What Conservatives Get Wrong About Education: No Left Turn and Deviation

I could laugh off and dismiss No Left Turn in Education if it wasn't 2021. June brought the promise of a mask-free summer full of travel and music and family visits. Then came the delta variant. It was a deflator for so many of us, while for others it was simply a maskless, "vaxless," business-as-usual moment. Like alpha and all the variants to come before, the delta variant became a political football. The generalized left was advocating vaccinations, social distancing, continued mask mandates, and other mitigation practices. The generalized right was advocating personal choice: vaccinate, distance, and mask if you want to, but leave us alone.

As a teacher, this has been a confounding problem: first, how to communicate the actual purpose of masking to students and parents? It even took me a while to realize that the point of wearing a mask indoors was so that I wouldn't infect others. While there may be some protection from inhaling a viral load, my mask is protecting the others around me from being exposed to whatever viral load I could be shedding. Once I "got it," I tried to share this as often as possible with my students. Some never bought it, though, and teachers spend half the day saying, "Please put your mask over your mouth and nose." For some students, especially those eavesdropping on their parents' Tucker Carlson regimen, not wearing it is a sign of defiance. 

Maskless adults who knowingly traipse around in areas with high community spread are basically sending one message out to their community: "I really don't care what happens to you or anyone else. My comfort comes first." Fair enough. The pursuit of happiness is, in some measure, an inalienable right. Plus, originalists or strict constructionists can argue that there is nothing in the Constitution about the Federal Government dictating health mandates, and they would be right, literally. However, as states tried to exercise their authority in this manner, there have been reactions ranging from rude but peaceful protest to threats of violent insurrection, including a promise to kidnap a governor. Nice.

It is in this climate, then, that I find No Left Turn's desire to ban particular books seriously unnerving. Somehow, this seems possible, no matter how misguided. The Hate U Give? Really? It's difficult to imagine that the "banners" even read Thomas's narrative. It is a solid coming of age story that uses police violence as a catalyst for Starr Carter's dawning social- and self-awareness. Her biggest offense is standing atop a van with a bull horn exhorting a crowd to never give up until justice is served for her dead friend Khalil, a young man unjustly killed by a jumpy patrol officer. As an American book, it could sit comfortably beside Richard Wright's Native Son or Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance." In that essay, Emerson writes, "I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. . . . I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways." When speaking out about needless police violence, Starr Carter was heeding Emerson's call.

In their desire to ban books, No Left Turn proves to be lacking in an irony meter. Robin Diangelo's White Fragility–featured in their "Critical Race Theory" category–identifies the extreme defensiveness found in much of white America when confronting issues of racism. This defensiveness and anger can cloud out the very message that Diangelo tries to send. She argues that when we holler and decry "attacks" on the integrity of Western or Enlightenment thinking, we are not listening. Diangelo goes to great lengths to point out that she is not accusing any individual of racist acts or positions. Rather, she discusses racism in the way that institutions have themselves been built for exclusion. One needn't look further than White Man's Leagues, Plessy v. Ferguson, Red Lining, Poll Taxes and Literacy Tests for evidence of institutional discrimination. This is basic AP US History material. Nothing shocking.

Recently, by revisiting and amplifying the events of Tulsa's Black Wall Street massacre 100 years after the fact, students were given a window into the past. It was a great educational moment, one that allowed a framework for discussing abhorrent acts of racial violence. None of this study, by the way, is intended to shame white students. Rather, in my predominantly white school of Downeast Maine, this is an opportunity to empathize with people who had all opportunities for generational wealth erased with a torch and a gun. These are not disputed historical facts. If discussing them makes us uncomfortable or mad, good. Go there. That's what Diangelo advises: our discomfort is telling us something.

As Americans, though, we should lean into that discomfort. Ours is a project, more than a nation. Ours is a state built on the promises of equity and equality. It is a state founded on the principles of evolutionary change. It is a state founded on the desire to seek redress for grievances. The founding fathers sought to disband the ties that bound them to an unjust king. "No taxation without representation." Agreed. The project of America is one of ever expanding inclusivity. And at each stage, it has come with a price. For the founding fathers, that price was an outright bloody revolution. The king had stepped on the colonists' rights, and the colonists sought to change the power dynamic.

Now, when I see No Left Turn listing Howard Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States, I continue to wonder, Have they actually read it? Left, right, or center, it is an historical fact that the Pinkerton Detectives, and sometimes the National Guard, were sent in to gun down striking laborers. Were some of them left-wing or even communist? Sure. But remember, no tension between (labor) agitators and abusive owners (capital), no 40-hour work week. No Upton Sinclair and other muckrakers, no USDA. Would you prefer rats and spoiled pork in your hotdogs? If students never read about Samuel Clemens' opposition to the Philippine-American War, how are they to have any historical context other than that of the "yellow press"?

Zinn's mission is not to make white people feel guilty. Rather, his is a mission to document Americans exercising their right to redress grievances. Following cycles of exploitation or struggle come waves of protest, sometimes violent, only to be followed by waves of reform. This is in keeping with the trends of the Second Great Awakening, a movement driven by the charitable side of Christianity. This early-19th century Protestant revivalism launched the temperance, feminist, and abolitionist movements, among others. These preachers were in line with the founding fathers' habit of complaining about their poor treatment at the hands of a greedy king. This is in keeping with the spirit of the Bill of Rights and the spirit of American reform. 

It is understandable how many conservatives are afraid of their children reading books that empower them to veer off the course their families have set. In a pluralistic, multicultural society, difference can be as difficult to accept as change. Yet in the words of that radical leftist Willa Cather, "When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting." If the No Left Turn folks were to do deep, analytical readings of Cather's novels, what would they find? Probably enough to make Cather, herself, blush.

The novel I just quoted, the classic My Ántonia, only features two rapists. One is a Boston farmer who torments his Swedish housemaids before one "was forced to retire from the world for a short time." The horrid Wick Cutter, exploitative money lender and town Brahmin, was also a letch. Regarding his housemaids, "One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in a business for which he had fitted her. He still visited her." But maybe it's just as well that this is couched in a language and context too subtle for the seeker of the salacious and the banner of books.

Cather's project, though, was reformist as much as it was reportage. She sought to show Americans just how much the maligned Eastern Europeans of the late-19th century actually contributed to the shaping of the prairie. She reveals just how provincial and narrow-minded most people become. Even Jim Burden, the novel's youthful narrator, succumbs to conservative claptrap and marries a disinterested WASP. Oh well, at least he shares his own mistakes with readers and embraces his shortcomings in the end.

By expanding the franchise, Andrew Jackson pushed against the then conservative American grain who would only grant white, property-owning men the right to vote. While expedient for his own ends, Jackson's move won him a spot on the twenty dollar bill in spite of his other, extensive short-comings. His democratic push was a wave of change and reform. And we are proud of him for it.

Then came the 13th and 14th Amendments. Then came the 19th. Despite the 1924 Snyder Act, Native American voting rights weren't secured until the passage of the 1965 Voter Rights Act. As an American, I for one am glad that these struggles pressed forward. There were always people objecting at each step of the way. Thankfully, they are mostly the forgotten voices of American history.

While No Left Turn will continue to gain traction in this reactionary moment, I will stand against them and their endeavors to limit American discourse. The reductive histrionics of Charlie Kirk's argument against Critical Race Theory, for one example, are simply designed to inflame and divide. No student benefits from an education that seeks to pretend that the world outside does not exist.