Best Behavior - Part II

A different school of thought

1.

The memories I retain of early April 2020 have all the qualities of those anxiety dreams where you’ve forgotten about a college course for an entire semester, and it’s MATH 312: Statistical Inference, and you can just sort of remember what the teacher looked like, and you should be taking the final exam right now, so you’ve got to rush to the classroom: There’s that sinking feeling that you’ve irrevocably screwed things up, of course; but also a possibly delusional, and yet what-else-are-you-going-to-do?, kamikaze ambition to see the thing through. The full contours of the state’s and my employer’s pandemic policies had just come into focus: The University of Hamburg would switch to completely on-line teaching, which I’d never done before, while my kids would be homeschooled for several weeks, during which time my wife and I would in effect be their teachers. And meanwhile our home was in the midst of a massive renovation, with construction workers milling in and out.

I lost my temper and all sense of decorum often. Lord only knows what the carpenters who were reconstructing our attic thought of the rafter-shaking timbre of my voice bellowing out frustrated commands at my kids. Certainly some facet of me just wanted everything to go back to the way it had been just weeks before. And yet, exasperated as I was, I was also thrilled. This was my chance to return for at least a little while to the halcyon days before the kids were in school and I got to choose what their education consisted of and how it was organized. I had ambitions of making bacteria cultures in petrie dishes in our fridge with my son and identifying the igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks in our neighborhood with my daughter, all while dutifully carrying out the worksheets and exercises passed along by their teachers. I’ve mostly compartmentalized the memories of how that all worked out, but when I do decide to risk peeking into the memory box, it bursts open with disjointed recollections of skillful evasion and lawyerly deflection on the part of my kids; resignation and disgruntlement on mine. Weirdly—maybe a little hearteningly—my kids look back on that time fondly. (My nine-year-old daughter can still recall that igneous rock comes from solidified magma. So, that’s something.)

German parents inveighed against lockdown policies and having to homeschool their kids just as much as their American counterparts. But their reasons weren’t exactly the same. Sure, they too were royally pissed that their daycare was gone, meaning they couldn’t go to work. But that was never an existential threat the way it was in the US. It was more like a massive inconvenience (and Germans are used to a lot of state-provided convenience).¹ But it was also repugnant in another way—one that probably makes no sense to Americans.

In American culture, graduating school is a thing to be celebrated, and we do so capaciously. I don’t know that we really need an awards ceremony, before a prom, before a baccalaureate ceremony, before a full graduation ceremony—but by God we have them! Then again, we probably don’t need an Armed Forces Day, and a Memorial day, and a Veterans Day, either. These things just sort of get locked into the warp and weft of life. Germans have their “Abibälle”²  and graduation ceremonies, too. But they aren’t the gowned, mortarboard-and-tasseled solemnities we know. They’re down-to-earth gatherings of family, friends, and associates to commemorate a job well done.

The beginning of school, on the other hand—now that is something different. On their first day of school, American kids drink some orange juice, eat some cereal, pack their bags and lunch boxes, tie their boots tight, and (in the words of the poet) hope they don’t get in a fight. German kids, meanwhile, are lambs to the slaughter—and the gods they must be sacrificed to are Public Norms and Order. The kids are furnished with two eldritch artifacts, a “Schulranzen”—a trunk-shaped backpack twice their size—and a “Schultüte”—a massive paper cone filled with pencils, erasers, rulers, fruits, candy, and the last tastes of unalloyed freedom they will ever enjoy—as they are handed over to the state.

Gone are the days when their world was the family unit, the warm hearth, and their parents’ whims, amply supplied with years of paid leave. After the festivities of the first day of school, parents are then met with a cold sign at the front of the building that says, “Parents, we’ll take it by ourselves from here.” An adult inside a school facility is met with extreme suspicion, not for fear of pedophilia but of pedagogical interference.

From the German perspective, this is intended to stop overprotective helicopter parenting and foster independence. The very idea of homeschooling is anathema in Germany. Children must develop into autonomous citizens of the culture in good standing. The fact that parents had to take over the schooling in 2020 was a public disaster. Homeschooling is for quacks who’ve never quite learned what is and is not “in Ordnung”—like Americans.

When I first moved to Germany 17 years ago, there was significant public ferment about “Leitkultur” (the basic or common culture that is supposed to guide public norms of behavior and opinion) and parallel societies, meaning pockets of self-organized subculture, where people with strictly differing beliefs from the Leitkultur would deny their children the right to learn about self-blossoming sexuality, scientific facts, and socially progressive ideas. This was couched in terms of religion, and more specifically in terms of problems with Muslim immigrants. There was certainly a lot of hand-wringing about whether this wasn’t closed-minded, and the word “Leitkultur” became a bugaboo. But that was a matter of the culture trying to be internally consistent. Everyone generally agreed with the parallel-society critique. The problem lay in trying to fit values of tolerance and multiculturalism into the system since inclusion meant sacrificing other values.

