What educators do now will not impact the electoral outcomes in November or its aftermath. That is up to near-term voting and political action. They can, however, influence the future.
I know this: Voting still matters. In a democracy—or even the semblance of one—who gets elected determines on whose behalf and based on what principles government acts. I know that there are many influences on voters’ choices. I know that people’s values have a profound influence on their voting.
Voters bring starkly different values to their choices. That is normal. I do not know what will happen between election day on November 3 and the inauguration on January 20. However, I anticipate violent civil conflict in the election’s aftermath because the norms for peaceful conflict resolution have been purposefully eroded. Common acceptance of empathy, ethics, and evidence as drivers of behavior has been intentionally redirected.
I have worked as an educator since I landed my first full-time post-college job in 1973, first as an elementary school teacher, and for the over thirty years in science education. My driving force has always been a core assumption: What happens in classrooms has a significant influence on how students think and behave when they emerge into adulthood, and hence when they vote and interact with one another.
I hope students grow up to treat everyone with dignity and respect. I hope they develop the tools to make sense of the natural and social environments in which they live. I hope they develop confidence and passion to act to influence the personal, social, political circumstances around them based on human values.
I know I am not alone in these hopes. I know that most educators are trying. I know most Americans share these hopes. I know that many of us are frustrated and angry that our common dreams for students’ futures are being thwarted. School systems are being diverted from what matters most by persistent inequity and racism, high-stakes testing, efforts to privatize and monetize education, and most recently by pandemic disruption of in-person learning.
I know this: Despite and in response to the challenges, all of us– not just educators and parents– must demand that teaching should focus on what matters most: empathy, ethics, and evidence. Those essential foci cut across all subject areas, all grades, and whether students are engaged at home or in school. Students may lose facts, concepts may fade, and skills may wither but they, like the rest of us, remember how we were treated. In the short term, that influences how, whether, and what students learn. More important, it influences how they will see one another and act as humans for a lifetime.
Teachers can orchestrate learning environments to encourage empathy—the ability and inclination to imagine, understand and identify with the feelings and life experiences of others. Teachers can encourage—even demand—ethical behavior based on respect and dignity. In other words, they can work to develop the habit of acting with empathy and ethics. Finally, educators can help students develop the practice of using evidence to make sense of the world, and to evaluate their own claims and decisions and those of others. That gives them enormous power to develop agency–the will to make a difference.
The erosion of common good values has been a decades-long process. Trump and his enablers know that values matter and that theirs are in the minority. That is why they mock empathy. That is why they justify and promote self-interest and expediency over human decency. That is why they work hard to denigrate, hide, and ignore the expertise and recommendations of the premier evidentiary discipline–science. That is why they seek to quash efforts to expose the evidence of historical racism and inequity in American history in the school curriculum.
I know this: Empathy, ethics, and evidence are their enemy. They are the foundation of the future for the rest of us. We can and must all fight back.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired several years ago as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins