Teaching Values

Critical Perspectives on Education, Politics, and Culture

Ron Scapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000446159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Teaching Values, Ron Scapp wrests the discussion of values and values-based education away from traditionalists who have long dominated educational debates. While challenging the Right's domination of the discussion of values education, Scapp examines some issues not typically raised by educators and critics on the Left, including the positive role of citizenship and national identity in U.S. education and culture.

1.
When the Truth Is Gone

Teaching in an Age of Uncertainty

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kind, of which he is, but hee.
This is the Worlds condition now . . .

—John Donne, An Anatomy of the World

When the Truth is Found to be Lies,
And all the Joy Within You Dies.
Don't You Want Somebody to Love.
Don't You Need Somebody to Love.
Wouldn't You Love Somebody to Love.
You Better Find Somebody to Love.

—Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"

For the past twenty years or so, many Americans have worried out loud and complained about the loss of truth, with a capital "T," in our culture. Such concerns have come from all corners of the political landscape, but perhaps none as fervent or alarmist as those voiced by the religious and political right. Following the lead of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, conservative commentators and critics Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and William Bennett, have all voiced their outrage and frustration over the erosion of American values in general and education in particular. They claim, among other things, that this state of affairs is the direct result of contemporary America's rejection of the principles and tenets of the Enlightenment, the very foundation of our nation's way of life. The primary reason for this decay and loss of values is said to be due to "postmodernism" and the "tenured radicals," to use Kimball's term, who proselytize a cultural relativism, and consequent nihilism, to students across America, at every level of instruction. In the process, these postmodernists have been charged with undermining the very core of American education and the future of our democracy.

Summing up his position in his book The De-Valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Children, William Bennett claims:

[m]any of America's intellectual elite perpetrated a doctrine of de facto nihilism that cuts to the core of American traditions. . . . A lot of people forgot, and many others willfully rejected, the most basic and sensible answers to first questions, to questions about what contributes to our social well-being and prosperity, what makes for individual character and responsibility, and constitutes a "good society." (pp. 255-56)

According to Bennett and others, American educators, but especially humanities professors, have distracted students away from "the core of American traditions" and values with the skepticism and suspicion that, allegedly, comes with a postmodern perspective. Alluding to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Bennett laments that "[s]ignificant portions of American society have been culturally deconstructed" (p. 256). The impact of this deconstruction, he claims, can be witnessed everywhere in American society: schools, universities, the legal profession, politics, and so on. For Bennett and other like-minded Americans, the task at hand is the "reconstruction" of America's cultural and moral values, and getting beyond the uncertainty of postmodernism.

But, as noted earlier, the right has not been alone in its criticism. Liberal and even "left progressives" also have expressed their concerns over the moral and political fallout of postmodernity. Author and democratic socialist Barbara Ehrenreich voiced her opinion on the matter at the 1991 Socialist Scholars Conference and subsequently published it in Democratic Left, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, as "The Challenge for the Left." She suggests that

[a]t a deeper level though, any possibility of a moral perspective gets erased by a position fashionable among some of our post-modernist academics, that there can be no absolutes, no truths, and hence no grounds for moral judgments. There can't be a left if there's no basis for moral judgments, including judgments that will cut across group or gender or ethnic lines, (p. 337)

Fearing the loss of any moral authority to challenge corporate and capitalist interests, Ehrenreich exclaims her rejection of the "value-free" relativism supposedly espoused by postmodernist academics.

Progressives such as Ehrenreich who make such criticisms should not be misinterpreted as begin in a political alliance with the right, but they do indicate a shared fundamental distrust of the "consequences" of postmodernist thinking. Thus, the left as well as the right view postmodernists' inquiries into the historical and formal nature and function of concepts such as truth, reason, and rationality itself as undercutting the possibility of moral action and the teaching of values. The presumption of those from both ends of the political spectrum is that whatever postmodernism has to offer, it cannot be good for America.

Enumerating his complaints concerning the impact of postmodernism on higher education, Dinesh D'Sousa warns us, in the last chapter of his bestselling Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, that by the time a student graduates from an American college or university she or he will have been taught the following falsehoods:

that justice is simply the will of the stronger party; that standards and values are arbitrary, and the ideal of the educated person is largely a figment of bourgeois white male ideology, which should be cast aside; that individual rights are a red flag signaling social privilege, and should be subordinated to the claims of group interest; that all knowledge can be reduced to politics and should be pursued not for its own sake but for the political end of power; that convenient myths and benign lies can substitute for truth; that double standards are acceptable as long as they are enforced to the benefit of minority victims; that debates are best conducted not by rational and civil exchange of ideas, but by accusation, intimidation, and official prosecution; that the university stands for nothing in particular and has no claim to be exempt from outside pressures; and that the multiracial society cannot be based on fair rules that apply to every person, but must rather be constructed through a forced rationing of power among separatist racial groups. In short, instead of liberal education, what American students are getting is its diametrical opposite, an education in closed-rnindedness and intolerance, which is to say, illiberal education, (p. 229)

With this list of consequences, is it any wonder that postmodernism finds itself the anathema for all those committed to "properly" educating America? The perversion of education, then, as denoted by D'Sousa, stems from the loss of truth and reason, and their being replaced, according to him, by the cynical manipulation of emotion and the uncivil desire for power. This is the view of postmoderism that has so many demanding a return to a values-centered education, a return to objectivity, to truth and beauty. Of course, D'Sousa et al. never seem too bothered by any of the historical events or circumstances that might cause one to interpret things differently.

