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Education

The Politics of Calling for No Politics

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[Header Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash]

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (HBO Documentaries, 2013) offers a window into the intersections of music, religion, and politics in the context of Vladimir Putin’s Russia:

On Feb. 21, 2012, members of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, donning their colorful trademark balaclavas, or ski masks, participated in a 40-second “punk prayer protest” on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral before being detained. Arrested and tried for trespassing, wearing “inappropriate” sleeveless dresses and disrupting social order, Nadia, Masha and Katia were accused of religious hatred in a trial that reverberated around the world and transformed the face of Russian society.

The film ends with two of the three band members still in prison, their unwavering ethical statements expressed in court haunting viewers along with the sometimes shocking and always confrontational performance art detailed in the backgrounds of these young women.

As I have written before, the expression of political commitments is often denied in certain contexts, notably for educators. The ongoing narrative around Pussy Riot triggers, I suspect, thoughts of the Dixie Chicks, an American country/pop group who watched their fame turn to infamy by a single political comment:

It was 10 years ago this week — as the country was barreling toward war with Iraq — that Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, stood in front of a packed house in London and said:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Especially since the politically charged counter-culture 1960s when US popular music merged with making social and political commentary, musicians and musical groups have capitalized on and suffered under their choices about being political or not. Athens alternative group R.E.M. and California-based CAKE are but two groups who have often worn their politics on their sleeves, both garnering and alienating their fans.

For musicians, the argument runs toward a purist view of entertainment: Just entertain, detractors exclaim. This purist view, ironically, is a political statement, one that determines for all musicians, all artists the singular role of art, a sort of art for art’s sake. A long tradition supports this view, one confronted by John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'”

The British Romantics argued for the immutability of art in its pursuit of beauty, even over this life. But other poets have seen quite a different world, and quite a different view of poetry. Andrew Marvell urges his coy mistress: “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”

From Keats to Marvell there is a sexual politics at play, underneath competing views of the roles and purposes of art. A parallel debate exists about the rightful place of politics in the classroom.

Stanley Fish and the Politics of “Academicizing”

Stanley Fish plays the same note over and over in Save the World on Your Own Time, a purist view of being academic: “That’s what intellectual work is all about, the evaluation, not the celebration, of interests, beliefs, and identities” (p. 11). Fish’s view of academics is “simple” (his word) as it entails only bodies of knowledge and analysis of those bodies of knowledge.

Fish also claims his argument that educators must be apolitical in the classroom is a minority view, an assertion that has some credibility at the university level (although not much), but is completely off-base when applied to K-12 teachers. Traditional and current expectations for teachers remain inside a belief that teaching can and should be objective—the teacher persona entirely divested from the politics of the person assuming that role.

In essence, Fish is embracing and even celebrating the phrase “merely academic” as he sees academic pursuits in their purest sense disassociated from the real world.

While I do not want to revisit Fish’s discounting the argument that everything is political (which he deals with multiple times and in a somewhat uneven way), I want to confront two problems I see with continuing to argue that teachers should avoid being political in the classroom.

My first concern lies with Fish’s framing of the purposes of education. His definition of academics is certainly compelling and shared by many, but equally credible educators embrace a different view of education, one couched squarely in and of the world. The social reconstructionists of the early 20th century embraced education as a lever for changing the world. Social justice and critical educators also start with the premise that education is historically bound and inherently political, as Kincheloe (2005) explains:

Thus, proponents of critical pedagogy understand that every dimension of schooling and every form of educational practice are politically contested spaces. Shaped by history and challenged by a wide range of interest groups, educational practice is a fuzzy concept as it takes place in numerous settings, is shaped by a plethora of often-invisible forces, and can operate even in the name of democracy and justice to be totalitarian and oppressive. (p. 2)

To take Fish’s apolitical academic pose in the classroom becomes a political act of maintaining the status quo, the norms, regardless of any instances of injustice. Within Fish’s parameters of fields of knowledge and analysis, the politics of who decides is left unchecked, unacknowledged.

For critical educators, there is a moral imperative to move beyond fixed bodies of knowledge and technical analysis, thus moving toward raising student awareness that some agent(s) of power drive(s) a consensus within a field as an initial step to providing that student opportunities to develop her agency either within that consensus or against it.

In its simplest form, Fish appears comfortable with the disassociated academic environment in which acquisition of content (Freire’s “banking” concept) and analysis are all that a teacher should approach. This appears valid only if Fish’s definition of what academics should be is also embraced.

Thus, my first concern is that Fish has every right to his definition of academics and the role of the teacher within that, but he doesn’t have the right to define academics for me or anyone else.

My argument about the role of the teacher is also couched in a tradition that embraces education as social reconstruction and critical pedagogy, seeking social justice; thus, the role of the teacher is necessarily political.

