Case for Contention Transcript (025)

The Case for Contention with Jonathan Zimmerman (4/13/20)

MICHAEL C. JOHANEK: Hello, this is Mike Johanek, Senior Fellow at Penn’s Graduate School of Education. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend and sometimes research collaborator Peter Horn. During our first conversation way back in 2011, Peter and I talked about how to engage students as citizens. It’s been a through-line in many conversations ever since, so I’m looking forward to hearing Peter and my colleague and friend Jon Zimmerman discuss why to teach controversial issues in U.S. schools. I know you’ll enjoy it.

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, education historian Jonathan Zimmerman on the teaching of controversial issues:

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN: It strikes me that what we’ve done is we have radically limited— beyond where it should go, beyond what’s educationally and pedagogically proper—we’ve limited the free speech rights of teachers to the point where it becomes risky for them just to do their jobs.

[VO]: We discuss the book he co-authored with Emily Robertson, which distinguishes between actual controversies and pseudo-controversies …

ZIMMERMAN: We wrote this book before Trump was elected president, and now if we wrote it, we would spend much more time on that distinction. I mean, I never thought the question of “What is a fact?” would become the most important question in our political culture, but it absolutely has.

[VO]: And the difference between teaching and indoctrination … 

ZIMMERMAN: A teacher’s duty is never to persuade you of something, except, perhaps, the need to create environments where everybody is allowed to speak, hear, listen and decide on their own.

[VO]: … as well as what’s at stake in this work. 

ZIMMERMAN: Every important claim provokes or offends somebody and raises difficult feelings. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not that important.

[02:25]

[VO]: Jonathan Zimmerman is one of the foremost education historians working today. His work examines how education practices and policies have developed over time, and the myths that often cloud our understanding of teaching and learning. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, he has a particular interest in how political and social movements come to shape education. In addition to prize-winning research published in academic journals, Zimmerman has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. He is also no stranger to smart late-night television. Shortly after I had him as a professor in grad school, he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and advised John Oliver of Last Week Tonight for a feature exploring sex education in schools. Professor Zimmerman came to the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania after 20 years at New York University, where he served as chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and won the university’s highest prize for teaching. I was delighted to sit down with him in his office at Penn GSE to discuss his book The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, which he wrote with Emily Robertson of Syracuse University. We spoke in late February 2020, which I mention for two reasons. First, I generally try to design podcast episodes that are not bound to a particular moment in time because a.) it takes a long time for me to put these shows together; and b.) I try through this podcast to showcase important ideas about what and how and why we learn that I believe will stand the test of time, so that, for instance, what Aja Monet and Meghann Plunkett shared about poetry two years ago will still pop whenever new listeners check it out. Second, our world is now enduring the hard, surreal pandemic of COVID-19. Just a few weeks after we spoke, Professor Zimmerman and I wouldn’t have been able to sit in the same room, and we certainly wouldn’t hear relentless Philadelphia traffic outside his office window. I frankly miss lively city sounds so much right now that I’ve made almost no attempt to bring those down in the mix. On that note, and with a sincere wish that you and and your loved ones are safe and healthy, I hope you enjoy these highlights from our conversation. Jonathan Zimmerman has written books on the history of sex education, alcohol education, culture wars, American teachers abroad—even the myths and facts surrounding our hoary notion of the little red schoolhouse. His newest book is due out this fall. Called The Amateur Hour, it’s about the history of college teaching in the U.S. So I began by asking Zimmerman how it was that he chose to specialize in the history of education. 

ZIMMERMAN: Well, like so many things in life, it was not planned. I knew from the youngest age I wanted to be an educator. And so after I was done with college, I joined the Peace Corps and I taught in Nepal. And then what I did was I moved to Vermont to be with my girlfriend (who became my wife) and I taught in Vermont. And then I followed her to Baltimore to teach in the schools there. And I was a great success in Nepal and in Vermont, and I was a failure in Baltimore! I just wasn’t prepared for it in any way. I tried to do things exactly the same way I had done in these other environments and I wasn’t successful. And the only thing I knew was I wanted to continue as an educator and I wanted to learn more history.

HORN: You were teaching history?

