Sam Smith – Having been a college anthropology major, I tend to violate the customs of journalism by seeking cultural explanations of change and not just the words and actions of prominent figures. After all, we as a nation did not elect Trump until he was 70 years old. What caused us after all those years to fall for his cons?
There are a lot of factors including one clearly of service to Trump: the rise of television which created a politics in which image massively replaced actual record. But there’s another factor that has increasingly come to explain much of our crisis: the collapse of our public schools.
Few things extend and support a culture more than its education system. But for that to even begin to happen, the system must teach not just English and math, but mutual values, traditions, cooperation, and moral habits. You need a system that deems learning civics and history at least as important as learning how many square inches there are in the triangle before you. Or learning how to resolve disputes as well as how to solve equations. .
But the model for American education has increasingly been to emphasize individual power and knowledge and to diminish interest in such things as community, compromise and ethics. Law degrees and MBAs, for example, have soared in importance, skills built in no small part on the ability to defeat someone else.
As elementary school principal Holly D. Elmore put it:
Teachers are needed in today’s society, more than ever, to have a profound impression upon the students they teach. Education is not the same field it was in previous decades; yet we are focusing on all the wrong things. When we focus more on a score than the heart, we are losing generation after generation. If it takes a village, then we have to step up and be the warrior for morality. Investing in character education improves attendance. When students know they are valued by not only their teachers but their peers as well, they want to be at school. Respect towards others, honesty, compassion for others, and teamwork are all character traits that do not magically appear when we teach how to take a test.
One of the victims of the current system is the role education could play in improving multicultural relations. We tend to regard such matters only by their failures e.g. how to stop racism in police departments. But we can’t develop a truly working multicultural society without people – beginning with children – learning how to relate well to those different from themselves. And we can’t do it just obsessing with ethnic failures; we need to learn how good multiculturism works. To do this you need education that cares about it and reaching children young enough not to have been taught to be bigots.
Beginning I suspect in the 1980s, Americans were increasingly taught to think mainly about themselves rather than their relations with others. The increasing urbanization of the country added to this effect. And so today, we now find ourselves with the rubbish left by one of the most egocentric, anti-communal leaders in our past.
We can’t rid our story of Trump, but we can learn from it. And to help us we need teachers who show the young why you never want to do this again. How we can learn from history and not just repeat it.
