Busybody Republicans and their neurotic quest to control public education

Brian Chilson

Watching the unbearably tedious legislative hearing on Monday where state Sen. Dan Sullivan and other Republicans whined about diversity, equity and inclusion practices at the state’s colleges and universities (part of an inquiry requested by Sullivan), I almost felt like I needed to stage an intervention. 

What you might call the neurotic style has overtaken GOP politics in the last few years. Like, OK, this is definitely an American type: The PTA busybody nosing around and intoxicated by pettily using power to get their way. But that is an annoying type! Republicans have become the party of PTA busybodies. You can see it in Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ dismissive glare; you can hear it in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ helium sneer. And it has overtaken the Republican majority in the legislature, with Dramatic Dan Sullivan leading the charge. 

I’ve got two kids. And my main advice to parents, which honestly I think is good advice generally, is to chill out. Your kids are going to get exposed to stuff that’s different than what you teach them at home, whether it happens at school or somewhere else. Navigating that is just a part of growing up. They’ll be OK. Not all kids have a loving and supportive home environment. Not all kids have enough to eat. If you can give them that, that’s a good start. 

But Sanders and company want to go a little further and poke around at schools to make sure there’s no diversity, equity, inclusion or other indoctrination. So they engage in dreary treasure hunts for any little throwaway strand of wokeness. This is not an emotionally healthy activity, in my opinion. If you go looking hard enough for anything, you’ll find something. There are a lot of schools and a lot of hours over the course of a school year. But this hunt is just an expression of anxiety, and the thing about anxiety is that it can never be satisfied. This is why I want to stage an intervention: I am worried about the mental health of parents fretting over this. Sanders and company are just encouraging ill feeling. It’s a huge bummer.

They are also imagining that teachers follow the finer points of some curriculum guideline to the letter (I promise you, not true) and that students are paying very close attention to every tidbit in class in ways that will quickly overhaul their worldview (deeply, deeply untrue). My daughter is in first grade and the truth is she daydreams a good chunk of the day. Sanders no doubt would worry about the content of those daydreams. Wouldn’t want any diversity, equity or inclusion in the tender subconsciousness of a six-year-old.

You might recall that the Sanders administration was pressed to give actual examples of “indoctrination” after they stripped state credit from an African American Studies AP class (neurotic worries about tokens of wokeness seem to increase under certain, um, circumstances). 

The state Department of Education cooked up a remarkable document to boast that actually they had uncovered a conspiracy of indoctrination, and Sanders had come to the rescue by dropping the hammer on nefarious local schools. The document included stuff like a workshop for teachers that encouraged participants to “acknowledge that [they] harbor unconscious biases” and suggested conversations in classrooms about “systemic racism.” One school district was dinged for allowing teachers to hang a Pride flag. Or this shocker: “Code.org, which Arkansas uses to train teachers for AP Computer Science Principles courses, included instruction materials that asked teachers to address their ‘unconscious biases’ and craft an ‘equity framework.’” And so on. (There was nothing about the African American Studies class.)

The document was titled, “Indoctrination and CRT Examples in Arkansas and Gov. Sanders Administration Actions.”  

CRT stands for critical race theory. I’m not going to pretend to understand what that acronym means in the zeitgeist, but the gist is that sometimes racism is a factor in this or that, and you may miss the nuance of such factors if you try to look at something with a completely race-neutral lens. Honestly, I think everyone uses this kind of “critical” perspective sometimes, even the CRT haters, but nervous right wingers seem to think it means that people are being taught to hate being white or to screw over white people, or something. I am skeptical that’s really going on. I know a lot of white people, and I know a lot of white youths, and I know a lot of white little kids. And everyone seems fine? I don’t know. I’m sure there are self-hating whites out there, or people who hate white people, or whatever. It just doesn’t seem very common? 

Anyway, here’s another example of supposed indoctrination:

The Fayetteville School District asked students what their “gender or gender identity” is in a cultural climate survey. They also conspired to keep children’s “gender identity” secret from parents and included grammatically biologically incorrect pronouns like “they/them/theirs” as an option for students to select.

This seems harmless? It looks like teachers were just trying to be polite to students who might be going through a difficult process if they happened to be transgender or use nontraditional pronouns. But OK, some people just really don’t want to call other people their preferred pronoun with a stridency I admit I don’t totally understand. 

Be that as it may. I kept staring at that second sentence above, not just for its catastrophic prose but also the way it seems to highlight the unmoored anxiety behind these wild goose chases: “grammatically biologically incorrect pronouns.” Just look at that. That is a work of art, a mouthful of errant fussiness, a kind of belch of anti-woke agitation. Just typing it, I get the giggles. 

The sentence itself is grammatically incorrect, of course. That’s embarrassing, I guess, but whatever. It’s also one of the most clunky, meaningless bits of prose I’ve ever come across. It is not language, in the traditional sense. It is a jumbled bricolage of memes, catchphrases, talking points, PR pablum: like bullet points from a political consultant’s memo, only without bullet points. It does not work even as propaganda, which typically involves at least enough mastery to make a coherent argument. This instead is the free association of an apparatchik with no command of the language. 

I’ve been a teacher in the past, and over the years, I have graded written work by third graders, middle schoolers, high schoolers and college undergraduates. This is the ugliest misfire I’ve ever seen. I am confident we demand better from our students, at least, than our government officials. 