ZIMMERMAN: Social studies. Although in Nepal I taught English, but in Vermont and in Baltimore I taught social studies. So don’t try this at home: I applied to exactly one doctoral program. This is madness. But that’s what I did.

[VO]: They were in Baltimore, so he applied to The Johns Hopkins University. 

ZIMMERMAN: The way I got into educational history is that I had a real mensch for an advisor, which was also luck. After I applied—and Peter, I had no idea what I was doing, in any way, shape or form. But after I applied, I was grading papers one afternoon and the graduate secretary from Hopkins called me and says, “We received your application, but it was incomplete.”

[VO]: Turns out, he was supposed to apply to not just the graduate program, but to a particular faculty member in that program who might become his adviser. So Zimmerman has this secretary from Hopkins calling him on the phone, pressing him for the name of the professor he’d like to work with. I like this story! 

ZIMMERMAN: So this is well before the internet. And I freak out. I say, “There’s somebody at the door” and I say, “Can you hold on please?” And I go and get the paper catalog they had sent me and I started going through it furiously, seeing who teaches social history, history of race, history of immigration, labor … R. Walters, gender unspecified. I have no idea who this is, but I get back on the phone and I say, “I’d really like to work with Professor Walters. You know, I’m a longstanding admirer of Professor Walters’ work.” And Ron Walters became my advisor and he was just a mensch. And to get to your question, how did I get into educational history, because I had been a school teacher, I had somewhere in the back of my mind that I wanted to figure out where these institutions came from and how they developed over time. Hopkins was a very conservative department at the time, not politically, but in a dictionary sense: very old-school. And most of the other people that I bounced this off said things like, “Jon, do you want to eat? Like food? And if you do, why would you ever willingly put the word ‘education’ next to your name? Don’t you understand that in the United States you subtract 50 or 500 status points? Why would you do history of education?” And Ron said to me, “Is this what you’re interested in?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, great, then do it!” That was all he needed to know. I’ve learned a lot from that. In this teaching relationship, it should not be about you. It should be about the student. And Ron could see that I was curious and passionate about trying to figure out how these institutions had developed over time, and that was all he needed to know. So that’s how I got into it.

[09:19]

[VO]: I asked if there’s a key concept from his study of the history of education that might be of use for your average citizen to know, but that they probably don’t.

ZIMMERMAN: I think there are many. It’s hard for me to rank them, in import because I suppose it depends on the concerns of the listener, of the audience. But I would say that one really important one that most Americans don’t know is that we’re putting a much greater burden on education than we ever did before, especially as a tool of social mobility. So, for most of our history, formal education was not a sine qua non for social mobility. When we lived in Baltimore and when I was in graduate school, our next-door neighbor was a guy who had worked at Beth Steel his whole life, at Bethlehem steel, which was just south of where we lived. He had an eighth-grade education and he owned his home. So Pete, that’s never gonna happen again in the history of the United States, but it happened a lot.

HORN: I grew up in Buffalo, right next to Lackawanna.

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, exactly. And I think that because we lack historic perspective, we often forget how close we are to our current situation where formal education has become a sine qua non for not just social mobility, for self-sustainability: that is, except for your occasional pro athlete or pop music star, nobody with an eighth-grade education will ever own a home again. And this is not, by the way, because people back then were so awesome and we’re not awesome, or schools back then were so great and now they’re not—

HORN: I think it’s because they walked to school every day in the snow—

ZIMMERMAN: Five miles, right, no shoes. No feet!

HORN: They had no feet. Little known fact.

ZIMMERMAN: No, there’s just a much greater burden on our schools now than we ever had before. Schools have become a necessity in ways that they were not for most of our history.

[11:27]

[VO]: I reminded Professor Zimmerman about a moment from the class I took with him—a moment I once blogged about—in which he asked my colleagues and me to prioritize a set of values for our respective schools. Here were two dozen school leaders, principals, heads of school, superintendents and so on from diverse education settings all around the country, and Zimmerman asked us, “How many of you said you want your school to produce democratic citizens?” Three of us raised our hands high. “Oh no you don’t,” he challenged. “Yeah we do,” we said. Sensing an opportunity for solidarity, more classmates chimed in: “I didn’t put citizenship first, but it’s high on my list.” Zimmerman chided, “You may think you want it, but you don’t actually want it. Engaged citizenship is messy and time-consuming. You want kids protesting all the time, sitting on the Board, writing curriculum? School isn’t set up that way.” 

