Teaching is my essential political action

On Monday my students will arrive in my room for the school year.  I have spent the past week getting ready, setting up the room, copying handouts, organizing books to be distributed, and attending meetings.  For the past three days I have also in the afternoons begun again coaching soccer.  I am already on 12 hour days, and officially the school year starts two days from now.  I am finding less and less time for political activity in the traditional sense.  I have to say no to the various candidates for Virginia's General Assembly who want me to come canvass or make phone calls for them.  And yesterday I had to decline an opportunity to meet in the near future with yet another Congressional candidate who would like my support and if not that at least my assistance with educational policy.  It might seem as if I am pulling back from political activity.

I am not, because I have come to realize that teaching is my essential political action.  Let me attempt to explain.
Political action does not necessarily have to be of a partisan nature, although I would agree with the proposition that the truth tends to have a liberal bias.  Still, liberalism is an attitude, a predisposition, and does not have to be partisan per se - when I grew up there were many liberal Republicans and more than a few conservative Democrats.

To me politics is how one moves forward to achieve goals.  It involves learning how to work with others. In a democracy it requires reaching out to find sufficient in common to achieve the working majority (or in some cases plurality) necessary to have electoral success for those who support the goals on which you have agreement.  It involves understanding people's motivations, and being able to express one's own concerns in a cogent way, in the hopes perhaps of persuading others to come to a similar point of view on how to address problems.

As it happens, my primary course is government, so of necessity I am teaching my students about the political and governmental processes, both how they are theoretically supposed to work and the reality of what actually happens.  I would argue that my subject matter is almost incidental to the proposition I am asserting, that teaching is essentially a political action.

We have never fully reached agreement in this country as to the purpose of public schools.  Some would totally abolish them, placing on individual families the responsibility for obtaining whatever education they would seek for their children.  Some want elite opportunities for their own children and such others as they might be generous enough to allow to obtain similar advantages.  They see education as a means of making the connections that enable one to control the levers of power, be they explicitly political or economic.  They seek the preservation of privilege.

The content and structure of what public schools we have are a product of the political processes. A curricular framework that emphasizes the superiority of the free enterprise system, which at least implies that the United States is the best nation in the world despite our decreasing ranking on international comparisons of health, life expectancy and infant mortality and our increasing economic inequity is attempting to shape the attitudes with which people will approach political participation in the future.  If we emphasize science and math with the goal of international economic competitiveness we simultaneously devalue science and math beyond the economic benefit they give while we present a distorted image of what learning and education really are.

And of course because public schools represent a major governmental expenditure - at the local level usually the largest single expense - control of schools often becomes a political football. 

All of this is preface.  And as a social studies teacher I probably should not presume to speak for those in other content areas.  Actually, I should be cautious about implying an ability to speak on behalf of anyone except myself -  I have not been designated either by official authority or by the vote of my compatriot teachers as their official representative.

So all else from this point will be my political statement.

I will next week lay out for my students certain principles.  In my class you are asked if your words and attitudes and actions show respect for yourself and for others, for if they do not we cannot learn from one another.  I will tell them - and later their parents - that I want them to learn to think, to express verbally and in writing their own ideas in a more cohesive and a persuasive manner.  I want them able to listen to and read the ideas of others, able to dialog, disagreeing without becoming personably disagreeable, but able to take apart the weakness of arguments -  their own as well as those of others.  In the process I may create my own worst nightmare:  an articulate and persuasive advocate of a position I abhor.  At that point I will be satisfied that I have done my job as a teacher.

For my job as a teacher, at least as I see it, is to empower my students.  That empowerment does not mean that I peel back their skulls and pour in factual information to be regurgitated on the multiple choice test of your choosing.  To be sure, they will learn vast amounts of factual information, but in context:  what do these facts mean, and why? 

I will on Tuesday present them with an eternal question:  what is justice?  And whatever answer a student offers, I will challenge it. If they say punishing those who break the laws, I will ask about Harriet Tubman and Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad, or the families that hid Jews from the Nazis.  We will explore the idea of a social contract and what it represents.  And throughout the year, whether they are taking college government as 10th graders or are seniors still trying to pass the course to graduate from high school, I will expect them to grow, to become more confident in their ability to wrestle with ideas, to know they have not only the right but the obligation of challenging the assertions of those who would seek to lead them, whether as putative candidates or as current office holders. 