That brings me to my second concern—Fish’s extended discusion of postmodernism and his dualistic, and distorted, representation of social justice, critical educators.

Fish uses Mark Bracher to represent educators who embrace “everything is political,” and builds to a powerful and somewhat appropriate comment: “In [Bracher’s] view teaching is indoctrination and the only question is, will it be our indoctrination or theirs?” (p. 176).

And it is here I both agree with Fish and have to take exception to him. If his characterization of Bracher is accurate (I’m not going to argue about that), then I agree with Fish and share his concern about anyone who sees teaching as necessarily indoctrination. To conflate “all teaching is political” with “all teaching is indoctrination,” however, is falling into a false and misleading dualistic trap.

I also agree with Fish that the classroom should never be partisan. I have made this argument before, but calling for political teaching is not calling for partisan politics in the classroom:

I will concede and even argue that classrooms, teachers, and education in general should avoid being partisan—in that teachers and their classrooms should not be reduced to mere campaigning for a specific political party or candidate. And this, in fact, is what I believe most people mean (especially teachers) when they argue for education not to be political.

But, especially now, we must stop conflating partisan and political, and come to terms with both the inherent political and oppressive call for teachers not to be political and the inevitable fact that being human and being a teacher are by their nature political.

That said, critical educators reject Fish’s “academicizing” and education as indoctrination; as Kincheloe (2005) clarifies:

Recognition of these educational politics suggests that teachers take a position and make it understandable to their students. They do not, however, have the right to impose these positions on their students [emphasis in original]….

In this context it is not the advocates of critical pedagogy who are most often guilty of impositional teaching but many of the mainstream critics themselves. When mainstream opponents of critical pedagogy promote the notion that all language and political behavior that oppose the dominant ideology are forms of indoctrination, they forget how experience is shaped by unequal forms of power. To refuse to name the forces that produce human suffering and exploitation is to take a position that supports oppression and powers that perpetuate it. The argument that any position opposing the actions of dominant power wielders is problematic. It is tantamount to saying that one who admits her oppositional political sentiments and makes them known to students is guilty of indoctrination, while one who hides her consent to dominant power and the status quo it has produced from her students is operating in an objective and neutral manner. Critical pedagogy wants to know who’s indoctrinating whom. (p. 11)

Embracing political transparency as an educator is rejecting both apolitical posturing and indoctrination.

Ultimately, I do support Fish’s right to his view of education and the role of the teacher, just as I support those musicians and artists who seek entertainment and art for the sake of entertainment and art.

But I remain in solidarity with the Pussy Riots, R.E.M.s, CAKEs, and critical educators who see education as integral to not just life, but a better life—as complicated an endeavor as that is fraught with the possibility that we make in our sincere efforts mistakes.

Being fully human is embracing our essential political nature, and as a teacher, I must be fully human.

Bessie, Democracy, Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform, Equity, Meritocracy, Poverty, Workers

Middle-Class Fear: Disaster Capitalism and the Threat of Poverty

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Toward the end of HBO’s documentary American Winter, Brandon is finally offered a job after viewers have watched him and his wife Pam struggle against Brandon losing his job, resulting in their being unable to pay their rent and having to live with Pam’s mother.

When Brandon is told he has the job, his new boss notes Brandon is overqualified, but Brandon eagerly explains that he is thankful for the work and committed to do whatever he can to be a good worker—despite the cut in pay and drop in job status not in his plans as a young man and husband seeking the American Dream.

In a May Experience course (a three-week mini-semester after the traditional academic calendar at my university) built on education documentaries and confronting the connection between education and poverty, two of the most powerful films include HBO documentaries—Hard Times at Douglass High and Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later. Just as these works rise above the generally poor examinations of education found among education documentaries, American Winter is another HBO success, a thoughtful and confrontational exploration of poverty against the backdrop of the American Dream as it is being tarnished by disaster capitalism [1].

The scene above with Brandon and a few other aspects of the documentary give me pause, but first, I want to highlight how the film overwhelmingly succeeds.

The place of American Winter is Portland, Oregon, and the  situation, the wake of the 2008 economic downturn that swept across the U.S. and the world. But the single greatest achievement of the film is the focus on eight families (ironically also the most troubling aspect as I will discuss below) who put “people just like us” faces on the consequences of disaster capitalism and force the audience to reconsider stereotypes of people trapped in the clutches of poverty.

The people of these narratives are overwhelmingly white and entirely from the middle and working classes—simultaneously, literally not “people just like us” (considering the increasing racial diversity of the country) but also the characteristics historically associated with the idealized middle class of the American Dream myth. It is both important and problematic that the families in this film are not victims of generational poverty, but real-world models of people who have embraced and achieved, although momentarily, some elements of that American Dream—education, careers, homes or the promise of home ownership, marriage, children, and, not to be ignored in the background throughout the video, an abundance of assorted material possessions that can be found in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms across America.

