrected on woke education. In 2022, DeSantis signed two major education bills, the Stop WOKE Act and the “parental rights” bill or “Don’t Say Gay Law.”
The second one prohibits teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade 3. There was outrage from progressives who said DeSantis was censoring gay content or erasing gay identity. But here’s the thing, only a handful of U.S. states make sex education and HIV education mandatory.
Most students in the country who do receive some form of sex education do so between grades 6 and 12 while some schools begin addressing certain topics as early as grades 4 or 5. Chicago public schools start sex education in kindergarten while the California Healthy Youth Act requires school districts in the state to provide comprehensive and inclusive sexual health and HIV prevention education to students in grades 7 to 12.
So it seems reasonable for DeSantis to draw the line at grade 3, in fact the conservative thing to do would be to draw the line later than the average, so maybe grade 10. But the law had led to costly litigation and idiotic book bans.
This week, the New Republic reported DeSantis’s “stupid culture-war laws cost taxpayers” more than $17 million. That’s not too high a price tag to keep our children safe from harmful indoctrination efforts, but the people of Florida have not gotten their money’s worth—21 of the state’s 61 counties have removed a total of 300 books in the past two years, and the embarrassing list of banned books reads like a Glavlit task sheet.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
Each of these is an absolute classic and indisputable member of the Western Canon. There are others too, such as Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk or a comic book version of Anne Frank’s Diary. This is the law of unintended consequences at its worst. The moral panic of the parents involved is hurting the very children they are trying to protect because, believe me, keeping classic literature out of the hands of your children does not make them smarter.
Then you have Stop WOKE Act, which says you cannot teach that any “individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex” or teach them to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for things done by other members of their race or sex.
Again, this sounds entirely reasonable. But people tend to overreact.
“Detractors of DeSantis’s legislative crusade argue that it’s a nakedly demagogic appeal to bigotry and moral panic stoked by right-wing propaganda,” writes Cathy Young, a cultural studies fellow at the Cato Institute, for Education Next. “They scoff at the notion that children are being taught either Critical Race Theory (CRT) . . . or “gender theory” lessons with explicit sexual content.”
But Young writes that CRT has “indisputably” influenced K–12 schooling, citing a 2011 article that noted “a growing number” of teacher education programs focused on social justice issues, often including “critical race theory” and “critical pedagogy” (more on that later this week). Young also notes that the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, explicitly endorsed CRT as one of the “tools” of anti-racist teaching in a 2021 resolution, adding that “dozens of schools have reportedly used as K–5 reading material a picture book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, which presents “whiteness” as a literal devil.”
Young says the Stop WOKE Act sounds reasonable on paper, but that any speech regulation is dangerous. Therefore, she suggests, in the older grades at least it would be better to “teach the debates.” Teach students the 1619 Project and the critiques of it. Do the same with race and gender. “The problems are very real,” Young told me. “This just isn’t the way to address them.”
How not to address them, part two
I agree with Young about debate. I used to teach debate at the university level alongside logic and public speaking and I am a firm believer in sunlight-as-disinfectant as opposed to safe spaces and censorship. I am also a recent father and so I have personal concerns about some of these activist teachers who walk around like the pied piper of Hamelin—who led the city’s rats into the river with his flute but when the villagers refused to pay him he led the children, who danced off into the mountains forever.
In July, Altheria Caldera and five others wrote an opinion essay for EducationWeek titled “The Case for Woke Education,” in which she lamented that woke has become a slur used by those who argue for apolitical education and that various “Anti-CRT” laws “aim to protect teachers and students from having to encounter several truths: that racism in the United States is systemic, that it is sustained by white supremacy, and that people of color continue to be victimized by this racist system.”
Caldera singled out Florida’s Stop WOKE Act as “anti-intellectualism and anti-truth,” describing these attitudes as rejecting evidence and facts. It is encouraging that she prizes evidence and facts, since I have heard some woke activists claim that using logic and facts in one’s argument amounts to white supremacy. But this gets at two of the main problems of woke education. One is that many liberals and progressives roll their eyes when anyone uses the word “woke,” failing to understand that the activists themselves are using it. The other is that people like Caldera claim anti-CRT efforts are ahistorical or anti-truth. But as Young noted above, what parents are often upset about is not the teaching of slavery but the way it is taught.
You can talk about the ways in which certain institutions perpetuate racism and I think most parents would agree that there are institutions we can name that do so in certain circumstances. Or you can rephrase the same idea by saying America is a white supremacist society founded on the exploitation of Black bodies.