German society was particularly confounded by the pandemic, when factions that were perhaps a bit more extreme but basically fellow travelers with the broader culture—people who think GMOs are strictly unsafe, nuclear power is inherently bad, and vaccines are suspect because they aren’t natural—suddenly became the parallel societies de riguer. They were supposed to be the good guys! It didn’t comport with German sententiousness that the “Ökos”could be the extremists. Nevertheless, levels of vaccine and mask-mandate refusal were never all that high. Pretty much everyone, including immigrants and alternative “Querdenker,” fell into lockstep when needed. The appeal of consensus—Leitkultur, if you will—is strong in Germany. Ordnung muss sein.

A question is implicitly begged in fearing that homeschooling might “deny” children “the right to learn about self-blossoming sexuality, scientific facts, and socially progressive ideas.”³ As far as “scientific facts” go, that’s a matter of theoretical reason. Inasmuch as empirical claims dominate the discourse, then those who bring conclusive evidence to the table win the day. (Then again, a lot of science is model building and theorizing, and I’ve just published a three-part essay arguing that such model-building is shot through with culturally-negotiated values.) “Self-blossoming sexuality” is certainly a subject informed by empirical facts, but it is overwhelmingly a matter of practical decision-making. And as for “socially progressive ideas,” those are by definition value judgements. By saying that children have to attend a state-regulated school and must be separated from their parents during the school day in order to engage with these matters, the implication is that such judgments of practical reasoning—normative judgments—have already been settled by the state. But have they? That’s the question begged by German “Schulpflicht.” American culture has a long and rich history of suspicion of such claims.

Frederick the Great of Prussia was inspired by ideas propounded by Johann Julius Hecker in the formation of the first “Realschule” in Berlin, which was meant to provide children with an education leading toward trade work or the fine arts. And in 1763, Frederick decreed the first general school law, requiring that all children between the ages of five and 13 be guaranteed a Realschule-like education. But it wasn’t until the first half of the 20th century that a system of state-supported elementary schools emerged in Germany.

In the US, on the other hand, public schools took hold in the early 1840s in the form of the New England-based Common School movement, under the direction of Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. That movement gained prominence almost immediately throughout the young country. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder accounts in his recent essay “Education and Indoctrination” that even in that nascent period, Mann was “terrified by the prospect of sectarian religious divides and partisan politics blowing up what was a fragile new experiment in universal education at public expense.” As Snyder chronicles, Mann tried to scrupulously render public education “nonpartisan and nonsectarian,” forbidding any “political proselytization.”

But the system of Bible-based “Christian virtues” he had deemed innocuous and included in the Common School curriculum turned out to be anything but innocuous in light of the millions of Irish Catholic immigrants in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia who found its textbooks full of anti-Catholic sentiments oppressive. When the Methodists of New York decried any potential Catholic influence on their curricula, a violent set of nativist riots erupted in Philadelphia in 1844.

Snyder notes that, while what gets labeled as “indoctrination” as opposed to “education” is most often determined—in 2022 just as in 1844—by whether one already agrees with what is being taught, the distinction is not completely without merit. Sure, when Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida touts the benefits of the newly-passed Individual Freedom Act (aka the “Stop WOKE” Act⁴) as protecting children from being taught to hate themselves and their country,⁵ that is nativist blather. The “Stop WOKE” Act—and even more so the Parental Rights in Education Act—are retrograde pieces of legislation that harken back not so much to McCarthyist book banning⁶ as to the British Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643.⁷ You can draw a straight line from Ron DeSantis’s nonsense back to the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. And yet, that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as indoctrination.

Critical Race Theory has a venerable history and is an urgently-needed corrective to systemic racism. But there are indeed modes of antiracist pedagogy, most closely aligned with Ibram X. Kendi, that don’t merely bring to light ways in which racism insinuates itself into practices we take for granted as normal, but actually suggest that the very operations of thought, the skills of categorical rationality, that underpin both theoretical and practical reason—“discrimination” of a more fundamental kind, as it were—are essentially White and irredeemably racist. Snyder is right to argue that progressives and liberals shouldn’t be afraid to ask whether this brand of antiracism isn’t indeed indoctrination. You can question Ibram Kendi’s epistemological overreach and still denounce Ron DeSantis’s horseshit. Something can be rotten in the state of Florida and in the state of Denmark.

But that is Snyder’s argument, not mine, and I refer you to his wise essay for more. I would like to piggyback on the point about “epistemological overreach” to make a completely different argument.

2.

The movement toward dropping strict truancy laws and making homeschooling legal in every state of the US coincided exactly with the emergence of modern movement conservatism, of which Ron DeSantis is the representative du jour. That’s not a coincidence. Many people who choose homeschooling do so because they like tradition, the family, Christianity, American exceptionalism, “Western culture,” capitalism, individualism, and guns; and they don’t like focusing on other religions, race talk, weird gender stuff, labor unions, big government, or abortion—and so I guess they’re happy to take their impressionable kids away from the public educational system because they think it disrespects the good things and teaches the bad things.

In order to prove that their goals are warranted, homeschool enthusiasts pay lip service to ideas that are rational. For example, in homeschooling circles there is lots of discussion about Article 26 (3) of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” If you engage with the people making these arguments, you’ll find that they are often acting in good faith and can be quite nuanced. But it’s hard to shake the conviction that a lot of this talk about the freedom of parents to teach their children as they see fit is (at least subconsciously) a pretext for making sure their kids don’t come across arguments that racism is a problem in the US or that gender is a social construct.

And yet, in a certain way, giving a pretext is a lot like lying: As Harry Frankfurt famously argues, “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. . . . A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.” In the same way, a person who gives a pretext thinks they know what a common sense value is. This is important: They think they know not merely what I value, but what everyone thinks we ought to value.

Consider Section 1. Subsection (8) Sub-subsection (a) of the “Stop WOKE” Act. It declares as unlawful any insistence that, as a condition of employment in the public educational system, a person be compelled to believe eight particular concepts. Number 8 in that list of concepts is the repudiation of some common-sense virtues, to wit: “8. Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, sex, or national origin to oppress members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.” Besides “racial colorblindness,” I’d say that list of virtues is pretty solid. And with regard to the sort of pseudo-antiracist arguments being made in documents like this “Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction" toolkit published last year, the Florida legislators have a point.⁸ There really are some weird attempts to undercut basic, common-sense values being bandied about in the name of antiracism, and I’d challenge Ibram Kendi, or the developers of such materials (or the advisory committees they consult) to make their arguments in ways that don’t appeal to “objectivity,” “merit,” or “excellence” (or humility, fortitude, patience, perseverance, trustworthiness, or kindness).

The reason I want to be antiracist myself is that I believe, from the most objective vantage point I can find, that racism pervades our social fabric and that it is destructive. I disavow “colorblindness” because I believe that it ignores the fact that people experience the social reality of race all the time. I want to merit the admiration and love of my fellow humans by showing love and appreciation to them. I believe a person can be an excellent student by mastering skills and learning concepts—and be an even more excellent student (indeed, person) by showing fortitude and patiently persevering when they fail to learn something at the first try.

I think the legislators who created the “Stop WOKE” Act showed some merit in fighting for these virtues. That was good. But I think they showed vice in appealing to those virtues in order to avoid talking about racism, sexism, and other manner of bigotry. That was bad. They have their priorities, which is good; but they don’t have those priorities in order, which is bad. I think people should prioritize certain virtues, and they should place more value on certain virtues than others, because that’s what makes us humans flourish. Likewise, the bald cypresses of my Floridian youth should let their magnificent systems of roots tangle through the swamp and pop their "knees" out of the tannin-red water like stalagmites.

As the philosopher Philippa Foot famously wrote, “there is no change in the meaning of ‘good’ between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will.’”⁹

This, I think, is the most promising path forward in explaining normativity. Being a good human entails pursuing the conditions that are conducive to our own flourishing. Not so much a Leitkultur—as a Leitnatur. This idea has its roots (so to speak) in Aristotelian philosophy; and came to fruition (so to speak) in the Middle Ages, under St. Thomas Aquinas; and had a sort of Keatsean autumn of mellow fruitfulness (so to belabor) in the midcentury period, in the  philosophy of Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and later Alasdair MacIntyre. There are some objections that can be made—not the least of which is, if it is our natural end to flourish in virtue, shouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier for us to agree on what is virtuous? And if virtue is based on our human nature, doesn’t that mean there could be practically-reasoning creatures who wouldn’t have to follow our virtues, because they have a different nature? How does that make sense? I’ll takle those questions in Part III.

1. German readers, please don’t mistake this for criticism: I am happy to enjoy the benefits of your social safety net, and I am in favor of others enjoying them, too. But such convenience can’t help but lead to some ungrateful feelings of entitlement.

2. In fact, German decorum can’t help but be judgy about how pompous and Americanized Abibälle have become.

3. Structurally, it’s analogous to specious “right to work” arguments.

4. WOKE being (of course) an acronym for “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”

5. You know, by preventing them from learning about the moral failures inherent in the founding of the United States, like upholding slavery, or about the facts of the Civil Rights movement.

6. Although it is that too, as evidenced by the constant haranguing of librarians it has inspired

7. For Halloween this year, I’m dressing up as zombie John Milton, hell-bent on eating DeSantis’s brains.

8. Not that they should be legislating the content of education training, of course. That’s an egregious violation of First Amendment rights.

9. Foot, Philippa. Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 9.