On Nov. 19, Becky Pringle, the president of America’s largest teachers union, issued a statement lamenting the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. She demanded that the nation’s schools push for “justice and accountability for all.”
What begins in union meetings often ends in the classroom. As such, the reactions to last year’s unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as well as to Rittenhouse’s acquittal, have not been limited to the public square. In schools around the country, the Rittenhouse trial has wormed its way into both curriculum and pedagogy. This isn’t the first time either: the trials of Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman also served as easy fodder for activist teachers.
Allegations of activist teaching are no right-wing conspiracy. In fact, activist teaching is present across the political spectrum. The Rittenhouse trial has been fodder for numerous examples of performative activism in the classroom. In Chicago, one teacher asked students to compare Rittenhouse to Julius Jones, a black man from Oklahoma whose planned execution in relation to a 1999 murder was recently commuted to a life sentence. In Dallas, a teacher listed Rittenhouse as a “modern hero” alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, George Floyd, and Joseph D. Rosenbaum (one of the men Rittenhouse was accused of murdering).
But when educators present their own political ideologies as fact, they are engaging in a form of evangelism. That’s not what parents send their children to school to learn. When parents send their children to public schools, they expect that their kids will learn how to read, write, do math, and develop character. They do not expect their children to be force-fed an ideologue’s worldview.
Those teachers who see themselves as activists first and educators second would do well to remember their real purpose. Indeed, their jobs may depend on it. Public school enrollment is falling across most states. While this increase in educational freedom is a positive development, it doesn’t help the millions of students who continue to attend public schools.
Crafting education systems that support specific political goals is a tool of dictatorships and autocracies, not free societies. Moreover, these techniques usually result in children being less educated.
If parents want to raise their children with a certain ideological framework in mind, that is their right. It is also their right to send their children to a school that reflects those ideologies. But public schools, being taxpayer-funded, should keep ideology away to the greatest possible extent. They should cultivate the common values that we all agree define a good person. But, to the extent that it’s possible, public education should be neither conservative nor liberal.
By allowing teachers to spread dogma without any pushback whatsoever, the state is tacitly, sometimes explicitly, endorsing a particular ideology. These are matters that should be hashed out by way of ballot boxes, not in classrooms.
The problem of activists masquerading as teachers did not begin with Rittenhouse, nor will it end with him. Unless school districts prioritize virtue over ideology, public school attendance will only continue to fall. Children are not political pawns, and teachers should leave the broad, sweeping declarations to the clergy.
Garion Frankel is a graduate student at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is a contributor to Young Voices, a guest blogger at reimaginED, and the Chalkboard Review’s breaking news reporter.
