How Did I Get Here?
How the last two years drained my enthusiasm for teaching and prompted the beginning of a deep dive into Critical Pedagogy.
A Brief Origin Story
While my educational background was in the hard sciences, it was the field of education that ultimately grabbed me. I've been an educator (mostly in science and math from 3rd through 12th grade) for the last decade. The 2021-22 school year was the last year I taught in a K-12 school because I came to believe that there was something deeply wrong with the field of education, and this is where I start trying to find out exactly what it is.
My first years of teaching were at an independent school with around 100 students that went from kindergarten to 8th grade. Possessing neither an education degree, nor a credential, this was the perfect environment for someone like me to start teaching. I became a proficient educator largely by practicing and being committed to improvement day after day. I internalized pedagogical principles by observing the more experienced teachers around me and trying things out in the classroom. Over time, my nascent thoughts about teaching math and science began to coalesce into firm ideas and practices. Eventually I sought out other teaching positions that would allow me to move around America and teach students of various ages and academic backgrounds. During this time, I not only had the opportunity to continue to develop my own ideas about the correct approach to education, but I had the privilege to witness some truly wonderful moments—moments where I could almost see the fire start in their young minds.
Discovering Critical Race Theory
Then came 2020. The year of COVID hysteria. The year where I had to somehow adapt to no longer using facial expressions to instruct, to give encouragement, or to build rapport. The year where I battled figurative and literal headaches associated with trying to project my voice through a cloth muzzle for several hours a day. Where an already difficult job found a way, day after day, to get harder. But like so many other teachers, I did my best to soldier on. It was hard, and I was miserable, but, hopefully, it was temporary.
However, 2020 was also the year of the George Floyd riots, and with them came more nebulous changes to my job. They seemed small and fairly reasonable at first: a new Director of Equity, promises to confront racism within the institution, guest speakers on the topic racism, etc. Nothing that really impacted my work--I was teaching a hard science after all.
Then came the email telling me that a number of students would be absent from physics because they would be attending a separate session for students of color. I remember reading the email several times. It wasn't delivered with self-importance or righteousness, just a simple statement of fact that none of my black students would be in my class so they could attend a different class exclusively for students of the same skin tone. All I could think was: "I'm teaching a segregated class." Was it permanently segregated? No. Did the students return the next day? Yes. It would have been easy enough to shrug it off and move on. But for some reason it stayed with me. I don't know what was said in this meeting for students of color, but I could not shake the feeling that I was somehow complicit in separating my students by the color of their skin—a practice that had been rightly criticized and abolished decades earlier.
The other experience that stuck with me from this school year was encountering the following argument: The fact that some of our students of color are accused of “acting white” by their friends reflects evidence of systemic racism at our school. The justification for this claim was that the school had asked them to “assimilate” into a new educational environment, causing them to change behaviors or habits in such a way that caused their friends to hurl the “acting white” accusation at them. The proper, (perhaps anti-racist?) course of action would have been to accept them for who they were and not require them to “assimilate” to their new environment. Here I was at a school that was trying to teach students to improve their minds by forcing them to take on hard tasks, develop self discipline, and communicate more clearly, and this was the thing that was considered racist? I remember saying to myself, “Damn, they really can find racism anywhere.” It turns out to be much worse than that.
The national conversation in the wake of George Floyd’s death made it clear that these kinds of things were coming more and more into vogue. I had already read White Fragility1 by Robin DiAngelo and How to be an Antiracist2 by Ibram X. Kendi. Neither of these works were particularly compelling or insightful for me (though both have had quite an impact). What they did make clear to me however, was that the ideas behind people like DiAngelo and Kendi went much deeper than a couple of condescending pseudo-self-help guides.
Having an appreciation for the role that ideas play in cultural shifts like this, I started looking into the thinkers and systems that laid the foundation for the things that were happening around me. I found the book Cynical Theories3 by Helen Pluckrose and Dr. James Lindsay to be particularly valuable in starting to understand the pedigree of ideas that culminated in DiAngelo’s giant Kafkatrap and Kendi’s bizarre binary thinking. While I’d heard the term “Critical Race Theory” before, I wasn’t familiar with the major names in the movement, its intellectual forebears, or the fact that it could be thought of as a member of a family of “Critical Social Justice” Theories. Again, the work of James Lindsay proved invaluable, and I voraciously consumed the content he put out at New Discourses4 . Over the next several months I learned a bit more about the ideas of Derek Bell, Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw; and further back, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This was just scratching the surface. The more I looked, the wider the ocean seemed to be.
