Classroom Censorship in Historical Perspective
On Thursday, October 5, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest virtually hosted Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor of History of Education at University of Pennsylvania; Ms. Dana Goldstein, national correspondent of the New York Times and author of the best-selling book, The Teacher Wars[i]; and Dr. Adam Laats, Professor of Education and History at Binghamton University. The three panelists explored U.S. School Censorship and Democracy. This panel was moderated by Dr. Jerusha Conner, Professor of Education in the Department of Education and Counseling at Villanova University, where she also directs the Graduate Programs in Education.
Watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRzXAF0iOSo&list=PL_Z9mt0HJeskBM8nPMx5IMz-WulxN7Ypm&index=1&pp=iAQB
Between the start of school in 2021 and 2023, 50% of states “have passed some sort of restrictive curricular law.”[ii] Last week, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest brought together three experts on the history of American education who explored what about these last two years is consistent with American history, what is new, and what might be done. The conversation made clear that efforts to censor U.S. classrooms are a longstanding tradition, but the current wave is complicated by a broader loss of faith in democracy.
Faith in democracy is, according to Dr. Zimmerman, “the faith that people of equal reason, equal information, and equal understanding, can reason from the same set of facts to different conclusions.” When two people with different views have this faith, it opens the way for hard conversations — about topics such as the politics of reproduction, or the meaning of controversial moments in United States history — and the possibility of working out differences. It is a public virtue that is developed through education and practice. Dr. Zimmerman thinks that to hold on to this faith we must see these discussions modeled, especially in schools. Yet when describing the present moment, he believes Americans are “so mutually hostile, angry, and scared that we don’t have the will to do that in our schools.” [iii]
In their free-flowing conversation, propelled by Dr. Conner’s probing questions, Dr. Zimmerman, Ms. Goldstein, and Dr. Laats modeled just this kind of conversation, openly disagreeing, agreeing, and working through differences. Dr. Conner began the conversation by asking each panelist to describe these last two years and how they understand these restrictive education laws.
Dana Goldstein presented this censorship movement as having two phases.[iv] The first phase focused on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and tried to ban “discussion[s] of structural racism or systemic racism.” Now, a second phase has shifted focus to censoring conversations around gender and sexuality and blocking Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which Ms. Goldstein has defined as “a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mindsets that can support academic success.”[v] In this phase, books even possibly depicting same-sex relationships have been removed from schools, even though it was found that the majority of the challenges against these books nationwide were “filed by just 11 people.”[vi] Additionally, it is baselessly feared that the purpose of social-emotional learning is to “soften children so that they are ready to receive the gender ideology of the left.”
These laws are vaguely written and their use of jargon like CRT and SEL creates confusion among teachers and district attorneys about how the laws will be interpreted. In Florida, where these laws have received the most publicity, Ms. Goldstein reported that some teachers are unwilling to discuss social studies curriculum with prospective parents for fear that they might accidentally break the new laws. Vague laws lead to teacher’s self-censorship and if teachers are scared to speak, the quality of education goes down. Dr. Laats agreed, saying, “kids don’t learn when the story is confusing,” citing a recent study that shows that of high school seniors, only “8% could identify slavery as the cause of the civil war.”[vii]
Dr. Adam Laats revealed that these censorship efforts resonate with the past. He showed that the present controversy of CRT reflects the controversy around evolution during much of the twentieth century.[viii] These terms take on a political life of their own quite apart from the academic fields of study that created and use these ideas. In their public use, they are incredibly vague, which allows the terms to be packed with meanings. In the case of evolution, Dr. Laats showed how it was associated with “abortion, Nazism, [the] radical feminist movement … communism … pornography, sexual perversion … [and] paganism.” Confirming the continuity of the logic, Dr. Laats presented Senator Ted Cruz’s 2022 senate speech, in which he argued that the branch of CRT is yet another flowering of the root evil, communism. CRT, communism, and evolution all functioned as “open buckets that you could throw any danger in.”
Yet, in both his opening comments and throughout the conversation, Dr. Zimmerman argued that one key difference between the past two years and twentieth-century classroom censorship is the complication of lost faith in democracy widespread across the United States. One reason he presented for this loss is that Americans have grown far less religious. While Dr. Zimmerman did not describe religion as a bastion of democracy in itself, he did present its loss and subsequent replacement by the quasi-religions of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, as a cause for polarization and thus a poison to democracy.
Twenty years ago, Dr. Zimmerman projected that America would become a more secular place, and consequently, a more tolerant place, thinking religion inculcated an orthodoxy that would shut down democratic discussion. Today he believes the opposite has occurred. Over the last twenty years, religious affiliation has dropped by 20%, but people have become simultaneously much less tolerant. As it turns out, he now believes that the religion that has been lost seems to be more akin to the belief of “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that it has been replaced by a quasi-religion of the Right and the Left, which believes “your neighbor is a plague on the land and a dagger at the heart of the republic.”
