Two years ago, I wrote a column called “What Would Socrates Say?” Ironically, a recent piece in the New York Times by Ezekiel Emanuel and Harun Kucuk, both faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, caught my eye: It was called “Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato.” Their commentary captured most of my increasing concerns about America’s education sector.
When I wrote that column I’d taught for a year at a university in Thailand. It was a rewarding experience for me and my students, most of whom were Asian. Their education generally involved being quiet unless called on by the teacher. When that happened intimidated students whispered variations on what the teachers had said, devoid of conviction, originality, or Aha! moments.
“That was not my style,” I wrote in a memoir about teaching in Thailand. “I called on students to interpret literature’s plots and themes, to question their classmates and me, to defend their own ideas, to think critically. Then I watched them light up and smile with satisfaction when I agreed with their ideas.” Those were my own Aha! moments.
I think about that as I watch our higher education system crumble into something worse than second rate. It’s a system that is being destroyed by political ideologies that influence curricula, teacher qualifications, and students’ futures in profoundly troubling ways.
Concerns about gun violence, banned books, state mandates and laws, disgruntled parents, and depressed students are stunning signs of a system that is losing good teachers because it is failing them. That system is also compromising our youth’s future.
How many students’ lives will be affected by the failures of a politicized education system? How many youth will be unable to pursue the work they aspire to for lack of qualification, whether practical or professional? How many gifted teachers will be gone from America’s classrooms? What will happen to those requiring specialized education to be happy and productive? How will dumbed down education affect our economy, and our standing in the world?
The idea that classic books and illuminating poetry and prose are no longer permitted, or have been removed from schools, along with censored, rewritten American history, is the stuff of autocracy and dictatorship. So is arresting students who are exercising their First Amendment right to peaceful protest and free expression.
At lower levels, arts funding in public schools is being drastically cut because of budget shifts that focus on math and reading. Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, recently vetoed all arts grants in Florida. That will have a chilling effect on youngsters whether in schools, theaters, or cultural events. Imagine how stifling that will be to children’s curiosity and creativity. When arts programs are treated like orphans in the room children are deprived of the opportunity to thrive through creative endeavors in the one place where the arts should be encouraged.
As Emanuel and Kucuk point out, “broad-based education has as its goal the development of educated citizens who can act responsibly in an ever more complex and divided world.”
The rapid decline of what can be called a liberal arts education at every level, coupled with the decline of Socratic methods in higher learning, are a harbinger of a future in which citizens march to a dictator’s drum instead of shaping their own individual and collective futures.
One can’t consider an educational crisis without reflecting upon what has been taking place widely on college and university campuses in response to the pro-Palestinian movement. While the First Amendment doesn’t protect violence or destruction of property for which perpetrators must be held accountable, it does protect peaceful protest and free speech.
An essay in YES Magazine by Bella Jacobs, a graduating student at Pitzer College in California gives me hope that essential discourse can still exist, and make a difference, on college campuses. There Gaza Solidarity encampments are joining other campus groups that are working toward “reimagining political movements as communities where we commit to a better world.” That kind of organizing and exchange among diverse peoples and emerging leaders “can lead to “engaged dialogues that …develop principled forms of protest that make our movement for peace impossible to ignore.”
That goal suggests a promising antidote to students being arrested and denied their graduation ceremonies, valedictorians slated to deliver commencement speeches being denied that honor, faculty dismissed for supporting students’ dissent with school administrators, politicians and excessive police force, all frightening reminders of dictatorships. Let’s hope we aren’t edging toward another Kent State where four students were killed, and others were wounded on campus by the National Guard for protesting the Vietnam War.
Perhaps the most vital question we should ask ourselves is this: How can we return to a time when educational environments at all levels fostered experiential, enlightened learning, along with civil discourse, instead of resorting to repressive actions driven by differing viewpoints that inflame dialogue and justify misguided funding. Perhaps only then can we again experience Aha moments that foster hope, community, and a safe, free future for all.
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Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.