“You Can’t Teach an Old Dogma (or Donald) New Tricks”
Donald Trump is beyond help, but you knew that already. The most charitable amongst can try to reform him, but the chances for success are slim, at best. Blinded by self-aggrandizement and race hatred, no light can enter. All windows are mirrors, all rooms tunnels. When he steps outside the oval office or master-suite, his view is orchestrated to please him.
Personal change is simply not in the cards, and though he is convinced, as the saying goes, that he is a legend in his own mind, we know he is a global security threat.
Knowing that this is not a false alarm, we laugh him off. We march. We organize our communities to stand strong, as one, when he attempts to pit us against each other. We enter politics as candidates driven by a moral impulse. We add our voices to the serpentine conga line of Trump resistance stretching through blue and purple states.
All good things. But on Martin Luther King Day, I felt particularly helpless, especially after Trump’s anemic statement about “the wonderful things he [Martin Luther King] stood for.” I reached out to members of my organization, Teachers Without Borders, especially those who live and teach in each of the African continent’s 54 unique countries, Haiti, and El Salvador (the shithole countries, the mud-hut countries, the countries overrun by AIDS), by asking: “What are your thoughts about the American president and the state of democracy in the United States?”
It was a rhetorical question, I’ll admit, mixed with an attempt to distance myself from, and apologize for, the contagion of hate America has unleashed upon the world. I steeled myself for their outrage, deflation, alienation.
I was wrong. Instead, I got a pep talk and a set of stern reminders. Every note began with gratitude for having solicited their opinion. They reminded me that a country’s people must not be defined by their government, that dictatorial and dogmatic heads of state will never dictate the state of our heads, that we must never forget to model the behaviors we wish children to emulate.
Duly noted. But then the notes kept coming. Pep talks. Commiserations. Entreaties to keep the faith, one after another, until I began to see a pattern and remember why I started the organization in the first place.
Teachers from the very countries defamed by his remarks consistently took the high road. One even quoted King’s own words: “never [to] succumb to the temptation of bitterness,” that the chief aim of education is to save us from “the morass of propaganda,” to “sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” I got the distinct impression that, around the world, Martin Luther King Day was their holiday too.
Their message was clear: teaching is our collective best defense system against a growing tyranny, and the sooner we all saw it the better. Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written less than a year after Dr. King’s assassination, Neil Postman writes: “When the president appears on tv and clearly makes the point that anyone who does not accept ‘our policy’ can be viewed only as lending aid and comfort to the enemy,” who but teachers can respond by asking their students, “How is that so?”
We teachers are, after all, the largest professionally-trained group in the world, tasked with the responsibility of nurturing civility in every classroom. It is our job to sound the early-warning system when race hatred seeps into our classrooms like a noxious gas. I saw once again why and how the three words of our name—Teachers Without Borders—represents far than a network of professionals. We’re a movement.
We are Teachers…
…who create safe, democratic spaces to learn, even when the sanctity of our classrooms is under siege. In the United States, where I write this, children are petrified that they may be shipped off in the middle of the night to a land they cannot recognize just because their parents chose to move to the United States. We must be advocates for their families so that their daughters and sons can learn, in peace. And when those incidents of malice, bigotry, bullying, and sexism infect our classrooms with what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called the “Trump Effect,” we stop our lesson right then and there and renew the discussion, once again, in order to build back the social contract, rooted in a wellspring of public welfare and dignity, we have so painstakingly constructed.
Without…
…fear of reprisal for teaching critical thinking. Almost 100 years ago, H.G. Wells warned: “Education is a race between civilization and catastrophe.” When the powerful run roughshod over the truth, the skills of crap detection and the capacity to produce valid evidence for one’s assertions requires intellectual courage and care. Without the capacity to be nimble and inquisitive enough to call out a lie, our children don’t have a chance. We, in turn, will be complicit in hastening the day when that race is lost.
In her masterpiece, “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker writes: “When Celie questions, a space opens.” Children cannot be afraid not only to ask questions but also to question the answers. And when that space does open, children can spot immediately and instinctually the artificial walls of prejudice and stereotypes that depict whole regions of the world as diseased, or driven by crime, or committed to stealing jobs, or devoted to terrorism. We teachers may be tyrannized by the urgency of our daily work, but we will never let a day go by without countering the urgency of tyranny.
Borders.
We teach about borders all the time — the patterns of history that gave rise to borders and the struggles that have redefined them. We also know that teachers would never advocate for a free-for-all any more than they would tolerate a bully seeking to hijack the core purpose of learning. We also teach about refugees who have no home. The faces in our classroom represent the world. We know that borders define nations. As sure as day, we know that a walled-off mind trumps curiosity. We respect all children because we center our lives around a sense of mutual purpose and inclusion. Only then can teaching take root in the fertile ground of imagination. So, yes, we know borders.
Naïve, you say? Ask any teacher and she will tell you that we cannot root out evil with a few lesson plans (though there several fabulous ones for every subject and every age, for free, and in the public domain). She will say that we teachers help children practice democracy — our only hope for preventing the tectonic plates of race-baiting from causing fissures in the very foundation of thinking itself.
Decades ago, Dorothy Parker wrote: “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.” By its very nature, teaching (from the Old English tǣcan‘ — to show, present, point out’) is designed to educate for the human impulse. That is what Martin Luther King stood for.
I am optimistic that Congress will act to reaffirm American ideals and the integrity of the presidency over this temporary president’s vagaries, vanity, and vulgarity. I hope Mueller’s team can soon place before a jury neat piles of incontrovertible evidence that Mr. Trump’s multi-fold, decades-old, centerfold crimes require swift justice.
In the meantime, I will do my part. I will keep teaching.
