What Underlies the Republican Party's Commitment to Ignorance and How this Puts All of Our Children in Harm's Way by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

In a June 28, 2021, New York Times op-ed, economist Paul Krugman asks the question of "What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?" The short answer is their political interests. 

Now let's go a bit deeper and consider its role in the current movement in Texas surrounding House Bill 3979 and Republicans' expressed stance against Critical Race Theory, a bill that is already law but that Governor Greg Abbott is bringing up again in the Texas Legislative session that begins tomorrow. Specifically, Abbott has presidential aspirations and playing to the base of a party by fostering fear of the endarkened "other" makes for good political theater. What should not at all get lost here is the depth of the party's extremism and how this should be of grave concern to the public.

Similar to the 2012 and 2020 Texas G.O.P. Platforms, HB 3979 offers a "solution" looking for a "problem," the problem being, far too many people using their critical faculties to oppose inequality in U.S. society. The Ethnic Studies Movement over the past several years and the racial justice movement last spring motivated bills like these that are springing up across the country.

As captured in a 2012 post to this blog, we must remind ourselves here in Texas of the willful ignorance of the G.O.P. that has been explicit in the Texas Republican Party platform as follows:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Compare this to the 2020 G.O.P. Platform. Whatever progress it makes with item 134 with teachers teaching "critical thinking skills, including logic, rhetoric, and analytical sciences within these subjects," this gets nullified with item 138 as follows:

"We reject Critical Race Theory as a post-Marxist ideology that seeks to undermine the system of law and order itself and to reduce individuals to their group identity alone. We support legislation to remove this ideology from government programs, including education involving race, discrimination, and racial awareness. To facilitate the appreciation of our American identity, the contrast between freedom and the tyrannical history of socialism/communism throughout history must be taught."

If we put aside the outright lie of what Critical Theory is and acknowledge that it is a legitimate, forty-year, approach to critical thought and thinking—one among many legal, policy and political tools in educators' craft—the deeper question is the source of this fear. 

Perhaps you saw, like I did, the July 5, 2021 interview of Chris Tomlinson on Joy Reid's "ReidOut" on his co-authored text titled, "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth," a book that Gov. Abbot and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick recently censured (read "

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick admits he told state museum to cancel 'Forget the Alamo' book event"). In response to Reid's query about why this was so, Tomlinson explains:

"We make the argument that the myths that were taught to people my age and younger, frankly, in Texas schools are hurtful to the growing plurality of Hispanics in Texas. It paints a picture of freedom-loving Anglos fighting against dark-skinned people for liberty. It completely ignores the role that slavery played in motivating this because we point out the inconvenient fact that Mexico is a multicultural society that had just overthrown Spanish colonial rule, was trying to outlaw slavery.

 President Santa Ana said before he crossed the border into Texas, 'I am going to free the wretched souls in bondage.' Saying those things in Texas is apparently...was going to get you slapped down."

Yes, distorted history is harmful and objectifying. Borrowing from Dr. Lisa Delpit's classic, "Other People's Children," the legislating of sanitized curricula is inescapably a patronizing expression of white supremacist privilege on what to do with, and how to teach, "other people's children" who, in republicans' eyes, neither have, nor should have, a right to a perspective— even when the historical record aligns or the large numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse children in our schools would seem to suggest.

Consider that according to 2019-2020 Texas Education Agency data, Latina/o students are the largest demographic group in our state's public schools (52.8 % enrollment), with white, African American and Asian American children equaling 27 %, 12.6%, and 4.6%, respectively.* 

Referring not to numbers, but to political power, public education in Texas is "minority education." Hence, the G.O.P.'s commitment to ignorance becomes decipherable.

While obviously harmful to minoritized youth, I would amend Tomlinson's point of "hurtful to the growing plurality of Hispanics in Texas" to also include white children. I quote Texas A & M Professor Dr. Marlon James, with whom I recently spoke, who says that denying students our history makes all of our children vulnerable to extremism, putting them in harm's way. 

If you have any doubts about this, I encourage you to read Max Kutner's unsettling audiobook, Radicalized, that tells the story about how an eighteen-year-old, white American boy, Devon Arthurs, becomes a neo-Nazi—and later a Muslim jihadi—resulting in the violent murder of his two roommates. This chilling tale is partly chronicled in this AP News account titled, Deadly Shooting Ends Friendships Forged in Neo-Nazi Group. As Devon's parents were neither neo-Nazis nor jihadist, they never saw this coming. 

As I consider this horrible experience that this family endured, I cannot help but think that an authentic engagement with U.S. history, Women and Gender Studies, or Ethnic Studies might have been that ounce of prevention that might have engendered a pound of cure. It might have lessened Devon's vulnerability to extremist thought that in the beginning was little more than a young boy who was bullied in school, searching for a meaningful and powerful identity.

You see, nature hates a vacuum. And an empty, limited, self-serving history that HB 3979 represents is fertile ground for "free radicals" that can attach to any ideology or dogma, left or right, on the body politic. As the age-old dictum says, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Such free radicals become the cancer in the body.

Parents and people of good conscience, do duly note that while willful ignorance may preserve privilege and power for a time, in the long run, there are diminishing returns to this backward, medieval agenda. Even if the truth of history that HB 3979 seeks to outlaw makes us feel uncomfortable on occasion, let us be mindful of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s wise admonition:

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: It is the presence of justice."

Hence, rather than shrinking from history and critical topics as the Texas GOP would have us do, the constructive, intellectual task is to let a thousand flowers bloom. Instead of censorship and narrowing curricula, we should allow for vigorous debate and democratic deliberation so as to illuminate and clarify our present condition as a society, and in so doing, provide goal posts and real policy solutions for just and humane public policy and practices that make for a better world.

References

Dearen, J. & Kunzelman, M. (2017, August 22) Deadly Shooting Ends Friendships Forged in Neo-Nazi Group

Krugman, P. (2021, June 28). "What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to                                       Ignorance? New York Times. 

Kutner, M. (2020). Radicalized. Audible originals.

Texas Education Agency (2020). Enrollment in Texas Pubic Schools                                      https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/enroll_2019-20.pdf

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy; Director, Texas Center for Education Policy, University of Texas at Austin; and blogger since 2004.