The Looking Glass world of Ron DeSantis
Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina has a reputation for being a very, very conservative school. But not the most conservative school in town. Rumor had it that a local Bible college forbade its male students from having photos of their mothers in their rooms lest they lead to impure thoughts.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want to forbid impure thoughts in his state’s schools. Heaven forfend that little ones (and older ones) might have impure thoughts about their country’s exceptionalism and history. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said at his trial for corrupting youth. DeSantis wants to ensure Florida’s youth go uncorrupted and their lives unexamined.
At The Bulwark, Mike St. Thomas who heads the English Department at Rhode Island’s Portsmouth Abbey School, considers what it means to force Florida classrooms to be more conservative, to not to teach AP African American Studies, and to pass such (deliberately?) vague laws that teachers must walk on eggshells around ideas that might lead to thoughts DeSantis deems impure.
Himself raised a conservative Catholic, St. Thomas nonetheless found the majority liberal atmosphere of academia not as oppressive as conservatives allege. This contrasted with what he found when turoring a local home school senior writing a senior research paper:
But I soon found out that my student’s curriculum did not allow him to choose his own topic. It did not even allow him to choose his own argument—the homeschool program provided all its students with an identical pre-written thesis statement, which they were then instructed to copy verbatim into the first paragraph of their final paper. The thesis went something like this: The Roe v. Wade decision was both unethical and unconstitutional and should therefore be overturned. It was the students’ job to pick up this baton and run a set course with it, drawing upon legal decisions and political philosophy specified by the curriculum itself to provide support for the predetermined conclusion.
My disbelief soon gave way to anger. I, too, considered myself pro-life, but I was incredulous that that belief—any belief, really—would be used to justify this infantilizing treatment of a capable high school senior. Looking back on it now, this was my first conscious encounter with programmatic ideology in an educational setting, my experience in graduate school notwithstanding. The idea that my student’s homeschool curriculum was designed to dogmatically advance ended up disfiguring the proper relationship between curriculum and student. Not only was it blatant indoctrination, but it could also probably be construed as a form of plagiarism—albeit one designed by Kafka or Orwell, where a student must lift just the right ideas from just the right sources and pass them off as his or her own sincere opinions. I helped my student with the paper, but it tore me up inside. It still bothers me to this day.
DeSantis means to turn Florida into one large home school by banning disappoved ideas. Which ideas? Prohibited item 7 in the Stop WOKE Act, for example:
An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.
Anyone who has read Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” has felt anguish and psychological distress over the dehumanizing of disfavored classes from India to Germany to the United States. That’s the point, as much as classical tragedies evoke tears. To know yourself better and to experience the broader world through new eyes are goals of education. Just not in Florida.
Are universities liberal-leaning like Bob Jones is right-leaning? Sure, St. Thomas writes, but
In graduate school, I saw up close the predominance of progressive politics and “intersectionality,” an erstwhile academic term of art that has become a much larger cultural shibboleth, in the university setting. In many ways—ironically, given its commitment to diversity—my program was a homogeneous environment to learn in. Even so, I would choose it without hesitation over the bleak paradigm that gave rise to the homeschool research-paper edict. The department was very liberal, but by and large, the professors treated my arguments on their own merits, encouraged me to read widely and think deeply, and helped me both pursue my own interests and better articulate what I had to say about them. Though academic communities of like-minded individuals can skew toward cultish conformity (as even some progressives acknowledge), mine did not: Though culturally lopsided, the atmosphere was not coercive. That would have made it, in a word, unacademic.
How does one go about banning an idea from a place where ideas are meant to be explored, examined, and critiqued? DeSantis’s efforts are bound to fail, of course, if success is measured by anything resembling the academic standards of open inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and reasoned debate. But political success is another matter entirely. DeSantis is using the Trump playbook, which means the goalposts are movable, the better to suit those who wield the power.
Florida House Bill 999 which seeks to limit diversity efforts even bans the word democracy from its text, preferring the conservative formulation, “education for citizenship of the constitutional republic” (three times in its 23 pages).
“That pedagogy, as I’ve tried to make clear,” St. Thomas writes, “does not aim to help students think for themselves. After all, why bother with that if minority rule, rather than democracy, is the goal?”
Q.E.D. Is that Latin abbreviation too elitist?
Minority rule, the conservative goal, is a looking glass inversion of classic democracy. That’s why democracy must be banned and constitutional republic substituted. Our slave constitution’s compromise allows a minority of the population to enjoy majority representation in the U.S. Senate and electoral college. As their God intended.