Teaching as Political Activism

Teachers can’t wear political buttons, can’t talk politics with students, a recent article says.  Despite the NYC Department of Education’s prohibition, I’ve heard colleagues describe teaching itself as a form of political activism.  They say, for example, that any book an English teacher chooses to teach is a political choice.  If I teach Rushdie rather than Sophocles, I make a political statement.  While I admire their enthusiasm, I’m cautious.  The classroom is about intellect, not rhetoric.

Though in the past I’ve criticized the work of Stanley Fish, his new book should cause the politicking teacher to pause.  In Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish makes the case against professors who use their classrooms as political platforms.  The teacher’s job is to teach his content knowledge.  That’s it.  Fish launches his attack by critiquing the language of university mission statements, which pledge to create caring students who will be critical and politically mindful citizens.  In many more words than this, Fish tells such schools to shut up and teach.  Teachers have a body of knowledge they are to impart and a reserve of analytical skills specific to their discipline.  Politics has no place in the classroom during school hours.

Some would argue, as Fish anticipates, that the very act of teaching is political.  He responds to it by saying that the everything-is-political argument is ineffective exactly because of its breadth: if everything is indeed political then it’s hardly a starting point for argument.  There’s nothing to argue if the point of argument lacks distinction.  Saying everything nullifies anything.

The limit of Fish’s own argument is his definition of teaching.  Often, while reading the book, it’s clear that Fish has a very specific definition of teaching in mind: learning is conveyed, not uncovered; meaning is distributed, not made.  Fish is a professor more than a pedagogue.  He professes things more than he teaches students.

At the same time, his take on the role of colleges in shaping the character of the young–that they can do no such thing–is refreshing.  Fish slices through rhetoric with undaunted deftness and the language of university mission statements amounts to bad writing, pseudo-poetic nothingness.  Slice away, Professor Fish.  I even agree with him on the issue of politicking professors.  The role of scholars is to present ideas fairly for students to explore and analyze.  Let the students grapple with the ideas.  Students’ learning is their own business.

This tension between teaching and learning isn’t lost on Fish’s contemporary, Gerald Graff, current president of the Modern Language Association.  He wrote recently,

“For all its obvious value, excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee good education. The courses taken in a semester by a high school or college student may all be wonderfully well taught by whatever criterion we want to use, but if the content of the courses is unrelated or contradictory, the educational effect can be incoherence and confusion.”

As Graff seems to be pointing out, even thoughtful or engaging pedagogy isn’t enough if it doesn’t take into account certain content markers, skill sets, and the teachings of colleagues.  Fish stops shy of paying this sort of attention to teaching method and the contexts of students’ experiences; Graff is well aware, but drifts away from content into the waters of methods. Both would have a great deal to say about politics in our New York City classrooms. When the Chancellor declared that all teachers must remain politically neutral, the United Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, responded that “students can only benefit from being exposed to and engaged in a dialogue about current events.”  In the context of a unit on the presidential election process, I could see students engaging dialogically on the issues.  But not all exposure is edifying: buttons and bumper stickers are monolgic and rhetorical.

At the heart of the matter is the difference between teaching and learning.  Fish has his own sense of what the former means; no one–not Chancellor Klein nor Ms. Weingarten nor I–really knows what the latter is at all.  Learning is subjective, internal, private.  Learning happens when the student is ready for it and all teachers can do is provide opportunities and catalysts for that moment.  It’s clear that Fish has a great deal to teach us.  He also has a lot to learn about learning.  As do we all.

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