ZIMMERMAN: Well, just to be clear, obviously you’re talking about a class where I was trying to provoke people, and I was not literally saying they didn’t want that. But what I was saying is that I think it’s a minority viewpoint. You know, if you went up to most people, especially most parents, and you said to them, “Do you want school to teach your kids to question everything, including everything you have taught them?” I think most citizens would say, “No! What I’d really like is like for my kid to be ready by the time I need to go to work, or for my kid to develop a couple skills that they could use to, you know, get a reasonable-paying job.” And it’s not that people are opposed to that citizenship ideal. I just think it’s far down people’s lists of priorities. The other thing that I’ll say is that it’s much harder to do, especially for teachers in a society that doesn’t award teachers a lot of cultural authority. So you know, if you really take that ideal seriously, the kids will question everything, including you. How many teachers want that? How many really want that? And I know the answer is some, right, but that makes life ever harder. So if I could just share a story that I often share with my students on exactly this subject, when I got back from the Peace Corps, I went to Vermont to be with Susan. And randomly I started substitute teaching at the high school she’d attended some six years earlier in South Burlington. And by that time it’s March, and in U.S. history, we’ve gotten up to the New Deal, to the 1930s. And  I come in there, you know, Mr. Just-Back-Peace Corps Volunteer and I put all the acronyms that you had to memorize for your APUSH class on the board, the CCC, the WPA …

HORN: Was this AP United States History?

ZIMMERMAN: No, it was just regular U.S. history, but, you know, the CCC, the WPA, the PWA and so on. And I said, “Okay, look, I’m not going to make you memorize these because you know, I think that you’d forget them and I don’t really care, frankly, how much of it you remember. What I want you to do is I want you to open up your textbook, I want you to find out what they are, and then I want you to tell me three alphabet agencies that you would support today and how you would pay them. So let’s go, let’s start.” I said, “I’m not interested in you telling me what CCC stands for—”

HORN: Civilian Conservation Corps!

ZIMMERMAN: Very good. “I want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear what meaning you’re making of this.” So we start doing it and it was slow, but we kind of got into it and it seemed to be going pretty well. And maybe two days in, one of the kids we used to call ‘stoners’ raises his hand, and stoners in the 1980s, you know, they were often the most able students. The reason they were stoners is they were so—

HORN: They were bored.

ZIMMERMAN: —alienated by the bullshit of school. So he raises his hand and says, “You know, Mr. Z, I’ve been listening to you all week about us, like, making our own meaning and coming to our own conclusions. Well, I’ve come to my own conclusion: You suck!” And I would suggest, as I suggest to my students that there was, there was more wisdom in his comment then even he realized in his marijuana-fed haze—

HORN: How do you mean?

ZIMMERMAN: —that the claim that was smarter than he knew. Of course he was trying to yank my chain, because that’s what adolescents do. But he was onto more than he realized. And this is what he was on to: if you really take this sort of dialogic and critical thinking seriously, the students may decide that you suck. And most people don’t want that. I know I don’t. I don’t want my students to think that. So how do you ask a group of professionals that are awarded very little authority in their culture to take the kind of risk—that’s really what we’re talking about—that this teaching involves? I think it’s a hard sell. That’s not to say I don’t want to sell it, because I do. I mean, that’s the wrong metaphor, but I’m a proponent of it. But I think all of us have to be realistic about the social and cultural circumstances under which this occurs or doesn’t.