Differing from Dr. Zimmerman, both Dr. Laats and Ms. Goldstein reported that the desire to make America more Christian has motivated, in both the past and the present, censorship activists. Ms. Goldstein observed that “churches and Christian leaders are fundamental to what’s been happening” in the last two years. In one recent case in Texas, a church even organized against specific teachers. Dr. Laats nuanced his observations about the way language like ‘communism’ functioned politically, noting how it can rally Christian ire — because communism was historically atheist — without using explicitly religious language. The vagueness of the threat of communism, like CRT and SEL, is a powerful tool for combatants because “you can pack religion in without saying Jesus Christ.” Receiving this pushback, Dr. Zimmerman clarified that while religion has decreased, it remains a powerful political motivator and that what has really changed is not so much the religious motivation as the religious language.
Alongside changes in religion, Dr. Zimmerman and Ms. Goldstein gave another reason for the present loss of faith in democracy: the decrease in quality social studies education. According to Ms. Goldstein, social studies was first reduced during the No Child Left Behind policy, and more recently, has been radically polarized. Dr. Zimmerman argued that quality social studies education should be the place where Americans learn to talk to one another. For example, in teaching American history, he believes teachers should first teach a historical event with the more conservative state-approved textbook, then teach the same event with the more liberal 1619 Project, and finally present their own views, with the caveat that no student ought to be enjoined to agree.[ix] Students would learn how the same history can mean different things, and how educated people can disagree and still talk and work together. Without teaching a diversity of perspectives, Americans are less able to work with others democratically.
This failure of democracy flares up in efforts to reshape curriculum. Dr. Zimmerman contends that citizens ought to be involved in shaping curriculum, even though Moms for Liberty — an outspoken censorship activist organization that the Nation has termed a “far-right, hate group”— is the loudest group involved today.[x] Yet it was also a citizen group that changed the curriculum on slavery from teaching it as a benevolent institution for the “civilizing” of “barbaric Africans” to the evil that it is presented as today. According to both Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. Laats, the democratic answer to any group trying to shape curriculum is not to cancel citizen action, but to involve a diverse group of Americans in working toward an accurate representation of the entire country.[xi] Having everyone present is the necessary precondition for having a meaningful, democratic conversation, that we might begin the hard task of working out our differences, in both schools and society.
Concluding the event, Dr. Conner asked, “How do we work towards a more unified country? How do we bridge this impasse?” Dr. Laats advocated for avoiding simplistic ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomies, so that “we can build a ‘we’ that actually represents the real ‘we’ that should be included in all these decisions” around curriculum. Dr. Zimmerman agreed and nuanced Dr. Laat’s recommendation, noting how “a lot of people in very conservative precincts of the United States would listen to our discussion tonight and imagine that ‘we’ were thinking of ‘them’ as the ‘they.’ How you get beyond that, I think, is the hardest thing of all.” Ms. Goldstein concluded by challenging everyone to “read a new source that’s not your typical new source. So if you typically watch CNN, try Fox. If you typically read the New York Times, turn to a local paper.” Only by attempting to understand our neighbors can we begin to restore our faith in democracy.
Endnotes
[i] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, Reprint edition (New York: Anchor, 2015).
[ii] This quote is an opening quote from Ms. Goldstein’s presentation at the event. Unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are from the event.
[iii] For more on the importance of free speech and hard conversations see Jonathan Zimmerman, Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn, Illustrated edition (Buffalo, New York: City of Light Publishing, 2021).
[iv] For Dana’s reporting on education see “Dana Goldstein — The New York Times,” accessed October 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/by/dana-goldstein. See also, Dana Goldstein, “Florida Rejects Dozens of Social Studies Textbooks, and Forces Changes in Others — The New York Times,” accessed October 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/us/desantis-florida-social-studies-textbooks.html.
[v] Dana Goldstein and Stephanie Saul, “A Look Inside the Textbooks That Florida Rejected,” The New York Times, April 22, 2022, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html.
[vi] “Objection to Sexual, LGBTQ Content Propels Spike in Book Challenges,” Washington Post, May 23, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/23/lgbtq-book-ban-challengers/; Katie Balevic, “Just 11 People Were Responsible for Most 2021–2022 School Book Challenges. A Virginia Woman Challenged 71 out of the 73 Books She Read.,” Business Insider, accessed October 17, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/school-book-challenges-bans-virginia-moms-liberty-education-2023-9.
[vii] “SPLC Report: U.S. Education on American Slavery Sorely Lacking,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed October 12, 2023, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/01/31/splc-report-us-education-american-slavery-sorely-lacking.
[viii] Adam Laats, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, 1st edition (New York (N.Y.): Oxford University Press, 2020).
[ix] For more on Dr. Zimmerman’s perspective on teaching see Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson, The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, 1st edition (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[x] Moms for Liberty held their national “Joyful Warriors” summit in Philadelphia this past summer, Kim Kelly, “Moms for Liberty Came to Philly. Philly Came for Them.,” July 5, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/moms-for-liberty-philadelphia-protests/.
[xi] See Dr. Zimmerman’s Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005).
