As a ideological and political strategy, creating a simplistic caricature to attack and drum up support has proven to be extremely effective for conservatives in the US. Notably, a key caricature to attack in higher education has been Critical Race Theory (CRT):
We put “CRT” in quotation marks throughout this report because so often the conflict campaign’s definition of “CRT” (like its description of actual K–12 practice) is a caricatured distortion by loud opponents as self-appointed “experts.” The conflict campaign thrives on caricature — on often distorting altogether both scholarship and K–12 educators’ efforts at accurate and inclusive education, deeming it (and particularly K–12 efforts to discuss the full scope of racism in our nation) wholly inappropriate for school.
Pollock, M., & Rogers, J., et al. (2022, January). The conflict campaign: Exploring local experiences of the campaign to ban “Critical Race Theory” in public K-12 education in the U.S., 2020-2021. UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access.
The caricature of CRT being leveraged to dismantle higher education among conservatives and Republicans is nothing like the theory itself; further, the presence or even influence of CRT in higher education instruction and courses is wildly overstated by the attacks as well.
But caricature works in public rhetoric designed to score ideological/political points.
Using caricature from the right to attack education perceived as being liberal has a very long tradition from public critics of progressive education and John Dewey to the more recent scapegoating of whole language and balanced literacy in the Reading War.
Ideological criticism in education based in caricature isn’t valid and does far more harm than good. A current example is the outsized attacks on three cueing (see V. here) that is a foundational part of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement and legislation across the US.
A window into a much more serious problem in education can be found in Lou LaBrant’s criticism of the Project Method:
The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. (p. 245)
It is doubtful, however, whether playing with toy furniture will produce in the average adult an ambition to own his own house, or whether enjoyment in carving a boat for the Lady of the Lake will induce one to read Cavender’s House. Quite the contrary may be the result. In encouraging much of handwork in connection with the reading of literature, it seems to the writer, wrong emphasis is made. The children may be interested, yes. But it makes considerable difference whether the interest be such as to lead to more reading or more carving. Soap is doubtless an excellent material, and important in present civilization. The question is whether carving out of soap a castle or a horse or a clown will stimulate interest in the drama, or even in daily bathing….On the contrary, the need of the reader is to secure a picture from the written word. (p. 245)
That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft. (p. 246)
LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), 244-246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/803664
If we fast-forward about 60 years, Lisa Delpit offered similar criticism of workshop approaches that she noted often failed minoritized and poor students who had different lives outside of school than more affluent students who were often white:
Good liberal intentions are not enough.
Although the problem is not necessarily inherent in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them … If such explicitness is not provided to students, what it feels like to people who are old enough to judge is that there are secrets being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach. A doctoral student of my acquaintance was assigned to a writing class to hone his writing skills. The student was placed in the section led by a white professor who utilized a process approach, consisting primarily of having the students write essays and then assemble into groups to edit each other’s papers. That procedure infuriated this particular student. He had many angry encounters with the teacher about what she was doing.
Lisa Delpit on Power and Pedagogy
Conservatives latched onto that criticism and quickly (and falsely) aligned Delpit with the basic skills ideologues:
I do not advocate a simplistic ‘basic skills’ approach for children outside of the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural orientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to family background, but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines.
Lisa Delpit on Power and Pedagogy
Both LaBrant and Delpit in their criticism represent the reductive faddism of instruction that exists in education, should be criticized, but like attacks based in caricature, should not be confused for the authentic version of the practice.
There are two dominant realities in education that reach back over a century—the failure to translate research and science into classroom practice (the “considerable gap” identified by LaBrant in 1947) and the packaged commercial versions of complex educational theory or philosophy that renders instruction reductive, ineffective, but efficient.
For example, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels often laments that his use of “best practice” quickly became a branding term for commercial education materials, rendering the term useless and the practices pale versions of what research supports.
LaBrant bristled at the Project Method that became a hot thing to do at the exclusion of students reading and writing in their English classes; LaBrant was prone to far less glitzy approaches as can be noted in her scholarly titles: Writing Is Learned by Writing (1957).
Many decades before reading and writing workshop became brands, LaBrant was practicing free reading and students writing by choice in workshop settings. Once you read through LaBrant’s classroom practices, you notice that none of that meant ignoring so-called skills and certainly that didn’t mean letting students do as they please with no mentoring or accountability (the context Delpit rightfully confronted).
While caricature attacks are mostly ideological and political—lacking any real interest in reforming practice for the benefit of students—education does have a reductive practice problem, faddism and simply enough examples of misunderstanding or learning contexts that limit good practice to justify criticism.
Fueling that more credible need for criticism, I think, is the “my instruction can beat up your instruction” approach to educational debate.
Instruction one-upmanship is the wrong way to address how to serve the individual needs of all students because it misses the point of instruction.
“My instruction can beat up your instruction” feeds the idea that there is The Right Instruction out there if only we’d find it and implement it; “my instruction can beat up your instruction” is silver-bullet thinking.
However, as Dewey, LaBrant, and Delpit would assert, instruction is right when it serves the student. There simply is no one right way existing decontextualized from students.
Again, let’s we return to LaBrant, this time exasperated about her need to make a case for students writing:
It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need. Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)
LaBrant, L. (1953, Nov). Writing is learned by writing. Elementary English, 30(7), 417-420. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41384113
The irony here is that for decades, notably in the context of literacy, too many advocates overemphasize discrete skills instruction (often called “direct instruction”) and too many practitioners since the 1980s have misunderstood “workshop” to the exclusion of addressing students’ need to develop skills.
The education debates, then, suffer from oversimplification (caricature) that leads to the same crisis/reform cycles we have experienced repeatedly since LaBrant took aim at the Project Method.
As a first-year writing professor, I can attest that LaBrant’s concerns from 70 years ago ring true today; most students have written way too little and have received almost no direct writing instruction about writing by choice and authentically.
Still.
The problems and the causes are complicated.
The solutions are complicated as well.
But we remain trapped in the simplistic—caricature, faddism, and “my instruction can beat up your instruction.”
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dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 