[17:02]

HORN: I do begin to judge books by their cover, especially nonfiction. After reading the title, The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, which you co-wrote with Emily Robertson of Syracuse University, I’m not surprised that much of the book frames this case, but you also spend some pages arguing for excluding issues that are not truly controversial. Can you say some more about that?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, we wrote this book before Trump was elected president, and now if he wrote it, we would spend much more time on that distinction. I mean, I never thought the question of “What is a fact?” would become the most important question in our political culture, but it absolutely has. We try to draw a distinction between what’s a real controversy and what’s a pseudo-controversy. A real controversy is one where fully informed people disagree, and a fake controversy is one where fully informed people do not disagree. So let’s take the example of evolution and creation. I understand that there are millions of my fellow citizens that do not believe that we as human beings share DNA with other creatures. I will say, Pete, I believe it’s their right to believe that. I would lay down everything for that. I don’t believe they should be compelled to think otherwise. I think they should have every right to scream that to the hills, but I will not have that question debated in my classroom. And the reason is it’s a pseudo-controversy. It’s a pseudo-controversy in the sense that there are no fully informed people that deny the fact that we share DNA with other creatures. I would not want to debate that question in my classroom because there’s only one right answer. And that’s not a debate. That’s a pseudo-debate.

HORN: If we shift to climate change—

ZIMMERMAN: Yes.

HORN: —for example, and I’m glad that you make this clarification. The book came out in 2017, but of course that means, of course, it was written earlier—

ZIMMERMAN: It was the 19th century!

HORN: It was like a billion years ago, because one of the things you did do, you know, was, bring out that oft-quoted quip that I’ve mentioned myself—

ZIMMERMAN: [Former NY Senator Daniel] Pat[rick] Moynihan.

HORN: “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts.” You say this is an essential element of democracy, but of course we’re in this moment right now where it seems like diametrically opposed sets of facts exist not just for people watching Fox and CNN, but because of the algorithmic magic of Facebook—which I understand operates on some level of outrage [i.e., more outrageous claims and articles and/or topics that get people more outraged get more traction]—but it can let me, you know, look at my newsfeed and get an entirely different sense of what’s happening in the world from my next-door neighbor. I just wanted to say, I was at a party a couple of weeks ago where somebody said to me—this was right after Mr. [Rush] Limbaugh was awarded the—

ZIMMERMAN: Presidential Medal of Freedom.

HORN: Right? A smart person said to me, with a straight face, “Well, you know Obama gave the Medal of Freedom to Jeffrey Epstein.”

ZIMMERMAN: No, he didn’t!

HORN: I know! And this was where my jaw dropped open, and so that was my response. Uh, but you know, I went to check this out and the first thing when I typed in “Obama Epstein Medal of Freedom” [my search engine] was like, “No, he did not give it …” because of course my Google is set up to go to, you know, fact-checking organizations. But it was amazing that just on this basic point— This wasn’t offered like, “I think Obama may have …” This was like, “Well, you know about Obama,” like “… what Obama did.”

ZIMMERMAN: Well, look, it seems to me you’re raising a bunch of real challenges for us. I mean, one has to do with the media environment that we live in. My students are often shocked to hear that when I was growing up, there were three channels. You know, and now there are 900 and nothing’s on! But the larger point is that of those 900 channels, you have ones that are tailored to your particular predilections and biases. And then you have this thing called a news feed, which is a horrible metaphor, that curates this so that you just get information that fits your biases—

HORN: Horrible [metaphor] or maybe perfect? It may be a little too on the nose!

ZIMMERMAN: Well, it’s awful. I mean, right, exactly. “It’s time for your two o’clock feed now!” And you know, I think we know from a lot of evidence that pleasure centers in your brain light up when you see things that confirm what you’ve believed. The kind of education that I want is in a way unnatural. I want to expose people to things that aren’t them. You know, to me the most depressing literature coming out of political science shows that since the ‘70s when I was in high school, we’ve segregated ourselves in every way ideologically. Bill Bishop wrote this book called The Big Sort a couple of years ago and it’s still very relevant. He just looks at numbers from the ‘70s. And the question is, you know, “Do you have a neighbor of a different political party?” “Do you have a friend of a different political party?” “Do you have a lover of different political party?” “Would you be okay with your kid marrying somebody of a different political party?” And Pete, you look at all those questions and it’s a straight line down, just a straight declining vector.

HORN: Over time?

