The same ideology underlying the demands of student radicals and the university’s subsequent reformations is now forming and shaping American public schools.
The same ideology underlying the demands of student radicals and the university’s subsequent reformations is now forming and shaping American public schools.
T he 1960s takeover of American universities has now come for our institutions of K–12 education.
In some cases, this statement is quite literal. Bill Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground became a revered professor of education after his time leading a terroristic organization. Similarly, their principal bomb maker, Cathlyn Wilkerson, became a high-school math teacher for two decades.
More figuratively, however, I mean that the same ideology underlying the demands of student radicals and the university’s subsequent reformations are now shaping — though it might be more accurate to say misshaping — American public schools.
Henry Giroux, an influential professor of education, summarized the accomplishments of the 1960s student protests:
Many colleges reduced the number of so-called breadth requirements; students won both the right to initiate new courses and a greater voice in educational governance, and they spurred the formation of a plethora of new programs in black, latino, and women’s studies.
In other words, the students hollowed out the commitment to a traditional body of knowledge worth knowing and replaced it with two things: student control and a focus on immutable characteristics. These two directives now drive K–12-education reform.
Regarding the focus on immutable characters, almost daily, another story circulates of high schoolers segregated by race under the guise of “affinity groups” or districts of students asked to dismantle “heteronormativity.” The National Council of Teachers of English argues that English teachers ought to “decenter” reading novels to instead focus on sexism and racism. And lest we think the sciences or mathematics are free of such ideological tinkering, Jefferson County Public Schools advanced an “anti-racist math” initiative this past summer.
Where the 1960s saw universities create new departments focused on the study of race and gender, K–12 schools have found ways to wedge these concepts into seemingly every class — from individual examples of activities to district-wide initiatives.
Perhaps less reported upon but no less consequential, student autonomy has come to run our public schools. Popular curricula such as Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study run literature classes entirely on student choice — inevitably young-adult fiction. Students spend math and science classes subjected to “discovery learning,” wherein they’re expected to experiment their way into learning geometry or germ theory. (Surprise: They never do.) During social studies, in place of learning traditional history, students are expected to research political issues of their choosing in “action civics” classes.
Underneath both trends is a philosophy that seeks to recast the role of schools: They are no longer to transmit the best that has been thought and said but instead foster political action and inculcate “correct” political opinions.
The “Port Huron Statement,” perhaps the most influential and famous statement of the 1960s student protests, makes clear that this, too, was the ultimate aim of the 1960s protests. The statement speaks derisively of universities “searching for truth” and instead envisions them as “the beginning point” of their new left agenda. Educational institutions are not to be locations of academic training, but advocacy and radical social change. According to the authors of the statement, the central question scholars ought to ask is, “If we wanted to change society, how would we do it?”
Despite the similarities in intent, the actors forcing these changes differ, which provides insight in how conservatives ought to repel the modern institutional takeover. Where students forced the radical changes of the ’60s from the bottom up, today, administrators, DEI consultants, professors of education, and teachers are forcing these changes onto students from the top down. Students show up wanting to learn civics or grammar, and our institutions hand them curricula and activities replete with political progressivism.
As I’ve written about here and elsewhere, these ideas begin in teacher-prep programs. So-called wokeness finds much of its genesis in colleges of education. That is a longer essay for another time, but consider just one example: The academic article “Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” a seminal essay that mainstreamed the concept of microaggressions, was written by a team of professors of education at Columbia’s Teachers College, the most prestigious teacher-training program in the country. The great Robin DeAngelo herself, American czar of progressive racial politics, is a professor of education. The radical and fringe progressive philosophies informing the student protests of the 1960s became the assumed philosophy within which schools of education began to carry out their scholarship.
This centralized, top-down nature of American K–12 education takeover does make the task before us slightly clearer than just stalling the changes of the 1960s. There are clear targets this time — schools of education, curriculum companies, woke administrators, school boards, unions — and that gives me some hope that we can regain some sanity in our schools, however fleeting that hope may be.