I will encourage them to have their own opinions, but I will remind them of the response Daniel Patrick Moynihan once made to a man who insisted that he was entitled to his own opinion - you may be entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  I will expect them to be able to go beyond emotional appeals, whether made to or offered by them, to also understand logical connections with reality. 

All of this is political.  It presumes a democratic system, where the individual citizen is capable of understanding and thus participating in the political processes that shape our government and hence our society - or is it our society and hence our government?  Either way, the key is the right and ability of each member of the society to participate. 

The ultimate authority is the collection of persons we call "we the people."  We see this in our jury system, where unfortunately many do not know that in most jurisdictions jurors can ask (usually through the judge) questions of a witness -  the jury is the finder of fact, not the judge, certainly not the prosecution in a criminal matter. 

I teach in a public school.  Seemingly every year it gets more difficult to teach honestly.  We are burdened with record keeping, external mandates, attempts to control and dictate what is said in our classrooms.  Insofar as I am restricted in applying my judgment, my ability to respond to the needs and interests of my individual students, I lose effectiveness and they are thus disempowered.  Disempowering a group of people is a political action, and insofar as I contend against that by insisting on teaching in a fashion I believe is more empowering, I am committing a political action, one with more cogency and long-term impact than I can achieve even by helping win a presidential election and certainly far more than would be the case in any single state legislative race.  I am hopefully planting seeds, nurturing young shoots, feeding saplings, all in the hope that there is a future.

There is a Talmudic tale of a man carefully tending an olive tree whose fruit he will never taste.  He is asked why he is so careful when he will not benefit, and he points out that his children and his children's children will benefit.  I have no biological children.  My commitment to a better future that may not occur until long after I pass from this life is a political action on my part.  It is a commitment to something broader than my own immediate benefit.  It is an understanding that as I have benefited from those who went before me, many of whom have no close biological kinship beyond our common humanity, I have an obligation to attempt to pass on a world no worse off than the one I received.  As I had teachers and other adults who challenged me to think more deeply and beyond my own individual needs and desires, I feel obligated to act towards those adolescents in my care with a similar approach. 

And not just to those who come in to my physical classroom.  My writing is clearly a political action.  In my teaching I try to present alternatives,  taking upon myself to make sure that should no student be able to present a point of view to which none seem drawn that they at least be able to grasp how something seemingly alien to how they think can have an intellectual consistency and honesty:  one basic factor of human existence is that we do not all think and react the same, and thus we need to be able to seek to understand the point of view of the other if we wish to achieve some common ground.  I would hope that as I offer my perceptions and arguments on line I similarly demonstrate a willingness to engage in dialog, to explore more fully, so that we can find common ground where possible, and where unable to do so not fall into permanent disagreement. 

I am far from perfect either as a human being or as a teacher.  Every student I have ever taught has heard me apologize, accept responsibility for when I am wrong, or too judgmental, or not listening.  Teaching to me is relationship, and relationships require accepting responsibility, so I must model it if I wish to inculcate something similar in those entrusted to my pedagogical care.

I am 61.  I am already tired, and classes have not yet begun.  I increasingly wonder if I can continue to teach beyond this year.  This November we have elections for 40 state senate seats and 100 house of delegates seats in Virginia.  Our presidential primary process has already begun, and the following fall we will have national elections and in many states races for governor.  In the mean time there are decisions being made in legislative bodies at state and federal level that have great importance to the future of our nation.  Our involvement in all of these is an important part of the political process, the political actions to which we are called.

I cannot do all that I might want.  I lack some skills, and certainly have insufficient time and energy.  So I do what is the most important political action I can undertake.  I teach in a public school, seeking to empower the future generations in the hope that the democratic republic from which I have benefited for most of my life will still be there long after I die.  I can think of nothing more important for me to do.  Teaching is my essential political action.

What is yours?

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