Centrist Propaganda: Holocaust Education and African-American Studies in New Jersey
What then of the center? Is there such a thing as centrist indoctrination in the schools? Can an enforced commitment to the middle-of-the-road mainstream possibly be a bad thing for pedagogy? Two articles in the New Jersey section of today's New York Times suggest that the answer is an emphatic"yes."
The first one, "Diary of a Teenage Hit," seems innocuous enough at first glance. Here we learn that between September 2005 and Feb. 26 of this year, 9,000 students from 28 New Jersey schools will have flocked to the Paper Mill Playhouse of Millburn, NJ to see matinee performances of"The Diary of Anne Frank." Why the sudden interest?, you ask.
Part of the reason for this large degree of interest from schools is because New Jersey is one of seven states that mandates that Holocaust and genocide studies be taught at some point in their elementary or secondary schools' curriculum.As for the content of what they learn, this passage conveys the aspiration:
Many, if not most, of New Jersey public schools fulfill the academic requirement by offering courses at the middle school level, like the"Lessons From the Holocaust" class that Mary Vazquez teaches as an eighth-grade elective at Millburn Middle School. She said the course was always overbooked, and that two-thirds of the students in it are Jewish.
"They have a great interest in learning about their heritage," she said.
Actually, the very nature of theater seems in total harmony with the desired approach to the teaching of the Holocaust. Dr. Paul B. Winkler, the executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education in Trenton, said in a telephone interview that Holocaust and genocide study must be"much more affective learning than cognitive learning." In other words, more about caring, understanding and feeling than about facts and figures.Students learning to emote about Anne Frank on the public dime: who could possibly argue with that?
Turn the page and you find an AP story called"Trying to Make Black History More Than February," which describes Newark assemblyman William Payne's struggle to mandate the teaching of black history in New Jersey's schools. (The article appeared on p. 7 of the New Jersey section of New York Times today, and the front page of the Times of Trenton yesterday, but is archived at neither site. An online version is available under the"news clippings" section of the Amistad Commission site, San Diego News Tribune, Feb. 9.) The"mandate," as you might imagine, takes the form of a legal imperative:
New Jersey's 2002 law created an Amistad Commission whose members write lesson plans, organize educational events and train teachers—all focused on black history. The law says each school board"shall incorporate" black history at all grade levels.In practice, the imperative takes the following charming form:
Ms. Jackson-Weaver [executive director of the Amistad Commission] now is surveying New Jersey's 593 districts on their compliance with the law."Just in case you didn't know," she told districts in a letter,"we do have an Amistad law on the books and it's necessary to have African-American history in the curriculum….Later in the article we're told:
Last week, New Jersey's education commissioner sent another reminder to school districts to urge educators to implement the law."The use of legalized compulsion to teach students about the plight of African-Americans as victims of legalized compulsion: who could argue with that?
I could. Whatever their intentions, here is what one actually learns from these probably well-intentioned centrist efforts at indoctrination:
1. The teaching of history is to be driven essentially by ethnic and political interests and/or demography, then mandated by law.
Thus: Jews want the Holocaust taught. Jews have a powerful lobby in New Jersey (plus powerful friends in higher education). Hence Jews get what they want. African-Americans want black history. African-Americans have a powerful lobby in New Jersey (plus powerful friends in higher education). They get what they want. Message to other ethnic groups: If you want your group's history taught, go out and get a lobby (plus powerful friends in higher education); lobby the legislatures; then set up a"Commission" and step onto the gravy train.
Prediction: it won't be long before we hear from aggrieved Native Americans, Hispanics, Chinese-, Japanese- and Korean-Americans, Russian- and Ukrainian-Americans, Armenians, Palestinians and/or Indians demanding their"fair share" of the genocide/oppression studies curriculum. As this happens, watch historiographical and pedagogical standards yield slowly but surely to ethnic pressure, and watch each group jockey against (or cut deals with) the others for power. Meanwhile, watch the history curriculum vanish from sight, swallowed by ethnic course-trading and -bickering. (One more prediction: Wait for hitherto unheard-of confusions to sprout in the new generation of students educated by this approach, produced by a curriculum motivated to some degree by ethnic cheerleading, aka"learning about one's own heritage." I think, for instance, of my own students' bizarre but persistent habit of conflating the words"ethics" with"ethnics" on the assumption that the two words are equivalent.)
