What we don't teach matters

First, some housekeeping. Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy, a twice weekly newsletter where I write about education (mostly) and share some links with my commentary. I’ve been rolling down a list of topics that I find interesting, but I welcome any suggestions or questions. If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe and share my work. I’d love to grow my audience somewhat organically and without the added labor of marketing it or maintaining a social media presence. If you don’t like Substack as a platform, I am posting a copy/paste version of the newsletter on BeeHiiv.

Moral Education Continues

As part of my research into high school entrance, I looked extensively at documents, websites, and other aspects of schools’ online presence from schools in every state in the country. One of the things I noticed as I looked at school after school is that the place where school counselors work had a different name than I recalled seeing from my time in high schools. Some schools no longer had a counselor’s office or even, as I remember it being called in my own high school, a guidance office. No, what I saw on these websites and in these documents was something called a College and Career Readiness Center or some similar variation on that theme.

One of the questions I asked at the end of last week’s post about natural disasters causing disruptions to schooling was, “Do you think the people in the College and Career Readiness Center are here to talk about your trauma?” Schools have so clearly and exclusively reoriented themselves around the academic goal of getting students into college that some of their other functions seem… deprecated? Vestigial? I don’t know the right word but what I do know is that kids notice these things and I made the point that this is a kind of curriculum. Schools exist to promote specific values and morals. In the 21st century, one of the moral stories we tell children is that the best thing they can do for themselves and society the economy is go to college.

One thing I learned from Paglayan’s Raised to Obey was the difference between state building and nation building. This difference helped me understand how the origins of compulsory mass education in state building live on today in various ways. One of the key components of the adoption of compulsory education was the centrality of moral education for the masses.

The content of these moral lessons was remarkably similar from country to country and across many decades, but this might seem weird in the 21st century. I certainly don’t remember taking a class about morality in my school years. None of the schools I’ve worked with or classes I’ve observed have been classes teaching official state morality. Or maybe they have?

Social Emotional Learning is a good example of where this kind of moral education has gone in recent years. And, look, I get that we want kids to be able to handle their emotions, not get into fistfights in the classroom, and deal with adversity. I’m not objecting to the usefulness of this kind of values education. I am trying to point out two things. 1) this is still teaching values and morality; 2) this is still using values and morality to maintain social order. While we may not have standalone moral education courses anymore, we are embedding moral principles in our schooling.

Last week, I used a list of recommendations by researchers to create a list of things schools were not doing in the aftermath of natural disasters. We can use this same principle, the null curriculum, with many other parts of school instruction. SEL’s goals are laudable! Don’t mistake this for a rejection of SEL so much as a chance to see what other lessons we are teaching kids both explicitly and implicitly. What SEL says is bad is students who “engage in negative behaviors, disengage for school, or drop out”. These are the null, the thing schools are trying to remove from campus, from the school body, or from your kid. One common worry about SEL instruction is that it may become another source of stress and self-blame. If you are a disengaged kid, SEL may teach you that school is not a happy place for you. If you do exhibit negative behaviors, schools may further distance you from the student body. Given the stated goals of SEL instruction does it make sense to evaluate students on a fairly large rubric and tell some kids they’re only able rarely demonstrate relationship skills or responsible decision-making? Should you be able to fail social emotional learning? At some point, you look at these efforts and recognize that all the language around equity and community and responsiveness sits on top of a moral framework that tells kids how they should conform to the expectations of school. In some schools, that conformity may be the main purpose, just as it was when compulsory schooling got started.

Not a part of our curriculum and will not be tolerated.

Please note that I’m going to be discussing sexual assault in schools, clearly an upsetting topic in any context and doubly so in schools. If you need support or would like to know how you could better support schools in dealing with the challenges of addressing sexual assault, I recommend checking out the work of SSAIS.

Let’s try a different example. Here’s something that is written in the school handbook of my high school alma mater:

I’ve read this passage and many similar ones over and over again. Two things stood out to me. First, the conflation of holding hands and hugging with more sexual kinds of physical contact seems ridiculous and hard to enforce. Can you imagine getting a call from the school telling you your kid is in trouble for holding hands with their boyfriend or whoever? Goddamn. Anyway, second, this was a very rare acknowledgement by a school that things beyond classroom content — i.e. romantic/sexual behaviors by students at school — are curriculum. The school is saying, in a written document given to every student and parent, that they are teaching students a moral lesson about how to behave toward each other. The moral education, in this case, is not a class or a unit within the class. Instead, the moral lesson is taught through the school’s disciplinary policies. And, in case it’s not clear, they have the moral statement right at the top. Students are going to “behave and conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen at all times”. Ladies and gentlemen do not hug or hold hands, much less “pet” or kiss. Those things are “not a part of our curriculum and will not be tolerated.”

What does “will not be tolerated” mean and how do students understand this rule? Sure, maybe they get that there aren’t supposed to be public displays of affection at school. On its own that seems kinda crazy to me but it’s the South so you have to expect far more discomfort with kids, love, caring, and so on. But what if something worse happens? Let’s imagine I’m a kid in the bathroom and someone sexually assaults me. Maybe they kiss me without consent or reach down my pants or up my shirt. Maybe someone takes a picture of me in the stall. If that is “not a part of our curriculum” what do I expect will happen if I go to the principal? If this behavior is not tolerated, am I still breaking the rules even if I’m on the receiving end? What if I’m experiencing sexual violence at home? Will school help? To repeat a point I made last week, do I think the people in the College and Career Readiness Center are there to talk to me about being sexually assaulted? With zero tolerance rules like these, what kind of environment or school culture exists surrounding youth sexual activity? Are students learning the intended moral lesson or are they learning several lessons, some of which run counter to the intended purpose of the school? Or maybe the focus is more academic? Who cares about any of that because the school has good test scores?

Questions like these show the value in thinking about curriculum as more than just the content of a class or the stated rules and procedures of a school. We have to consider the implicit lessons, including moral lessons, taught by schools. We have to think about ways that our reasonable desire to prevent kids from performing sex acts at school may also contribute to cultures of silence, victim blaming, or increase bullying. Schools want an orderly and obedient student body that protects the status quo, as Paglayan reminds us. As such, we need to remember that the status quo is a misogynistic one that, despite great strides in recent decades, still subjects women to insults, hatred, and violence while denying men the necessary pressure to develop strong character and learn respect. We can respond to the failures in status quo moral education with a moral education of our own that challenges misogyny.

Sadly, I worry schools are not well equipped, are not willing, or are not supported enough to challenge the resurgence of online and real-world misogyny we’re seeing. The federal Department of Education was one of the key players in pressuring schools to do better and they’re probably not going to be fulfilling that role anymore. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, raises another possibility. If schools protect and sustain the status quo, one in which elites are protected and their status is not threatened, then schools would be protecting misogyny. Given the, ahem, uncomfortable relationship between our governing elites and sexual predation, maybe that possibility is not as far-fetched as it once might have seemed. Just as republican elite anxieties following the BLM movement have spurred their efforts to end discussions of racism and other “divisive concepts”, I wonder if backlash to the #MeToo movement has also garnered elite attention? Are schools now going to be doing more to protect men who sexually victimize women? Will rules like those at my alma mater contribute to their cause more than they will protect anyone? It’s hard to know anything for sure these days but the worry is there and, for me, stronger than ever.

Thanks for reading.