ZIMMERMAN: Over time, since the ‘70s, yes. We have segregated ourselves into ideological bubbles and the media environment is a big part of that, but it’s not the only cause of that. And there are all kinds of, I think causal loops here, but that’s a big part of the story. So then the question becomes, as educators, what do we do? And to your point about Limbaugh, I think the first thing we need to do—and people are trying this, it’s a heavy lift—is to teach people how to consume media. So you might’ve read about Sam Wineburg’s project out at Stanford. One of the things he’s doing is he’s studying Stanford students to see if they can identify fake and real websites. And the takeaway is they can’t! And these are arguably the most privileged kids and the best-educated kids in America, right? And so what does that say about other people who haven’t had the same privileged education? It seems to me that’s one challenge that all of us have. And the second challenge is to expose people not to alternative facts, but to alternative perspectives. You know Dr. [Kellyanne] Conway said that there are alternative facts about Bowling Green.

[VO]:  You may recall president Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway making this assertion.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [from interview with Chris Matthews 2/2/17]: I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green [KY] massacre. Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.

ZIMMERMAN: There aren’t alternative facts about [the] Bowling Green [“Massacre”]. Bowling Green was a scam, just like there aren’t alternative facts about Obama and Jeffrey Epstein, or about Obama being born in Indonesia, you know, or about the moon landing being a fake, right? But there are alternative perspectives on almost everything. So you began the question with climate change. One of the things I say to my students is, “If the question is ‘Has human behavior contributed to warming the earth?’ that’s not a debatable question.” Again, I understand that there are millions of Americans who say that human behavior hasn’t contributed to global warming. Again, I believe it’s their right to say and believe that, but they are wrong, all right? However, if your question is “What should we do about climate change?” or “Should we be in the Kyoto or the Paris Accords?” there, that’s not a matter of alternative facts. It’s a matter of alternative perspectives. The question of “Should we have stayed in Paris?” is not a fact question. You do need facts to debate the question, but the question itself is a normative question.

HORN: Yeah, that’s a policy assertion.

ZIMMERMAN: And those absolutely should and must be debated.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [from interview with Chuck Todd on  1/22/17]: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck! What is it— You’re saying it’s a falsehood and they’re giving— Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is …

[25:39]

HORN: Since we’re getting into the way that this can play out in the classroom, I was interested that a theme that runs through your book The Case for Contention is that lots and lots of schools and districts—you’re focused on public schools—lots of public schools and districts pay lip service to the idea of engaged citizenship, and as a facet of that, exploring controversial issues. It’s stated in some way in many policies and maybe even some mission statements. But as far as the way that plays out in the classroom, to the extent that it actually happens, or to the extent teachers are actually protected if they try to engage in controversial issues … if they feel comfortable with it—and I would add, if they’ve established a classroom environment where you can do this and not have it feel like a debate, and not devolve into ad hominem attacks, you know, where there’s a respectful environment and you set that up (and of course that takes time to do)— even if all those things are in place, they may not have the protection if a parent, or a coalition of parents or, you know, whoever … community members get upset about it, right, it can very quickly [become untenable].

ZIMMERMAN: So it seems like what you’re alluding to is just a massive disconnect between the stories that we tell about education and the way we practice it. And there’s always going to be that disconnect. If you want to go very existential, you could say that it’s part of the human condition: all of us say one thing and do another, to some degree. I do think in the zone we’re talking about here, the teaching of controversial issues, the gap is particularly sharp. So, you know, if you look at policy, lots of school districts have their explicit policies about how they support and endorse the teaching of controversial issues. And it’s often cast in quite eloquent, sometimes flowery, small-r-republican rhetoric. You know, “We need this to create citizens. … We need this to protect and advance the republic … We need young people with the skills and habits of democratic practice.” And that’s all true. I think it’s 100% correct. I’m glad that you have those policies, but anybody who studies policies understands that you don’t enact or implement them by snapping your fingers. It’s quite different to say “We should have controversial issues taught in schools” and to teach controversial issues in schools. The first one is an ‘ought’ statement and the second one is the actual practice. And we did find in our book, there’s an enormous divergence here. So when you actually send people to classrooms and you look to see the degree to which they’re engaged in controversial issues, it remains quite low. This is why our book is so skinny. Because I’m Jewish, I can make this joke: I put it in the same category as Great Jewish Sports Heroes. Um, you know, it’s very small, and the big reason is there’s been so little teaching of controversial issues, and the question is why. I think in your question you alluded to some of the reasons. One of them is that teachers are already overburdened with lots of other things, including preparing people for standardized tests. Also, they’re generally not exposed to how to do this in their pre-service training, so when you interview teachers and you say, “In your preparation to become a teacher, did you receive instruction or practice in the teaching of controversial issues?” Most say no. So why would we expect them to do it, right? I mean, I don’t play squash. If you put me on a squash court, I wouldn’t know what to do. So, given that we don’t actually explicitly prepare people for this task, it shouldn’t be surprising that often they don’t do it. And then what you alluded to earlier, Pete, at the very beginning, was often, despite all the rhetoric about the teaching of controversial issues, teachers actually don’t really have the right to do it. And when they engage in it in different ways, they’ve been penalized, disciplined, and sometimes even fired. The courts in recent years have radically narrowed teachers’ leeway in their own classrooms. Just to give you the most important case, it comes out of the early aughts. There was a teacher in Indiana named Deborah Mayer, and she was teaching a lesson from the district-sanctioned current events magazine, Time [Magazine] (for Kids). This was in 2003, right before we invaded Iraq. And if you remember, during the buildup to that, there were various protests when it became clear that we were going to, including a very large one at the National Mall.