2. Difficult epistemological and pedagogical questions are to be ruled out of court as violating the complacent law-mandated centrist status quo.
For instance: Why exactly do high school students need to be exposed to"genocide studies" as opposed to plain old history? Why can't students learn about the Holocaust as part of a unit on World War II, instead of reducing all of World War II to the diary of Anne Frank? For that matter, why can't students learn about"black history" in a regular American history course as distinct from learning about"black history" as such?
Continuing with the ethnic theme: Why is the Holocaust Commission's work so heavily tilted toward the Nazi extermination of the Jews, as opposed, say, to the Soviet extermination of the kulaks? How is the term"genocide" to be defined, anyway, and why isn't the crime of genocide reducible to mass murder? If we're going to study genocide, why not study massacre in the bargain and study something more controversial than the Holocaust—like Deir Yasin, Sabra and Shatila or the East-West Pakistan Civil War of 1971? If that's"too controversial," then why introduce"genocide" as a subject of study for schoolchildren in the first place?
Remarkably, for all of that hifallutin papers and conferences that the Holocaust and Amistad Commissions have funded, very little of their contents answers any of the preceding questions. On the other hand, if you urgently need to know, say, about the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's thought to public education at the K-12 level, you'll be relieved to find what you were looking for. An axiom: When funding precedes answers to fundamental questions, expect the questions to go unasked and unanswered.
3. Appeal to students' emotions so as to avoid teaching very much of substance; the substanceless is after all the"uncontroversial," and only the uncontroversial is compatible with bipartisan funding.
Precisely because none of the preceding questions is dealt with, it is downright offensive to be told by the executive director of the Holocaust Commission that the Holocaust is to be taught to schoolchildren on an"affective" rather than" cognitive" basis, so that emotions are to be manipulated but little information imparted. The irony of teaching children the evils of totalitarianism by induced mindlessness is apparently lost on these people, as is the irony of a legally"mandated" curriculum designed to teach them about the evils of compulsion.
I'm reminded in this connection of Hannah Arendt's description of Adolph Eichmann:
The longer one listened to him [Eichmann], the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think….No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality itself. (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 49).One of those safeguards was the cognition-destroying cliché, the clichés as Arendt puts it,"by which the people [of Germany] had lived for twelve years."
Eichmann's mind was filled to the brim with such [clichéd] sentences. [And yet] his memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happened; in a rare moment of exasperation, Judge Landau asked the accused:"What can you remember?" (EJ, p. 53).Remember this set of passages the next time you encounter a student fresh out of high school who can parrot clichés to you about Anne Frank or Rosa Parks, but can't remember anything else about World War II, the Civil War, Reconstruction or the civil rights movement. Could there conceivably be a connection between the substitution of cliches for history and students' inability to remember how historical events actually took place?
Don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that Holocaust or Amistad Commissions are about to make"desk murderers" of New Jersey's schoolchildren. My point is that they are doing a questionable job of imparting the capacity to think about the very topics they claim to be teaching. At the end of the day, it is worth asking whether history education is a form of non-cognitive ethnic appeasement, or something else, and if the latter, how it is to be imparted by clumsy laws implemented by educators skilled prinicipally in the skills of indoctrination. It is also worth asking whether history can be taught by legal edict, or whether there is something morally, pedagogically and politically problematic about the idea of compelling people to teach about the nature of rights violations in history.
In my next post, I'll put up a few inadvertently hilarious examples of history education gone awry. Ask yourself whether the failures arise from an overemphasis on cognition, and whether they can be solved by ethnically-driven agendas promoted by state-subsidized Commissions.