Here among the detritus and smorgasbord of atrocities, depravities, and violations of our values and ideals as heirs to the Trial of Socrates which founded our civilization as a self-questioning system, we now have the militarization of our schools as repression of dissent and the enforcement of authorized identities.
Texas has implemented the Stalinist model of schools. This reverses the true goal of education, to question and discover, and replaces educatus, to bring forth, with memorization and repetition, to stuff in authorized truths and identities. If allowed to continue, this shift will also replace science with technology and end innovation and America’s cultural advantage over totalitarian systems.
It is also a white supremacist strategy of enforcing the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic white elites, in which nonwhite students are assimilated, deracinated, and trained to obey.
If we are all trained and indoctrinated not to question authority, who will be our citizens and co owners of the state? This is a primary purpose of education in a democracy, to create a citizen electorate able to govern itself.
The purpose of education is to teach us to question ourselves and everything else, to reason, to never remain silent, and to organize ourselves with others in mutual interdependence as we solve problems together.
My mother taught high school English for many years, and would tell her students the story of how an enraged nun broke her finger for asking questions when she was twelve, whereupon she stood up and walked out, never to return. Then she would hold up her crooked finger and announce the first rule of her classroom; “We are not silent.”
We are not silent, for silence is complicity.
As written by George Chidi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Texas took over a failing Houston school district. Will its militaristic structure work?
The state fired teachers and brought in a former army ranger as superintendent, who brought questionable lessons with him; “In the fashion of American democracy, when someone believes there’s a problem with their local school, they may decide to make a call or send an email to their elected school board members, whom they almost always have to look up first.
Parents might take these minor elected officials by the figurative shirt collar and gently shake them, saying: “I want this thing to change.” They may then gather their surly neighbors and gang up on the school board to not-so-gently threaten their re-election until someone is thrown out of office or everyone else gives up.
Houstonians were getting arrested at rowdy school board meetings years before “critical race theory” made such things fashionable. In 2017, three women were arrested – and two charged – after getting into a shoving match when the Houston school board had been considering a plan to turn over its failing schools to a charter program, to get out from under the threatened state takeover. The board abandoned the plan.
But it’s one thing for activists to lobby someone who lives up the street and another when state lawmakers take control, as has happened in Houston.
Under a 2015 Texas law, if a school fails state standards for five years running, the state is obligated to either close the school – or take over the school district. In 2023, the entire Houston independent school district – the eighth-largest system in the country – became a dependency of the state.
Houston homeowners still pay school taxes. They even vote for school board members, though those elected officials have no authority. The state-run district places underperforming schools in the new education system, which critics describe as a reform model of inflexible lesson plans in a rigidly disciplinarian environment geared toward passing tests. The curriculum is questionable: in one instance, a school used instructional materials from the conservative non-profit PragerU that cast doubt on the human-made origins of climate change. In another, seventh graders were asked to imagine themselves as statehood convention delegates and asked whether slavery in Texas should be legal.
Parents have protested new rules that abandon state requirements for certified teachers in classrooms. They argue that Spanish-speaking students are no longer receiving adequately bilingual instruction. They see the conversion of a school in a struggling part of Houston into a military academy as a challenge to their values.
But now, there is no shirt collar to grab.
The halls of Phillis Wheatley high school were quiet in the middle of the day in the middle of December. Testing was on. Testing is always on, but in this case teachers were administering end-of-semester exams. Three students carted boxes of pizza into the front hall.
The school, in Houston’s struggling fifth ward, was the first of several schools in Houston ISD to trigger the Texas law. After a years-long court fight, the Texas education agency opted to replace Houston’s elected school board with a state-appointed panel.
About 5.4 million students attend public schools in Texas, and about 200,000 are enrolled by Houston ISD. Children at Risk, a non-partisan research and advocacy non-profit in Texas, academically assessed 1,282 high schools in Texas for the 2022-23 school year, pairing test data with socioeconomic data to look at performance. A few Houston schools took several of the rankings’ top spots. But Wheatley ranked 1,236th. Eight of Houston ISD’s 43 high schools ranked lower still.
Wheatley is showing improvement, said Bob Sanborn, the CEO of Children at Risk. “But when you look at schools like Wheatley, they’re in such a hole to start. At least they’re trying something different. Most parents at these poorly performing high schools want to see a change as well. They’re less interested in who is doing it and more in whether they will be successful.”
Sabrina Cuby-King became Wheatley’s principal in 2022. One year later, the Texas education agency took over. Wheatley had been the poster child for reformers after repeatedly failing the state assessments. All eyes were on her, and on Wheatley.
Her first order of business was doing what she could to turn off the spotlight, she said. Cuby-King has not spoken to the press since taking the job – until now. The Spelman College grad spoke with care to avoid negative language about the school, about the takeover, about parents or politics.
“Students who are attending here see their school on the news being beat down. That had to shift first … the perception of the school had to change,” she said. “I didn’t want my students to go out and be embarrassed. That was my internal push. That was my motivation.”
The state rates schools using A to F letter grades. Houston ISD posted school test grades on 23 January. After a string of Fs, Wheatley scored a D. It’s an improvement that Cuby-King expected after a year of intense change. She’s a cheerleader for the model.
“The model that’s put in place has shown that the turnaround is successful,” she said.
But both Cuby-King and other administrators vigorously challenged the suggestion that students were being taught to the test, despite the constant classroom quizzing.
“The focus is on high-quality instruction and a reassurance that kids have content-knowledge acquisition,” said Joseph Sotelo, the senior executive director of Houston ISD. “So, at the end of class, we have a quiz. We make sure that you know it, and through the genius of the model, when kids do get it, they get to go to the team center and excel with their work.”
Mike Miles, the Houston ISD superintendent, is a West Point-trained former army ranger and diplomat who also previously served as a school superintendent in Dallas and Colorado Springs, and ran a charter school network, Third Future Schools.
His critics complain of the military-like regimentation he has imposed on failing schools, over public objections, in the new education system modeled on his charter school approach – and of the questionable curriculum their children have faced. Both the PragerU and slavery material were removed after their appearance became public. But neither case threatened Miles’s job.
Miles “doesn’t have to act politically or in accordance with other peoples’ wishes”, Sanborn said. “And he has a personality that fits that. He doesn’t know how to spin things for the media. He doesn’t know how to spin things for parents. He has the best intentions, but sometimes he’s a bull in a china shop.”
Some of the changes are cosmetic, like replacing hall passes with 3ft-tall, bright orange traffic cones that a hall monitor can spot from orbit. Some changes are less abstract: in Miles’s system, lesson plans must be taught without deviation, with a quiz at the end of every block of instruction.
Students who pass the quiz are sent to what used to be school libraries – team centers, which have also been described as “disciplinary centers” – for other instruction. Those who fail the quiz are re-educated.
Critics of the state school takeover see Miles as the epitome of what they hate about it: an unelected outsider who refuses to listen to their concerns.
“I am speaking to the unelected board of managers, who consistently support the uncertified superintendent on his quest to remove all certified teachers, principals, staff members and counselors out of our schools,” Dr Pamela Boveland, a Houston college professor, said at the December school board meeting. “Obviously if he is not certified, no one else should be.”
In January, the district announced it would convert Cullen middle school – an economically disadvantaged campus that’s about 90% students of color and a solid C on the state’s academic achievement ratings – into a military academy later this year.
Until the state returns governing authority to the elected board, the elected officers of the district, like Plácido Gómez, who was elected last year, are left playing the role of a prison trustee negotiating with the wardens.
“People really are upset, and they have every right to be upset. Their voice was taken away,” he said of the takeover. He’s trying to give Miles the benefit of the doubt, though. “I’m willing to die on the hill of seeing the best in people. Though I could criticize the way that the superintendent came at things, I do believe that in his heart of hearts, he wants what’s best for students, and particularly, he wants what’s best for students who have historically been underserved.”
Miles argues that the takeover process itself was a product of a democratic process. Elected lawmakers enacted the legislation. Elected officials appointed attorneys to argue the constitutionality in open courtrooms, before an elected judiciary.
“I understand that people think that because they no longer elect the school board, at least for a period of time, that that process is non-democratic,” he said. “But the overarching process that allowed the takeover? Totally democratic. You may not like the results, you know, but the process was used and was vetted legally, through several iterations, right, several levels.”
Parents generally understand that Houston has some troubled schools and want to see them improve. But under the new education system, they’re left trying to find ways around the government to help their children.
Jessica Campos’s daughter attends Pugh elementary school in the Denver Harbor neighborhood; it’s one of the feeder schools to Wheatley. Because it’s in the Wheatley school cluster, the district imposed the new education system on it. In 2022 it earned an A grade. Last year it slipped to a B.
“We had just got through having our last day of school, and it was a wonderful time,” Campos said. “Next year, my daughter was going to have the same teacher she had in third grade, which was the best teacher she ever had. A couple days later, we get a call from that same teacher, crying, saying that he just lost his job. I’m like: ‘What is that? What do you mean? You just got nominated for teacher of the year last month?’ And he’s like: ‘Yeah, we all lost our jobs. All the teachers.’ So yeah, that’s going to upset us parents because we had a great school.”
Campos was disturbed by some of the changes made at Pugh, like the PragerU video. District leaders apologized, but the decision to use them at all is a poke in the eye to any pretense of local control.
Campos said she’s particularly concerned about how dual-language instruction had been curtailed. Pugh’s student body is 96.4% Hispanic, according to school records. About 97% are economically disadvantaged and almost all have Spanish as a first language. Campos says the mechanisms to challenge a problem like this have been eliminated.
“It feels like our language is being removed from our schools,” Campos said. “And I think that it’s our right as parents to choose that. I don’t think that the parents in our community had a voice. They have eliminated us from the schools. We’re not allowed to ask questions. Actually, teachers have told parents that they have been told they cannot speak to us.”
Gómez has heard similar things from teachers.
“A lot of teachers feel there’s a culture of fear in the schools,” he said. But there’s little recourse to the appointed board of managers. “If I come to them with a logistical concern, or that principal is not effective, or this parent had a negative experience trying to observe what’s going on in schools, the board of managers really doesn’t have the power to do those administrative things.”
Campos and her daughter’s teacher don’t get a vote on how the system is administered. But both parents and teachers have been voting with their feet. Teacher turnover has doubled in the last year, according to Houston ISD reports.
“Today I went to a school where almost all of the cars that I went to said: Yeah, we’re moving our kid out of the school district,” she said. “That’s what they want us to do. They want us to run, they want us to leave.”
“We have to stay and fight this because these are our schools, we pay taxes. These are our children. And we have a say in how the curriculum is presented to our children.”
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2019, Our Schools Are Become Prisons; Our schools are become prisons, and we must begin to rebuild freedom in America here, at the shaping ground of society and the intake for the schools to prisons pipeline and the criminalization of defiance of authority, the forge of a totalitarian state where submission and depersonalization are taught through the zero tolerance policy, where force is taught by armed police and a culture of violence is incubated, and where our population is divided into masters and slaves.
Part of a larger picture which includes the militarization of police and the counterinsurgency model of policing, the use of prisons to repress dissent, disenfranchise and return Black Americans to a state as close to slavery as possible through the sale of their time as bond labor, as reprehensible a practice as can be imagined, modeled on the labor system of Apartheid and a clear violation of the 13th Amendment, this subversion of democracy by a multitude of tools of state terror should be abolished immediately.
Much of the true education which occurs in schools comes from modeling target behaviors, so the question becomes, what kind of citizens do we want to build, and what kind of society are we trying to achieve?
As I wrote in my post of October 4 2021, What is the True Purpose of Public Education in a Democracy?; In The Addams Family Goes to School, wherein the truant officer is dispatched to bring Pugsley and Wednesday, aged 6 and 8 who have never been to school, our introduction to this family of glorious misfits, monsters, and forgotten gods, we are presented with a morality play of revolutionary struggle and a recurring theme of the series in which individuals and society are locked in a titanic battle for ownership of identity, with the stakes being autonomy or theft of the soul.
What is the true purpose of public education?
School is the forge of normality, authorized identities of sex and gender, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the institutionalization of nationalist values and narratives of exclusivity, valorization of competition, violence, militarism, and the apologetics of capitalist elitism as meritocracy, and of hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness and divisions of race. Here we sort future masters from those who will serve them.
Public education is also our one chance to reimagine and transform our civilization through its members, to produce citizens of a free society of equals who can fulfill the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Tyranny cannot withstand exposure, truthtelling, and the witness of history.
Can democracy function as diversity and inclusion, or does throwing all the children in a pen together to sort themselves out always result in assimilation and hierarchies of exclusionary division or making everyone the same?
The politization of public education has become national news recently with violent and disruptive confrontations during school board meetings, but this is nothing new. Education is a ground of struggle; who is chosen to succeed and take their place among our elite and who will clean their houses, serve their food, produce the goods and material basis of their survival. At stake here is nothing less than the definition of our humanity, of freedom and equality, of who will manage systems, process symbols, ideas, and information, create and have the power to change civilization, and who will service them.
Every aspect of education as a social system, textbooks and the canon of literature, how history is taught, tests and success filters for access to power and wealth, class stratification or mobility, patriarchy, racial divisions, language, all of it is volatile and of crucial importance to the project of democracy.
As written by Sherman Dorn in The Washington Post; “Chaos and violence seem to be the themes of the first month of school. To many observers, these may appear to be exceptional, unprecedented times. But there’s a long history of public schools serving as ideological and physical battlegrounds, particularly when it comes to conflicts over citizenship and civil rights.
The violent response this fall by some Americans to public health measures and teaching our history of racism is an echo of violent responses in the past to efforts to broaden the reach and mission of schools. And this history also shows that how government reacts is not foreordained, and that the choice of responses will play a major role in determining the long-term consequences of this violence.
In the 1830s and 1840s, industrialization in Massachusetts triggered civil disorder, including the Boston riots between Protestants and immigrant Catholics. State Secretary of Education Horace Mann thought he had a solution to this strife, arguing for educating all children together in what he called common schools designed to foster a background that all children would share.
But this concept proved fractious from the start.
No sooner did common schools emerge than violence engulfed them. In 1844, Catholic families in Philadelphia sought representation in the schools. Yet many White Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to a burgeoning national identity, and nowhere was that assault clearer than in their supposed attempts to take over the public schools. So nativists spread false rumors that Catholic immigrants were pushing local public schools to remove Bibles.
These rumors, fear and anger spread and neighbors took to the streets. Multi-day riots in May and July resulted in the burning of multiple Catholic churches and the deaths of more than two dozen people.
Violence at and around schools became even more widespread after the Civil War. As newly elected Black politicians joined with community members to create a system of public schooling in the South, they fused schooling and citizenship. All the Reconstruction-era state constitutions that Congress approved had education embedded as a right. The appearance of public schools for Black children and the promise of access to all aspects of society enraged some White Southerners who feared the erosion of a social order that gave them privilege and power. Those fears translated to direct attacks.
Because of the central role of public education in the new definition of American citizenship, Southern racists targeted schools as part of an explicit counterrevolution to undermine Reconstruction and civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan regularly attacked schools, and being a teacher in a Black community was one of the most vulnerable occupations throughout the late 19th century.
For a brief period in the early 20th century, school violence dissipated, but for the worst of reasons. Across the South, White elites imposed systems of disfranchisement and segregation; systematically and structurally disadvantaged, Black schools became less of a visible threat to White supremacy and reigning power arrangements.
But schooling became the center of widespread community conflict and violence again in the early 1940s. When two Jehovah’s Witness children, Lillian and William Gobitas, refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in their Minersville, Pa., public school classroom, they were expelled. Their case wound through the federal courts, finally reaching the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the school district.
In the wake of that decision, Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in communities across the country, often with members of the American Legion as leading local vigilantes. Coming to the schools with a mob mentality, Legionnaires and others identified the pledge in public schools as fundamental to American identity and those who refused to say it as national threats. In wartime, the mobs — and many other Americans — viewed dissent as suspicious and unpatriotic.
From Litchfield, Ill., to Kennebunk, Maine, entire towns were wracked by anti-Witness mobs. Children who refused to say the pledge for any number of reasons faced expulsion and threats of incarceration, as did their parents for encouraging juvenile delinquency.
In part shamed by the violence following their earlier decision, the majority of the court reversed itself three years later. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in his majority decision, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Despite this shift and the protection of students’ right to dissent, public schools remained figurative and literal battlegrounds in the fight over American identity and rights.