HORN: March 3rd. 3/3/03. It was worldwide.

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so there was an article in Time (for Kids) about that, about the protest, including a picture of the protest at the Mall. And a kid in the class, fifth or sixth grade says, “Ms. Mayer, have you ever been to a political protest?” And she says, “Yes. As a matter of fact, I drove by one in Bloomington”—this is in Indiana—“recently and I honked my horn in support. And also, I think that human beings should try to settle their differences peacefully rather than with violence, which is why I’m also the advisor to the Peer Mediation Club of the school.”

HORN: Sounds like a menace.

ZIMMERMAN: Fired! Yes. More precisely, she [i.e., her contract] was not renewed, and she sued and it worked its way up to the federal circuit court, the highest court except the Supreme Court. And the court said she just doesn’t have a right to say what she was saying, that schools are the employers of teachers, and they get to dictate what teachers say.

HORN: Yeah, this is one of the things that you explore, that, you know, as a citizen when she’s speaking as a citizen, she has a certain freedom of speech. But as a public school teacher, and particularly as a public school teacher, she is kind of an agent of the state.

ZIMMERMAN: Right, but should it be is our point, you know, and they [teachers] have become, according to the courts, ventriloquists of the state. But you can’t prepare democratic citizens that way.

HORN: Correct. I would agree.

ZIMMERMAN: Just being a mouthpiece for the state, you know, you’ve got to model a different kind of behavior. Now Pete, let me be clear. No right is limitless or should be, including the free speech rights of teachers, right? I can imagine all kinds of things that a teacher could say in a classroom that would earn discipline or being fired. What if the history teacher told her students that the Holocaust never happened? I don’t think that person should be teaching in a school. So is that a limit on her speech? Well, of course it is, right? In the same way that, you know, you can’t call the White House and say you want to do violence to the president, or that I can’t sexually harass my students. These are all limits on my speech and it strikes me that they are legitimate limits on my speech, but, it strikes me that what we’ve done is, we have radically limited—beyond where it should go, beyond what’s educationally and pedagogically proper—we’ve limited the free speech rights of teachers to the point where it becomes risky for them just to do their jobs.

HORN: I think that’s one of those things that many people would not be aware of, that many teachers would not be aware of. They might assume— look, you know, one of the ways that you discuss in the book talking about controversial issues is with some level of disclosure, to say [as a teacher addressing students], “Look, since you ask, this is how I came to think about this, and these are my reasons for it. But my job here is not to have you believe what I believe. My job is to help you to come to your own conclusions, but based on reasons. We want to think through these things, so I’m going to disclose this a little bit.” I think most people might assume, “Well that seems, you know, that seems so reasonable. That’s not indoctrination. This person’s a professional. Also there is a certain civic obligation, you know, and on and on and on.” I think most people would be surprised that if push came to shove—and let’s be clear, there are many, fine administrators who would support that teacher, and school boards as well, who would support that teacher. And it wouldn’t always necessarily go—but if it did go to a court that, I think a lot of people would be surprised that teachers are not protected.

