Hugh D. Hudson is a Regents’ Professor of History Emeritus and former executive secretary of the Georgia Conference of the American Association of University Professors.
In a guest column, Hudson says the battle to control schools and what is taught has high stakes for Georgia. There is a divide, he writes, on whether the role of school is to “provoke curiosity about the outside world” or safeguard a “mythical past” and preserve “the family and racial hierarchy of authority.”
By Hugh D. Hudson
Recent reports on the effort by the Cobb County School District to remove a primary school teacher from the profession have stressed that the teacher supposedly violated the new Georgia law prohibiting the presentation of “divisive concepts” to students. While it is true that the vehicle for the assault on the teacher, and all educators in Georgia, is the ability of disgruntled parents to initiate proceedings against teachers based on whatever they dislike, the fundamental struggle at play in Georgia is far more profound and concerning.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
What is the function of history? Authoritarians have a clear answer — to spread propaganda; Nazi Germany: “Jews and Liberals betrayed German and caused its loss in WWI”; Stalinist Russia: “Opponents of Stalin’s terror were agents of Western Imperialism”; Southern segregationist: “The Civil War was not about slavery but State’s Rights.”
Georgia today faces this existential question of the role of education in society.
Conservatives inside and outside the Legislature are confronting an educational intervention into their traditional culture, an effort to modernize and educate children for life in the 21st century. In response, conservatives are attempting to select out of programs for education those aspects they consider essential for the preservation of their traditionalist world.
All attempts at undermining conservative mores and attitudes, especially those associated with race and gender, through the enlightening potential of schooling are running into the refusal of traditionalists to subordinate their needs and desires to the wishes of “outsiders.”
Conservatives desire to draw out of education only what would be useful in their own familiar world and refuse to be assimilated through education into an American elite culture.
Conservatives have a pedagogy of their own — one oriented toward preservation of a mythical past rather than enlightenment. Primary education should exist solely to offer a cure for labor productivity, labor discipline, social control and military strength. The success of that pedagogy requires seizing control of schools from teachers.
Such an understanding of schooling does not translate into a desire for an expanded curriculum that confronts the difficulties of history and contemporary society, nor even for taking full advantage of the existing program.
Conservatives in Georgia have a “defensive” approach to schooling; they want their children to learn to read with comprehension and to write a decent letter, but they do not want the school to provoke curiosity about the outside world or undermine the family and racial hierarchy of authority.
Literacy is thus perceived as a means of protection against the hostile, outside world, not to advance within that world. Conservatives, therefore, have no use for processes that teachers see as the essence of education: promoting curiosity, initiative, and receptiveness to new ideas. Teachers want to educate and enlighten Georgia’s children; conservatives want to produce children in their own image and limit their children’s participation in what is to them an outside, and possibly destructive, force.
Given recent conservative legislative victories over teachers, schools might spread in Georgia, “education” will not. Schools will have little effect on basic mores and values and will not influence traditionalist (rural) culture. Teachers are threatened with being turned into rabbits, terrified of conservative assaults and fearful that the state will not provide them protection and material security. Schooling will not be able to bridge the psychological gulf that separates the unenlightened from modern society, a gulf that helps explain the political violence that has swept America. Georgia’s children may yet learn to read, but they will not learn from reading.
Georgia confronts the intellectual and military forces of an expanding world. If the job of the school is to teach the basics, Georgia schools may be successful. But we should question whether in fact that should be considered the school’s principal job.
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