After being exposed to more ideas from the Critical Social Justice movement and more stories from parents and educators, I have come to believe that my own experience was fairly benign when compared to what others have seen, heard, and lived through. The more I understood both the ideas and scope of this movement, the more I started to feel ashamed of my implicit agreement with the implementation of these ideas at the school where I worked.
From Critical Race Theory to Critical Pedagogy
Recently I started to dig deeper into the assumptions and ideas that have enabled Critical Race Theory to make inroads into education—namely the ideas of Critical Pedagogy (though “Critical Education Theory” would probably be more apt). Again, I am profoundly indebted to Dr. James Lindsay for his insightful introduction to the history of this movement and many of its key figures. It turns out that this movement is older than I thought it was. It had been sinking its hooks into education since before I was born; at least back to the 1970s, if not earlier.
It was through Dr. Lindsay’s Podcast5 that I became aware of the book The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Race Theory6 by Isaac Gottesman. The fact that the subtitle of this book acknowledges both the impact of Marxism and Critical Race Theory in American Education should make us wonder about the veracity of claims such as “Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory” or “Critical Race Theory isn’t in our schools.” Gottesman, a thought leader in the field of Critical Pedagogy, and historian of the subject would seem to disagree. After hearing Dr. Lindsay analyze the introduction to the book (by series editor Michael Apple), I felt a powerful desire to read this book, to understand the ideas, where and how they are being implemented, why they are doing so much damage, and, most important, how they brought so much of the institution of education under their sway.
My hypothesis is that many early critiques of American education such as Educational Wastelands: The Retreat From Learning in Our Public Schools7, by Arthur Bestor, and The Closing of the American Mind8 by Allan Bloom, were identifying aspects of Critical Pedagogy (probably proto-Critical Pedagogy in Bestor’s case) that had wormed their way into the practice of education, and consequently into the minds of American children. But that is an investigation for another day (or year). For now, I want to do a close reading and analysis of Gottesman’s book to start piecing together what exactly happened to the field of education.
Just Casting Stones?
When I’ve discussed this project with friends and former colleagues, I’ve encountered the objection, “Isn’t this just polemicizing?” Pointing to the faults of bad ideas is often worthwhile, but doesn’t it miss the more vital component of articulating some sort of positive view of what pedagogy should be? Am I just casting stones while failing to build anything up?
I don’t have a great response to that argument. As it stands, the goal of this project isn’t to build anything up or put forward a better way. Not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I just don’t have one. My ideas toward how education should be conducted were still developing, but they’ve largely stopped now. Perhaps while investigating the ideas of Critical Pedagogy, the contrast will help me understand more about my vision for what education should be. If so, I’ll write it down, but right now, that’s not the purpose.
When I think about education now it always comes back to Critical Pedagogy. It’s the corrosive poison that has been injected into American education, a poison that has steadily degraded not only the intellectual capacity of America’s youth, but also their emotional and mental health. To paraphrase Keyser Söze, the greatest trick it ever pulled is to convince the world that it doesn’t exist. I want to understand how that happened, and I think the best way to start is going to be in The Critical Turn in Education.
DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Kendi, Ibram. How to Be an Antiracist. Bodley Head, 2019.
Pluckrose, Helen, and James A. Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity-and Why This Harms Everybody. First edition. Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020.
Lindsay et al.
https://newdiscourses.com/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/01/how-education-turned-critical/
Gottesman, Isaac H. The critical turn in education: from Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Bestor, Arthur E. Educational wastelands: The Retreat From Learning in our Public Schools. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1953
Bloom, Allan, 1930-1992. The Closing of the American Mind. New York :Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Thank you for sharing your story. We have been on similar journeys. I loved teaching (and learning how teach more effectively) and found myself seeking answers on what forces were responsible for the degradation of education we've seen in recent decades.
Great work and best of luck. Kendi and DiAngelo's 'ideas' are socially and emotionally toxic. They are each literally a personality disorder in a book.