Citizens, not sheep
by Tom Sullivan
Emma Gonzalez speaks at the Rally to Support Firearm Safety Legislation in Fort Lauderdale, February 17, 2018. Photo by Barry Stock via Creative Commons.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) suggested in a tweet Wednesday, “We claim a Judea-Christian heritage but celebrate arrogance & boasting. & worst of all we have infected the next generation with the same disease.” That last barb seemed aimed at students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They returned to school for the first time Wednesday after a mass shooting on Valentine’s Day claimed 17 of their classmates.
Their outspokenness and activism in the wake of the shooting, and especially their skill in using social and traditional media for organizing to fight gun violence, has the NRA and its shills knocked back on their heels.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick knows why. No, these “poised, articulate, well-informed, and seemingly preternaturally mature student leaders” are not participants in a conspiracy financed by George Soros:
Despite the gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts, civics, and enrichment are zeroed out. In no small part because the school is more affluent than its counterparts across the country (fewer than 23 percent of its students received free or reduced-price lunches in 2015–16, compared to about 64 percent across Broward County Public Schools) these kids have managed to score the kind of extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United States. These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.
Part of the reason the Stoneman Douglas students have become stars in recent weeks is in no small part due to the fact that they are in a school system that boasts, for example, of a “system-wide debate program that teaches extemporaneous speaking from an early age.” Every middle and high school in the district has a forensics and public-speaking program. Coincidentally, some of the students at Stoneman Douglas had been preparing for debates on the issue of gun control this year, which explains in part why they could speak to the issues from day one.
Senior David Hogg, accused by online conspiracy sites of being a “crisis actor,” is in fact the news director of the school’s broadcast journalism program. Other student leaders come from the school’s drama program. Instant media star Emma Gonzalez read her speech in Fort Lauderdale from the back of her AP Government notes.
This is not the kind of education that breeds compliance, but citizen engagement. Thus, Rubio’s swipe and the Washington Examiner’s accusation that rather than engaging in “substantive policy debate,” Hogg and Gonzalez have “succumbed to the easy allure of partisan activism and demagoguery.” Better they learn to make money for their employers than trouble for their betters elders.
As Lithwick observes, this is not the kind of education that turns out cogs for the corporate machine, but rather the kind that nurtures the sort of citizens the founders hoped would lead their new country. Its survival depended upon it.
Something I wrote here three years ago:
America’s founding ideas were cultivated and distilled by people of the Enlightenment, probably the best educated the world has ever produced. Men mostly. White men. Wealthy white men.
Two and a quarter centuries later, another collection of wealthy white men want America to return to those roots, where only wealthy, white people will be educated in wealthy, white, business-friendly ways. State supports for low tuition rates “distort” the market. Costs must rise to drive students who can still afford it into the more remunerative majors. Tech schools for the rest.
Lithwick concludes:
To be sure, the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being vivisected without remorse or mercy. But unless you’re drinking the strongest form of Kool-Aid, there is simply no way to construct a conspiracy theory around the fact that students who were being painstakingly taught about drama, media, free speech, political activism, and forensics became the epicenter of the school-violence crisis and handled it creditably. The more likely explanation is that extracurricular education—one that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing and rankings—creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship.
What upsets Rubio and the Examiner is that Stoneman Douglas students don’t know their places. Schools that are preparing students to serve their country rather than the economy are not fulfilling their mission. Their issue with Stoneman Douglas is it is not turning out sheep.
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