It’s often not the content of what is being said but how it is said and how that inflammatory phrasing is presented as fact, as if there is no other way to say it. Caldera concludes, “It is perfectly acceptable for a teacher to be woke—to embrace intellectualism and truth. In fact, they should be woke.”
She is arguing that being woke simply means being truthful and being truthful means talking about racism in America in the way she prefers, namely as white supremacy. And it’s this overcorrection that triggers reasonable pushback from parents. So again we see the iron law of unintended consequences playing out when activist teachers try to teach about slavery and racism, which they should do, but also try too hard to control too much of the narrative, including the vocabulary we use to discuss such issues.
By the way, Caldera’s essay opens by noting a paper she wrote in 2018, Woke Pedagogy: A Framework for Teaching and Learning, which has been downloaded over 18,192 times, more than any other paper in the journal’s history. In that paper, she argues that “Teachers must refute colorblind pedagogy in favor of woke pedagogy” and says that to do woke pedagogy requires an activist disposition, open-mindedness and the knowledge that helps teachers stay woke.
The parents of Hamelin
One of the most damaging aspects of the Vietnam War on the invading U.S. forces in the 1960s and 1970s was heroin addiction among servicemen. In 1971, congressmen Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy went to Vietnam and estimated 15% of U.S. servicemen were addicted to heroin. But in 1974, American psychiatric epidemiologist Lee Nelken Robins published Drug use by US Army enlisted men in Vietnam, in which she said 34% of U.S. servicemen used heroin while 20% were addicted.
As a result of this crisis, president Richard Nixon passed the “Operation Golden Flow” initiative, making it required for all servicemen to pass drug tests before returning home from Vietnam. This experience was one of the things that led Nixon to declare his “War on Drugs” in 1971, when he called drug abuse “public enemy number one.”
Meanwhile in the United States, a generation of youth were experimenting with psychedelic drug use, which led to the grassroots parent’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Parents felt there was an overly permissive attitude toward drugs and they wanted stricter drug laws. But as we’ve seen, laws alone don’t get results. You need to address the problem in the culture and in the classroom. This led to the “Just Say No” campaigns of the 1980s.
That was the first parents’ movement. Today we are witnessing a second one, in reaction to what is happening in U.S. schools. In May, Fortune reported that parents have launched a legal war against woke education in elite schools. One of those parents is Andrew Gutmann, a former investment banker wrote a letter two years ago to other parents at Manhattan’s elite Brearley School (where tuition is about $60,000). In his letter, he urged other parents to reject Brearley’s “obsession with race” and said he was pulling his daughter out. Brearley head Jane Fried replied in an email calling the letter “deeply offensive and harmful” and said the school was committed to being “inclusive” and “antiracist.”
Gutmann, who is running for congress on the parental rights issue in Florida’s 22nd district—which includes West Palm Beach—told me that today, the problem has become far more widespread than it was then:
Regarding Brearley, they were teaching what we now understand to be the standard playbook of antiracism/CRT. Oppressor vs oppressed, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. What you need to understand is that it is not simply that they were teaching this. It is that the mission of the school completely changed because of this. They abandoned academic excellence, free speech, open discourse in favor of a single progressive/social justice worldview from which nobody in the community (including parents) are allowed to deviate. Every single subject and every aspect of the school incorporated these ideas. Schools like Brearley (sadly most schools in the U.S. - public and private) no longer teach math, English, history, etc. for their own sake. Instead, these subjects become props for inculcating progressive values. I write and speak about this often. It is tragic what has happened to our education system. I don’t believe there is a secular K-12 school in the entire country that adheres to classical liberal values.
The long march through the schools
The problem of woke education is fraught with moral panic and overreactions on both sides. And both sides need to recognize that the other has a point. Parents have a right to be concerned about some of the things being taught to their kids. But also, these teachers are right to be concerned that not enough is being taught about racism and slavery. In 2018, Melinda Anderson wrote in an essay for The Atlantic:
A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship—with students’ lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions.
The article went on to cite data from a survey of 1,000 American high-school seniors, which found that only 8% of them could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
This is disturbing, and it shows that the woke activists are right—we do need to teach racism and slavery better. They just aren’t offering very helpful ways of doing that, and what they are offering is taking us further from achieving those goals.
In his book Moral Education, the sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that schools transmit our values and our values determine our morality. That’s why this battle matters so much. Because sure, you can school your kids at home, but you can’t socialize them there.