In the fall of 1957, White mobs in Little Rock, Ark., turned out in protest of the nine Black students desegregating Central High School. As Melba Pattillo Beals described in her memoir, on the first day of school her classmate Elizabeth Eckford was sandwiched between Arkansas National Guard members refusing to let her enter the school and “a huge crowd of white people screeching at her back … [having] closed in like diving vultures … [who] shouted, stomped, and whistled as though her awful predicament were a triumph for them.” The mobs dispersed only after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to enforce federal court orders to desegregate.
In Nashville the same month, a violent opponent of desegregation bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School. No one was hurt in the late-night bombing, but as historian Sonya Ramsey explained, the single Black student in the school stopped attending.
In the 1970s, White mobs attacked buses carrying Black students as they arrived at South Boston High School.
Across American history, schools have been vulnerable to periodic violence that surrounds debates about citizenship and equal rights in education, including the role of schools in fostering shared childhood experiences, in building citizenship and equal education regardless of race, and in allowing principled dissent from rituals.
The strife this year fits into that broader pattern. To the parents and politicians angry or confused about critical race theory, like the parents and politicians angry or confused about mask mandates and health policies, the public schools are a key front in a battle for their rights and standing as citizens.
Debate over the role and purposes of public schools is a healthy sign of a functioning democracy. But violence around schooling is fundamentally at odds with the give-and-take of democratic decision-making. And it demands a strong response from authorities.
In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed the decision that had triggered mob violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1957, Eisenhower responded to the resistance to desegregation in Arkansas by dispatching federal troops.
Yet when the government has failed to confront violence, the consequences have been severe. In 1833, abolitionist Prudence Crandall opened her Canterbury, Conn., boarding school to Sarah Harris and other Black girls and women. Public officials responded by making it illegal for her to admit students from out of state without town permission, prosecuted her and stood by while a mob destroyed much of her school in 1834. Crandall moved to Illinois the next year, costing Connecticut a dedicated educational leader and beginning two centuries of a long troubled history of school segregation in New England.
The history of education teaches us that violence surrounding democratic schooling is part of a recurring pattern and that we have a choice to passively accept or assertively confront violent impulses.”
As I wrote in my post of March 22 2020, The Subversion of our Education System and Democracy; The suspension of our national standardized testing has revealed a failure of our education system; the commodification and privatization of learning and the modeling of our schools on factory production has produced a generation of Americans who can follow orders, perform routine tasks, and parrot facts, but whose abilities to create, invent, reason, and analyze and interpret facts have been crippled. This is intentional.
Educatus, the Greek word origin of education, means to bring out rather than to stuff facts in. It is an idea bound together with that of citizens as co-owners of their own government in a democracy, and equally responsible for one another and for the stewardship of its four pillars of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
Our civilization is founded and premised on its ability to question itself; this capacity for adaptation and transformation sets democracy apart from the tyrannies of priest-kings which had come before. From our origin in the Forum of Athens, the dialectics of Socratic method has been the forge of our identity as an anti-hierarchical culture, a free society of equals in which the greatest duty of a citizen is to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, to incite, provoke, and disturb, and we must return this process to its central role in education if liberty is to survive and flourish in this age of state terror and control.
We have permitted the subversion of our education system and democracy by those who would enslave us. And we must take it back.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2021, Truth, Lies, and History as a Ground of Struggle; the Case of Critical Race Theory Repression; We are confronted today with the realization of a nightmare and prophetic vision written by George Orwell in 1984, the classic novel of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government which rendered in the chiaroscuro of a newsreel depicting the liberation of concentration camps a fictional interrogation of totalitarianism as a companion volume to Hannah Arendt’s nonfictional The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The remnants of the Fourth Reich and the organizations of white supremacist treason and terror within our government who remain loyal to Trump’s vision of a white ethnostate want the government to control what is taught as history in our schools, which would be the death knell of freedom and equality in America, and are enacting a furious assault on our values and on public education as a guarantor of an informed electorate in order to render meaningless the idea of citizenship, the co-ownership of the state by its members, in parallel with vote suppression legislation.
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2020, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/29/violence-over-schools-is-nothing-new-america
Texas took over a failing Houston school district. Will its militaristic structure work?
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
Torch of Liberty 