FROM THE EDITOR: The Politics of Rage Is Alive and Well ...

The fix is right before us, but it requires a shift in how we think about K-12 education.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash

This Saturday, the politics of rage will be on full display.

The No Kings Rally will again gather between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. at the corner of William and Blue-Grey Parkway so protestors can express opposition to Donald Trump and his actions since becoming president for a second time.

Earlier the same day between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., the Fredericksburg Young Republicans and the UMW College Republicans will be at the same location for a No Gerrymandering rally.

The attack lines are predictable — and boring.

The No Kings Rally will rage against a narcissistic, intellectually weak Donald Trump who has neither a moral compass nor the ability to comprehend why anyone would disagree with him.

The president’s abject lack of empathy was summed up well by Jamelle Bouie in his recent New York Times column: “Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. … Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds.”

The No Gerrymandering rally will rage against the move to align congressional districts from the current balanced lines that ensure competitive races and balanced representation to a blatant disenfranchising of Republican voters across the commonwealth that would likely produce at 10-1 split in favorite of Democrats.

Their frustration is made more intense because Gov. Abigail Spanberger has built her reputation as a liberal politician who doesn’t do crazy, and works respectfully with those around her regardless of party — though she isn’t afraid to call down the storms behind closed doors, as the Washington Post has reported.

Here’s the thing — attendees of both rallies have defensible reasons to be angry.

But their rage will not result in changing many people’s minds. Because as defensible their anger at the abuses of power both are protesting against, each is blind to the hypocrisy of their actions.

Donald Trump is a modern-day iconoclast, breaking every institution and political norm he can lay his hands on.

Democrats’ frustration with this is not just understandable, it is justifiable. But the solution to opposing an institution destroyer is not to resort to the same tactic and destroy more institutions. Yet this is precisely what the current gerrymandering effort would do. Claims that it is “temporary” and will resort back to the current lines in 2030 don’t help the argument.

Don’t like how things are going? Change the rules, then justify it by saying we’ll go back to how things were when the current threat is gone. That 2030 marks the next census and will lead to the decennial redistricting doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds.

Thus, Republicans are rightly upset with this coming referendum and the gross gerrymandering it could create — it’s a Machiavellian power grab that the late Mayor Daley of Chicago would have admired.

But while raging against gerrymandering, many of these same people will turn a blind eye to one of the worst human rights violations in America since the Japanese Internment Camps during World War II — the indiscriminate and careless rounding up and deporting of immigrants by ICE while bypassing legal protections at every stage.

It brings to mind the German theologian Martin Niemoller’s quote: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist …. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

When the hypocrisies are this blatant, it’s difficult to take either group seriously.

There have been a host of reasons given to explain how we’re reached a point in our body politic where rage has supplanted discourse — social media, deteriorating families, bumper-sticker campaigning, dark money, to name but a few.

These certainly figure into the equation. But arguably the greatest factor is totally ignored — the role the U.S. education system has to play in our anger-fueled politics. More precisely, the role that a quarter-century of enforced outcomes-based education has done to our ability to see beyond our own anger, or understand much of anything for that matter.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act. It mandated state standards and high-stakes testing so that schools are forced to “prove” they are being successful. This test- and standards-driven approach to learning is also known as “outcomes based” education.

Sounds reasonable, save for this: in outcomes-based education, the only thing that matters are the scores on state exams.

Many foresaw what the No Child Left Behind Act would create — schools stripping teachers of the ability to push their students to wrestle with difficult literature, the moral complexities of history, and the critical thinking that is shaped by writing in favor of rote tests and sterile curricula that favor students checking the right box over actually learning anything.

The U.S. K-12 system, in other words, has become a multibillion-dollar game of Trivial Pursuit.

Everyone loses. But the greatest loser is the liberal arts.

The liberal arts — the core of education since the Greeks — challenges students to not only understand that there are many in the world who do not see reality the same as them, but to learn to put themselves inside those mindsets and to at least try and understand where they are coming from.

Only when that occurs can constructive, thoughtful discourse occur.

That discourse forms the backbone of diplomacy, of business life, and most important, of creating a pluralistic society that understands the importance of working for the common good over the greater good.

A quarter century in, the critics were demonstrably right. And we are going deeper down the rabbit hole.

At Tuesday night’s joint meeting between the Spotsylvania School Board and the Board of Supervisors to discuss the budget, the lack of appreciation for or understanding of the liberal arts was on full display.

Spotsylvania schools have a robust CTE program with a waiting list of more than 600 students. Some school board members, and most of the Board of Supervisor members, were pushing hard to invest heavily in the program. The reasons? — Good paying jobs out of high school, and facing the reality that lots of students don’t want to pursue higher education.

There is certainly value in CTE education, and the county should support delivering the program to the students who would like to participate.

But this support must be balanced against the fact that these students will also be citizens who vote (hopefully), volunteer, and will have to adapt throughout their lives to changing realities. Shortchanging liberal arts training so students can learn to fix cars and AC units is not just shortsighted, it’s destructive to use as a society.

The rush to artificial intelligence offers a great example. For years, technical education focused on developing coders was branded as a fast-track to a high-paying job and security. So confident were people in the future of coding, millions were spent to train coal miners, whose jobs were evaporating, could learn this new high-tech trade.

Today, coders are about as useful as vacuum tubes. AI has all but eliminated the need for them. As it is getting rid of people who charge six figures for a website.

As similar shifts to technical learning expanded, the liberal arts were left to wither on the vine.

Today, English majors are getting their revenge. Liberal arts majors are now in high demand as technology companies — which long favored STEM graduates — find themselves in need of people who can do more than think like engineers. They need people who can think critically, and originally, about the world AI is creating. (See three stories about this here, here, and here.)

If one believes that auto mechanics and plumbers and other technical fields are immune to AI, think again. The fact is, no job is AI proof. In a world where the job market will change not by the generation, but by the year, educating students so that they can think critically, learn quickly, and see coming what others cannot, is not a nice thing to do. It’s essential to preparing them for the future to come — a future not a single member of either board in Spotsylvania can predict.

The liberal arts more than any other discipline is what prepares students for that environment.

Which brings us back to politics.

Our current politics of rage is the logical outcome of one-dimensional thinking. That, in turn, is the result of an education more focused on Trivial Pursuit than developing independent thinkers.

The more outcome-based our education becomes, the fewer the people trained to look beyond their grievances to understanding how to move beyond protesting to finding solutions that move society forward.

At some point we must face the damage that the politics of rage is doing to our society. And we must understand the role that outcomes-based education as delivered at the K-12 level plays in fueling that rage.

Fill-in-the-bubble exams and endless protests will not fix what is wrong with our body politic. Neither will favoring CTE programs that lock people in to technical careers that may well not be there in five years.

What will strengthen our body politic? Ending outcomes-based learning and funding teachers who deliver thoughtful, guided reading of Machiavelli by every high school student (along with the writing of W.E.B. DuBois and Henri Pirenne and Milton Freedman and Karl Marx among others).

Do that over the next quarter century and not only will we begin to again produce the types of citizens who can adapt to a rapidly changing job market, but we will over the next quarter century develop students who will be equipped to build a healthier body politic than the one we have allowed to develop.

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