What might it mean for a student’s preferred pronoun to be “grammatically incorrect”? Grammar is designed not to pedantically ding people for going astray from the baseline rules, but rather to facilitate clear communication. That is worth thinking about in a situation where people are so willfully choosing to misunderstand. And then we arrive breathlessly at “biologically” (no time to pause for the needed comma when we’re in such a tizzy). Again, as a reader, I find myself at sea. Preferred nomenclature has no bearing on biology, but we have by now fallen down a hole of memes and tweeted semi-language, so it is hardly worth parsing that further.  

Finally, the word “incorrect” has a certain irony, calling to mind the phrase we used to use for “woke”: “politically correct.” And of course, that is precisely what’s going on here. Sanders and her allies are schoolmarm spies, enforcing political correctness. It’s just their politics. (As I was typing up this post yesterday, Sanders and her PC police squad banned various harmless words and phrases that ruffle her feathers from all state documents because she saw the phrase “pregnant people” on a state health department advisory about unsafe drinking water. The messaging on that document was perfectly clear — the water was unsafe — but the governor was flustered by the controversial word “people.”) 

A preferred pronoun issues no threat to grammar or biology. But it defies the regime. It is troublesome simply because it is not correct, according to our busybody nanny state overlords. We know what words we’re not allowed to use when Sanders doles out her corrections. 

This, too, is a form of indoctrination. 

A precocious 6-year-old whose parents kept Fox News on all the time might well come up with the very same phrase — “grammatically biologically incorrect pronouns!” — by accident, but I think I understand why it came from state officials who are all grown up. 

The purpose of the words is not to communicate, in the traditional sense, but rather to “trigger.” This is a psychologically strange desire. The hope is that you can come up with a phrase that causes other people emotional distress because you don’t like them. It almost never works because once you start trying to trigger — once you get a little too thirsty for other people’s pain — you wind up with nonsensical gobbledygook like the language in the education department’s document. It’s all too hamfisted. But because what you have written or said may be stupid, offensive or foolish, people will naturally object. Of course they object! Because, you know, it was stupid. But if you’re thirsty enough, you can take comfort in that objection. Triggered! 

All this seems extremely sad to me, but I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to judge what lingers behind this thirst for pain. I don’t want to begrudge anyone their hobbies. I do want to point out that once you start chasing the trigger high, you may find that you have detached yourself from whatever ideas or principles were motivating you in the first place. 

Because, if you look back through that document, I’m sorry, but these supposed indoctrination examples are so innocuous! If you don’t like the material in question, I get it, but it’s so small bore that it’s just hard for me to believe it’s worth the bedlam. There’s always going to be some aspects of some teachers or some curricula that are annoying, or don’t quite fit the way you look at the world. If you raise your kids to be open, critical and free-thinking, it will all work out. They’ll reach their own conclusions. 

I used to be a classroom teacher so I say this with love, but students — even very young students — are not looking to their teachers or to worksheets in the curricula for the cultural or political ideas that will help form their identities. A high schooler who is paying close enough attention to notice some sliver of CRT is by definition someone capable of forming their own conclusions (most, believe me, are not paying that close attention). 

Or take the kerfuffle over African American Studies and its supposed powers to bamboozle our children. I mean — isn’t it pretty obvious that the students who signed up for AP African American Studies want to be taking the class? Do you mean to tell me they’re right-wing pupils who otherwise find it shocking to explore issues of race in American history, only to be hoodwinked by a class and its undercover ideology? And if they are right-wing pupils, and they want to take that class, couldn’t we trust these students to engage with the material, even if it’s not politically correct by Sanders’ lights, and reach their own conclusions?

Our kids are precious. Of course. And we naturally care a lot about the places where they spend most of their weekdays. To further state the obvious: There could be teacher behaviors or school policies so egregious to the safety or educational opportunity of our kids that they demand a response — including from outside the district. Certainly, that is a history Little Rock knows well. But let me gently suggest that if politicians are trolling through teacher development workshop PowerPoints for some phrase that halfway hints at politically incorrect diversity, equity and inclusion, they have lost the plot. They are not seeking to protect kids, they are on a snipe hunt to feed their own appetite for aggrievement. They are refashioning parents’ deepest instincts to protect their children into an unquenchable and bottomless paranoia.

When I was in high school, my economics teacher was a hardcore right-wing idealogue and blabbed about her political ideas constantly. I guess she probably shouldn’t have done that, but: It was fine! I came out fine! When I was growing up, some of the curricula were historically inaccurate. Or misleading if you were to take note of the impacts of racism that didn’t appear (you might call such an approach ritical crace theory). Hopefully we get better. These are public schools, for the public, and we can argue along the way. We don’t need wild interventions over every little thing from controlling nanny-state governors in our local schools, but we’ll keep talking it out. This is as it’s always been. There is no crisis, no need for tossing new powers in the law to control freaks in Little Rock or endless legislative hearings seeking some example somewhere to get upset about. 

As a parent, you can’t control everything. If something is truly beyond the pale, of course, step in and fight. But there’s always going to be something you don’t love. You can’t cocoon your kids in a vanilla fortress of rightthink. It’s going to be OK. 

This post was originally published on this site