The United States of America erupted out of a certain type of revolution, one that we often fail to acknowledge for its inconsistencies. We rarely ask why some fled the religious oppression of Great Britain only to impose a similar and parallel religious persecution on this "New Land," claimed by European arrogance and disdain for the native population. We rarely discuss the radical elitists who rose to the role of leadership, those Founding Fathers who weaved enticing rhetoric about human freedom while tolerating at best and perpetuating at worst the billowing plight of human slavery.
In 2012, the public and political leaders will discuss many things, but remain trapped outside the ability to ask hard questions about equity: Why do U.S. prisons bulge with disproportionate populations of men of color? Why do children of color, particularly boys, suffer the harbinger of punishment by being disproportionately suspended and expelled in U.S. public schools? Why do laws and prison sentences remain skewed by race? (See The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States.)
Beneath the surface of this history of contradiction and hypocrisy lies the separation of education and politics that, ironically, serves to reduce public education to the Great Protector of the Status Quo, and not the Great Equalizer—as is often expressed in the partisan discourse among all political parties.
Whenever I raise my critical voice about both the fact of all education being political and the need for all educators to be purposefully political, the push-back is strong and all along partisan lines. The most fervent arguments call for professional objectivity, disregarding that taking an objective stance is a political stance.
A New Politics of Human Dignity, Agency
Since the message about the inherent political nature of teaching and learning spurs such strong and diverse resistance, I remain committed to making the case again here—but to reach beyond the call for classrooms and teacher and students to be political.
The U.S. needs now more than ever a new politics of human dignity, of human agency.
In the fall of 2005, I was in New Orleans just months from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; in fact, I was at the ASCD conference at the convention center that would play a major role in the coverage of the disaster after Katrina crippled the city.
I recall that trip vividly because I simultaneously had my most powerful epiphany at that point about the total failure of professional education organizations (most sessions at ASCD were sponsored by and presented by private entities, book publishers and companies pushing their services and goods), and by happenstance, I saw a brief interview on Charlie Rose with George Carlin, who confessed that most people assumed he was a liberal, or more specifically a Democrat, but that he wasn't aligned with any political party. Carlin added that he had long since stopped voting.
For Carlin, not voting was his vote.
Being political is inevitable. Taking a posture of objectivity is political, speaking your mind without reflection is political, and engaging with the complexity of the world with purpose and thoughtfulness is political.
Human behavior is political, and our political impact on the world is as varied as there are people. (Carlin voted by not voting; his politics was above partisanship but grounded in his radical need to act on the world through his humor, his being as a social commentator, a hybrid of entertainer and public intellectual.)
Despite Rick Hess doubling down on his calls for AERA "to distinguish between operating as a scholarly and a political organization," people and the organizations formed by people are perpetually functioning at the political level. To speak against that is being political, thus, using the freedom of political voice to deny others that same freedom.
Ideally, in a democracy every person is an agent of her/his own freedom. Government is not some abstract or imposed agency. The government is each one of us in unison (even and especially when that unison is discordant).
If we as Americans are genuine about valuing freedom and human agency, and if we as Americans believe universal public education is essential for the vibrancy and solvency of that democracy, then every element of that democracy and those schools must celebrate and foster the political nature of every person involved. To call for "nonpolitical" education, teachers, students, and citizens is to deny democracy. Being "nonpolitical" or objective is a type of silence that reinforces the norms, whether those norms are ethical or just.
This isn't about partisanship. It is about raising our politics above partisanship, a politics of human dignity and human agency.
The politics of human dignity and agency holds only dignity and agency sacred, not parties, not affiliations, not the lure of power, prestige, and privilege.
Power, prestige, and privilege, you see, are masks for the politics embedded in the status of each. Power begets power, at the expense of the powerless. Prestige begets prestige, at the expense of the ignored. Privilege begets privilege, at the expense of the oppressed.
And the politics of human dignity and agency is the self-sustaining fertilizer of human dignity and agency.
Human nature free is essentially political. To ask teachers and students to check their political essence at the door of any school or classroom is to ask them to check their humanity.
That sort of schooling feeds inequity and fails democracy.