ZIMMERMAN: Given current court doctrine, I think what you’re saying is right. Also, I mean, I appreciate your point that there’s enormous diversity across school districts. So if Deborah Mayer had done what she did in, you know, Greenwich Village of New York City, I don’t think he would've been disciplined. She would’ve been teacher of the year.

HORN: She would have been [progressive educator based in NYC for two decades] Deborah Meier!

ZIMMERMAN: Exactly. Right. So obviously, because American education is so irreducibly local, it’s context-specific. But you know, I do think the distinction that you raised earlier is at the heart of our book, which is the difference between teaching and propaganda. And, you know, in the book we invoke Alexander Meiklejohn who is, in our view, the most important philosopher that Americans know the least about, and really until the Cold War, the leading civil libertarian in the United States. And he said that he felt that teachers should be able, indeed should be enjoined to disclose their views, provided that they make it absolutely clear that these are their views and that nobody else in the room is enjoined to share them. And we don’t go that far. I mean, we don’t think the teacher should be required to share their views. We think it should be part of their professional discretion, right? Depending on the context, again, depending on the atmosphere, they should be allowed, if they think it’s pedagogically wise to share what they believe. But in the same breath, they have to make it clear that nobody else is required to agree with them. And that’s also a heavy lift because they’re the adult in the room, they’re grading the people in the room and evaluating them. So you know, I think again, we have to be realistic, not just about how frequent this is, but how difficult it is, difficult to do well.  

HORN: Well, I would say, because here’s one of the things. For me, in a hierarchy of classroom behaviors, facilitating a discussion where people actually talk with each other, where it’s not just this serial, kind of, “I’m going to ask you a question and then you respond to me,” but when people are actually discussing— I think there isn’t anything in the classroom pedagogically that’s harder. And that’s if you’re talking about a poem, you know, or an article or how you came to a particular proof—

ZIMMERMAN: Let alone building a wall on the Mexican border!

HORN: Yeah, it’s super fraught.

ZIMMERMAN: It is, it is. Yeah. And they’re taking cues from you. But in a way, that’s Meiklejohn’s point. You know, one of his famous aphorisms was “Slaves can’t teach freedom.” He said, look, if as a teacher you’re pretending that you’re sort of this neutral, Olympian figure standing up on a mountain above the fray, first of all, you’re lying! Okay, but more than that, you’re not giving students a model of democratic engagement. You’re a political actor, you’re a political figure as a citizen. And so you should model that by being quite clear about what you believe and why, so students can get a model of civic and democratic engagement. But to your point, especially in a discussion situation, it’s hard to do that and also create an atmosphere where students feel free to disagree with you.

[38:09]

[VO]: If you’re interested in thinking about how to establish a classroom conducive to discussing even the most challenging topics, check out my conversation with Paula Roy in Point of Learning episode 3. Ok, so toward the end of the interview with Professor Zimmerman, I asked one of my go-to questions, which is “Is there anything you would have liked me to ask that I did not?” 

ZIMMERMAN: I think there’s an interesting line of objection to the kind of argument I’ve been making that you didn’t raise, which is fine because it’s a short interview—

HORN: Well I don’t really disagree with you is the problem, probably!

ZIMMERMAN: I think the most powerful line of argument against what I’m saying now has to do with race and racism in the United States. I’ve had plenty of people say things like, “Look, you know, we can’t engage in the kind of discussions you want about certain subjects because people in the class are going to be injured by that discussion because they come to it with a certain set of experiences and perspectives.” And you could see this in our book, in the conclusion which we wrote about Ferguson. So after Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, there were protests all over Missouri and the nation. But when we looked at the local schools, most of them—not all, but most of them were evading or avoiding the subject. And there were a number of reasons for it. But what a lot of educators in majority-minority schools said is, “You know, the kids have already been traumatized by this. And we can introduce the subject because it will retraumatize them. It will create so much psychic discomfort that it will inhibit learning, rather than promote it.” And I would say that I think the research base for those claims is quite small, which should matter. But beyond that, I would also say, and my basic retort to that is “You’re right and you’re wrong. You’re right that a lot of these matters are deeply personal. You’re right that many of them strike at our most fundamental identities as human beings. And you’re also right that they can provoke strong negative emotions. You are right about all three of those things. But you are wrong if you think those things can or should be a bar on discussion. Why? Because every important claim provokes or offends somebody and raises difficult feelings. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not that important. So just one other anecdote: you probably know the name Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old girl who wore the armband to school in Iowa in 1965 to protest the Vietnam war. It worked its way up to the Supreme Court, to the iconic case Tinker v. Des Moines, where the court declared that neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. Mary Beth Tinker is not that much older than I am, and I’ve become friends with her.