Punctuating these stories are job loss, eviction, homelessness, hunger, sickness, and the frail as well as dwindling safety nets of government, church, and private organizations.

Documentaries, like all forms of nonfiction texts, are never unbiased, and always some political and ideological lens for observing a phenomenon. Too often documentaries are shoddy, careless, and misleading. American Winter wears its ideology on its sleeve, but does so effectively and with a level of integrity that lends it credibility even for those who don’t share its social justice politics.

The families are allowed primarily to speak for themselves, literally and through a patient camera following them as they wilt beneath the weight of joblessness and homelessness—especially when the children speak, cry, and personify the incredible inequity of how burdensome healthcare can be through no fault of those who find themselves sick (for example, Chelsea’s battle with bleeding ulcers leaves her mother Shanon facing $49,000 in medical bills while the family is otherwise destitute).

The film also weaves clear and confrontational statistics throughout the stories of the families. The blunt facts and harsh experiences in this documentary present a different picture than political leaders, the media, and the public tend to embrace and perpetuate: Poverty, joblessness, homelessness, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and seeking out social services are not the consequences of flawed individuals, but the result of systemic inequity in America’s government and economy.

The idealized American Dream may never have been a credible cultural foundation, but American Winter convincingly forces viewers to recognize that democracy and capitalism have been consumed by disaster capitalism. And here are some of the questions the film does raise as well as some of the problems embedded in an otherwise ambitious and even radical project.

“Disaster capitalism” [2] is a term associated with Noami Klein, as she explains:

People spontaneously started using “disaster capitalism” to describe what was happening with what they were seeing around them because it was so clear that this disaster was being harnessed to push through a radical vision of totally unrestricted markets. And Bush didn’t make too much of a secret of it when he announced that his idea of reconstructing the Gulf Coast was to turn it into a tax-free, free-enterprise zone.

What the book is doing that’s new is it is connecting these contemporary capitalisms, which I think most of us can easily see in Iraq and in New Orleans, and saying actually this isn’t just some twisted invention of the Bush White House. That actually there is a history. Every time there has been a major leap forward for this fundamentalist version of capitalism that really doesn’t see a role for the state, the ground has been prepared by some kind of shock.

In American Winter, the disaster is the economic downturn, but in New Orleans, the disaster was natural, Hurricane Katrina. Portland and New Orleans [3] also share a central mechanism of disaster capitalism: A disaster creates the opportunity for a workforce to be erased, the job market then contracts, and a workforce is rebuilt in reduced circumstances for the workers—lower wages, part-time positions instead of full-time employment, an absence of benefits, service positions replacing skill and managerial positions.

The events in Portland and New Orleans are stark examples that the workforce problem in the U.S. is not a lack of skilled and eager workers, but an artificially contracting business model that benefits the 1% with American workers as interchangeable widgets.

While the focus on the plight of the American worker is needed and vivid in American Winter, one consequence of the choice to examine American workers dropping into poverty is that poverty is regrettable and something to be addressed only because it can (and did) happen to the working and middle class—in other words, generational poverty is left at the side of this film and the corrosive myth that generational poverty is the fault of those in poverty remains untouched.

In fact, as the viewers’ sympathy for the eight families increases, it seems entirely likely that people in generational poverty may be viewed even more harshly than before because poverty sits as a middle-class fear in the film. The deficit and demonizing perspectives of poverty are not challenged in the film and may be unintentionally strengthened.

In its purest form, capitalism may be viewed as needing all  citizens having access to some relatively balanced reserve of capital for that consumer market to thrive, but disaster capitalism is a corruption of the distribution of capital, thriving in fact on the threat of poverty as motivation for low-wage, mind-numbing and soul-draining work. Disaster capitalism is hurt less by some having no or little capital than by the absence of poverty, an absence that would lift the necessary threat that maintains a culture of fear and a frantic pace that distracts the 99% while the 1% play.

Many scenes in American Winter haunt me, but few as much as Brandon, reduced and broken, at the end in a scene that likely was intended as one glimmer of light in a truly dark winter for these families.

But Brandon—like many of the children in these families—personifies how disaster capitalism and consumerism have created an existence whereby our humanity is almost entirely anchored to who we are as workers. Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self.

Ultimately, that is the greatest disaster in disaster capitalism.

[1] Listen to Steve Hargadon interview Adam Bessie and see Bessie/Archer graphic journalism series on disaster capitalism and education reform (G.E.R.M.):

[3] See Sarah Carr’s Hope against Hope, which examines how charter schools replaced the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina.