How authoritarians use public education to control the "truth"

“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” -Adrienne Rich

The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could possibly perpetuate the “psychic disequilibrium” that Adrienne Rich laments.

The case arose from conflicts between those in favor of teaching LGBTQ+ topics in schools and those who believe in so-called parents’ rights on religious grounds when it comes to the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns about a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school storybooks covering LGBTQ+ topics that could be read in class.

One of the contested books is titled “Pride Puppy!” and is about a puppy who gets lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ+ Pride parade.

When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the board reversed that part. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslim parents, in particular, objected. I wonder, though, whether they think parents should be allowed to opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.

This case harkens back to one of the earlier curricular programs created in 1991 by the New York City Board of Education. The Children of the Rainbow Curriculum was introduced to first-grade teachers to “assist with teaching about multicultural social issues.” The board developed the program to counter the increase in hate crimes directed against members of marginalized communities.

The curriculum contained 443 pages of suggested readings, activities, and other lectures, all designed to help teachers promote academic and social skills while teaching about diversity.

Unfortunately, the section on families that covered LGBTQ+ people incited enormous criticism. Some opponents argued that it promoted sex and sodomy to kids.

The battle gained significant publicity, and the New York City Department of Education ultimately voted against accepting the entire Children of the Rainbow Curriculum.

And the moments of psychic disequilibrium continued.

Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing

Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.

In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and that person’s restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization) and sustaining the life of the individual.

Nonetheless, we must establish a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, and minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).

Authorizing the “truth”

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.

Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” that his education consisted of neutralizing, meaningless content. “Everything looks worse in black and white,” he sang of the whitewashing of his lessons.

Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want the array of colors Paul Simon wished for: “Those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”

Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns and deepest purples.

Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst increased book banning and control of course content by state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights.” It’s all part of the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.

People on the political right transform terms like “woke” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into hate-filled and frightening epithets. In the process, they have driven us away from the underlying purpose of education.

The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”

In its original translation and intent, education includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge. This is in contrast to the placing or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds, or what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”

Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other types of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.

Let us take, for example, the Biblical warning in Genesis 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’”

The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When eaten, this “forbidden fruit” unlocks levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart. But more importantly, it can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in the black and white determined by those in power.

Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, they were strong women who refused to be trapped under the thumbs of the patriarchy.

Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge. The chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.

After an infuriated Zeus took back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.

For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained to the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.

Literature and cinema likewise warn of the horrific and often fatal risks of challenging the limitations placed by the powerful on the accumulation of knowledge.

The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future amounting to nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth, as they traveled at the speed of light.

The crew, led by Taylor – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.

A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on an animal-like intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.

Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual was somehow manipulated and falsified.

Blond-furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and humans.

He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart, undermining origin myths, and challenging hierarchal positionings.

These genesis/origin stories are examples of the concept of “hegemony,” a term coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci to describe the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense and part of the natural order.

This controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies exposure to multiple perspectives.

The institutionalization of a hegemonic norm functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as the truth.

This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research and was a precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.

Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”

Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and libraries, confiscating books they deemed “un-German.”

The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, students and Nazi leaders across Germany set ablaze over 25,000 volumes. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, fired up the Berlin crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”

In 2018, we witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ Christian crusader Paul Dorr check out four LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books from the Orange City, Iowa Public Library and burn them in a 27-minute October 2018 video diatribe on Facebook. – Dorr is the founder of Rescue the Perishing, a group “contending against moral evil to advance the Kingdom of Christ.”

The books in question were Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan; Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, by Christine Baldacchino; This Day In June, by Gayle E. Pitman; and Families, Families, Families!, by Suzanne and Max Lang.

In his video rant, Dorr argued that Two Boys Kissing was “designed to get 12-to-13-year-old boys to start having homosexual sex together.”