HORN: Is that right?

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, yes. She’s a totally lovely, dynamic, fascinating, superb person. She’s come to my class a few times here at Penn. She came a couple semesters ago to tell her story. And the first question, a student said, “Look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight. You were fighting the Vietnam War. This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, this Ann Coulter bozo, this Charles Murray person—they just hurt people. Why should we allow them to do that?” And she said, “Look, at the school I went to in Des Moines, there were kids who had fathers and brothers that were dying in Southeast Asia. Do you think they weren’t hurt by this snot-nosed kid wearing this emblem to school, saying that their loved one was dying for a lie? If you think that didn’t hurt them, you’re not thinking. Of course, it hurt them. It absolutely hurt them, as important speech always does. If hurt is going to be your rubric, there’s not going to be speech at all.” So I am not denying that a lot of these issues cause hurt. They do. But that cannot and must not be a bar on us as citizens talking about them.

HORN: I could think of somebody who is ill-prepared to have the discussion, you know, after Ferguson and actually, you know, letting things get out of hand and make it worse.

ZIMMERMAN: Of course.

HORN: But I can also think of a place where if you have a kind of structure, you know, like something that’s used in SEED—serial testimony, where you’re just going to speak for a minute, or pass, or not speak, but nobody’s going to disagree with you. Nobody’s going to interrupt you. But now we’ve at least made a place for establishing that “We are in the real world. We are in this town where this happened and we’re not going to judge anything that anybody said and we’re not necessarily— We’ll just give it some space …” but like, you know, there are different ways: It’s not just, “Are you with the cops or with Michael Brown?”

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, and the devil is always in the details.

[43:39]

[VO]: You may know that the “SEED” I referred to a moment ago when I was talking about the practice of serial testimony is short for the National Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity Project. If you want to know more, I’ve got an episode for that! My most recent one, in fact, called SEED Folk. As a final highlight from this conversation to share with you, here’s Jonathan Zimmerman on how important it is, regardless of how passionately a teacher may believe something, not to cross the line into indoctrination. 

ZIMMERMAN: A teacher’s duty is never to persuade you of something, except, perhaps, the need to create environments where everybody is allowed to speak, hear, listen, and decide on their own. A teacher should be trying to persuade you of the importance of that environment. Not everybody believes in that. And I will say that I try to indoctrinate the evils of indoctrination. I don’t really admit dissent on that score. I think that as a teacher your prime, indeed your only responsibility is to help people make up their own minds. And I will not brook, and I will not allow anything in my classroom that I think is going to inhibit that.

HORN: You just offered about six great closing lines in a row. Are you gonna try for anything else? That was great. Sometimes people begin a paper like three times and so you’ve got three introductions. Those are all great, like buttons.

ZIMMERMAN: [chuckling] All right, good. Good.

[VO]: My great thanks to Jonathan Zimmerman for sitting down with me to talk about one of my favorite topics: how we learn to discuss difficult issues. I’ve written a few pieces about this, so I’ll share some of those on the show page for you. Thanks to Drew Azzinaro for laying down guitar for the instrumental takes of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” for this episode. As always, Shayfer James supplies intro and outro instrumentals for the show. If you’ve ever wondered about the words to those songs, Shayfer is performing live each Sunday night at 7 Eastern throughout this period of social distancing from his home in Jersey City. You can find his weekly concerts on Instagram @shayferjamesmusic. That’s Shayfer with a y. Finally, thanks to you for listening, sharing, rating, and reviewing this show. When people you know curious about what and how and why we learn ask you for podcast recommendations, please tell them about Point of Learning, which is recorded, written, edited, and mixed by me here in the City of Good Neighors, Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I will see you again just as soon as I can. Until then, stay safe and take care of yourself.