I appreciate this post from Dan more than I can say (and I’m excited about the upcoming Becca Rothfeld book that inspired it). At one point, he writes:
What does it mean, for example, to democratize education? It seems to me that real democracy in education means the extension to each person of the same fundamental right of participation in educational institutions that we affirm in political institutions. It means educating each person to the fullest extent that their abilities and desire permit. It does not mean offering “free choice” as if we were stocking a supermarket, and it does not mean letting state legislatures stick their noses into it like dogs let loose in a restaurant kitchen. Least of all does it mean transplanting the mechanisms of political democracy—elections, impeachments, legislative sessions—into the classroom or the curriculum.
I’m going to brood on this bit for just a moment, because I think it’s a point that people don’t appreciate enough.
I meet far too many teachers in humanities fields who will almost immediately concede that the content they teach is in a basic sense bad. Writing, the central skill they teach, is a tool for exclusion (which it is, in the sense that anything useful is). The canonical novels they assign are only canonical because they won a rigged game, but now we have to read them anyway, because they are canonical, and you can’t deconstruct the canon if you don’t read it. The “critical consciousness” they cultivate is hopelessly always-already captured by the bourgeois culture industries, as evinced by the fact that they, the teachers, have these jobs cultivating it; still; it might help us understand the precise degree of our captured-ness. The pitch is basically “Study the bars of your invisible cage with us!” At best, these attitudes make studying English a bit like buying a car: It sucks, it makes the world worse, it’s bad for us, and any aesthetic enjoyment you get out of it is a destructive illusion. But you can’t escape it.
What’s interesting is that not that many of these same people really agree all the way with these arguments.