Expressing his assessment of the situation at the same Socialist Scholars Conference as Ehrenreich in 1991 and subsequently published as "Diverse New World" in the same edition of Democratic Left in the July/August 1991 volume, then Harvard professor of African American studies and philosophy of religion Cornel West challenges the views of D'Sousa. West points out that

[w]e're not naive, we know that argument and critical exchange are not the major means by which social change takes place in the world. But we recognize that it has to have a role, has to have a function. Therefore, we will trash older notions of objectivity, and not act as if one group or community or one nation has a god's eye view of the world. Instead we will utilize forms of intersubjectivity that facilitate critical exchange even as we recognize that none of us are free of presuppositions and prejudgments. We will put our arguments on the table and allow them to be interrogated and contested. The quest for knowledge without presuppositions, the quest for certainty, the quest for dogmatism and orthodoxy and rigidity is over. (pp. 331-32)

West directly confronts D'Sousa by boldly stating that "we will trash older notions of objectivity" and by proclaiming that the quest for certainty, dogmatism, orthodoxy, and rigidity is over. But far from trashing argument and critical exchange, West acknowledges the need for intellectual and political dialogue. In addition, he also asserts the need for the utilization of various forms of "intersubjectivity," that is to say, different voices and perspectives, which in turn can facilitate the very critical, and civil, exchange sought by D'Sousa. The postmodernist's rejection of truth with a capital "T," then, is not so much a rejection of intellectual rigor, inquiry, and values as much as a refusal to acquiesce in the prevailing dogma that has in fact excluded many from full participation in the search for meaning and value.

That this position strikes some as politically dangerous to the security of the status quo is fair enough, but to condemn this view as undermining American education and rendering students closed-minded and intolerant ignores the political and intellectual history that such a view challenges. What D' Sousa and Bennett state as their fear, a political ideology indifferent to truth and values, masks their desire to preserve the political regime challenged by postmodernists, a challenge that does not throw "truth" out the window. As Michel Foucault, one of postmodernism's icons, points out in an interview with Francois Ewald, subsequently titled "The Concern for Truth" for the French journal, Magazine littéraire 207;

[n]othing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent to truth; but nothing is more dangerous than a political system that claims to lay down the truth. The function of "telling the truth" must not take the form of law, just as it would be pointless to believe that it resides by right in the spontaneous interplay of communication. The task of telling the truth is an endless labor: to respect it in all its complexity is an obligation which no power can do without—except by imposing the silence of slavery, (p. 267)

The challenge that many postmodernists have made is the challenge of honoring the very obligation that Foucault speaks of, that of respecting truth in all its complexity. It is perhaps the rendering complex what was previously accepted as "the simple truth" that so disturbs and frightens those who believe postmodernism is sounding the death knell for values.

Clearly we live during an age in which "new Philosophy calls all in doubt" and this has caused disruptions and discontinuities. Unfortunately, the resulting challenges to the hegemony of Eurocentrism and phalocentrism voiced by feminists and antiracists, among others, have caused a blacklash, a nostalgic longing for the truth of things. With respect to education, this blacklash has been expressed by those demanding a cultural literacy that articulates the truth and values of our culture. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. puts it in his much-celebrated book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know:

[t]o thrive, a child needs to learn the traditions of the particular human society and culture it is born into. Like children everywhere, American children need traditional information at a very early age. (p. 31)

This is the view that D'Sousa, Bennett, et al. offer as the only viable alternative to the destructive forces of postmodernism, which, they assert, continue to erode our belief in American traditions and values. Of course, Hirsch, now famous for his essential list of names, phrases, dates, and concepts, argues for a "cultural literacy" based on the traditional information one needs to know in order to succeed in the United States—indeed, what the United States needs to succeed, that is, to survive.

Hirsch prophesizes that

[w]e will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else. (p. 32)

Accordingly, unless we learn a shared history, we will not be able to effectively communicate with each other and do the work necessary to ensure the future of our democracy. Postmodernists are charged with threatening this noble project by trashing the validity of the traditions that would make up our "shared background knowledge" and by imposing all sorts of new, culturally relative, values.

The question here is not whether a "shared background knowledge" is important to the workings of our democracy; of course such knowledge is valuable. We need, however, to examine what gets considered to be part of this "shared" knowledge, what gets included and excluded, and by whom. What Hirsch and the hundreds of thousands of parents and teachers who bought his book (primarily for the "list") never ask are the following questions: Who gets to determine the "shared" knowledge? Who gets to compose the list? And further, What general (read "national") meaning can such a list have?

Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues in her essay "Cult-Lit: Hirsch, Literacy, and the National Culture" that

[t]he method by which the List was generated is, in any case, exceedingly mysterious. According to Hirsch, it is not "a complete catalogue of American knowledge," but "is intended to illustrate the character and range of the knowledge literate Americans tend to share" and to "establish guideposts that can be of practical use to teachers, students, and all others who need to know our literate culture" (which is, of course, according to Hirsch, "every American"). But one might ask (granting the double absurdity of a specifically "American knowledge" and a possible catalog of any actual human knowledge), what sorts of persons are the "literate Americans" whose knowledge is illustrated or represented by the List? How, for example, could one distinguish them from Americans who merely know how to read? And how does Hirsch himself know what "the literate reader" knows? (p. 86)

The questions asked by Smith should be cause for concern to ever...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. When the Truth Is Gone Teaching in an Age of Uncertainty
• 2. Happy to Be Nappy
• 3. From Substandard to Nonstandard English Getting beyond the Morality of Speaking Right
• 4. Go Tell it on the Mount
• 5. But Is He Straight? Identity, Teaching, and the Simple Acts of Privilege
• 6. Why Multiculturalism (Still)?
• Epilogue Teaching in an Extra-Moral Sense
• Bibliography
• Index