The Insufferable Arrogance of Multiculturalism
My 8-year-old asked me on the way home from his new school one day last fall, "That flag in the museum — is it from the war when we got our independence?
"You know, the war with George Washington?"
I did my best to explain the relationship between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Not, I admit, that it's ever been entirely clear to me. On the one hand there's a lingering impression, from my own elementary school days, that in 1812 America was somehow addressing unfinished business from the Revolution. As the Fourth of July speechgiver in Little Town on the Prairie says, "We licked the British in 1776 and we licked 'em again in 1812, and . . . and any time the despots of Europe try to step on America's toes, we'll lick 'em again." On the other hand there's any tardy realization, at some point in graduate school, that whoever was engaging the Royal Navy in 1812 must have been involved in the Napoleonic Wars. My little boy and I chatted for a few minutes about Britain, Francis Scott Key, and the "The Star-Spangled Banner," then our conversation moved on to some other interest of Billy's.
This incident, which ought to have been entirely unremarkable, was in fact a "trumpets sounded for him on the other side" moment that brought tears to my eyes and went some distance to convincing me that getting Billy to his new school was worth the addition of an hour and a half to my daily commute. The reasons Billy's question seemed so significant have to do with his old school, where he went from kindergarten through 2nd grade. My husband and I are grateful to Billy's teachers and the administration at that school for many feats above and beyond the call of duty, and simply for doing their best with our son, who can be a handful. On the other hand, I'm convinced that aspects of the curriculum there — which I suspect are aspects of most elementary curricula most places these days — are intellectually corrupting in a way that isn't generally recognized. So I'm going to rename Billy's old school "St. Francis," and go ahead and say what disturbed us about what he learned there.
St Francis is on the conservative side as these things go these day — no sex education (as far as my husband and I were able to determine), no "dissenting" theology, and on the positive side, a school-wide campaign to teach and practice a "virtue of the month" and, even better, the inculcation of genuine Eucharistic piety. Billy's teachers were serious, even enthusiastic Catholics. Unlike the faculty at the diocesan high school where I used to teach, they didn't roll their eyes about "this diocese," which is one of only two in the United States that doesn't allow altar girls. The St. Francis teachers weren't scheming to revolutionize society, jettison Western culture, or turn out self-hating Catholics and blame-America-first citizens. And yet Billy finished 2nd grade knowing more about Trotsky's Mexican mistress than about George Washington.
A role model: a victim
It wasn't that his teacher was pushing Communism or adultery, it was just that the life of Frida Kahlo fit the pattern that was pretty much the only story line, outside religious instruction, in the three years at St. Francis: a member of a minority or other oppressed group perseveres in overcoming the barriers of his (or her) political participation or professional success. The career of almost every historical figure Billy was introduced to in his first three years of formal education — Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Blackwell, Jackie Robinson, a Hispanic ballplayer whose name I forget — was one of triumph over racial or gender discrimination.
Frida Kahlo was in the news the year Billy was in second grade; her "Self-Portrait with Necklace" had graced a first-class stamp that allowed the US Postal Service (according to the press release) "to reach out across communities to let everyone know that this organization has a commitment to diversity." Fashion designers released Frida-themed collections for the autumn of 2002, featuring Mexican peasant floral patterns and shawls on the one hand, and androgyny and mannish tailoring on the other. The big Hollywood picture about her life opened with a splash that October. And, as a physically disabled Latina painter, Frida Kahlo was a shoo-in for the St. Francis curriculum.
It's tempting to wax indignant about the particulars of this woman's career, to indulge in righteous indignation about just how unfit her life is for children to emulate. I admit that I succumbed to this temptation to the extent of collecting a list of things for which, on the one hand, Frida is famous and that, on the other hand, we do not want our son to learn to admire. Besides the Communism and adultery mentioned above, she is known for bisexuality, cross dressing, marriage to a divorced person, divorce, abortion, drug and alcohol addiction, seeking unnecessary medical treatment to get attention, inhospitality on a truly spectacular scale (first seducing Trotsky while he and his wife were guests in her house, and later bragging — falsely, so that lying also goes on the list — that she and her husband had lured him to Mexico to be assassinated; this last also ratchets her Communism down a notch, to the most slavish Stalinism) — and, finally, suicide attempts (including, possibly, a final, successful one). Frida Kahlo's character flaws are remarkable even by the abysmal standard of the 20th-century art world. Octavia Paz, the 1990 Nobel laureate in literature, wrote an essay exploring her career to address the question whether someone can be at once a great artist and a "despicable cur."
I would be very much surprised to discover that Billy was told about the more unsavory details of Frida Kahlo's life at St. Francis. I'm sure she was included despite — not because of — her vices. Still, it is disturbing to think that this very nice Catholic school made a woman of this character a heroine to him. If Billy encounters more of Kahlo's paintings or of her story later on, he will be the more likely to follow up with interest, and the more likely to think of her as a familiar and admirable figure. Because human beings judge so many things by precedent, some of her vices may seem a little less foreign to him, a little easier to accept as things you can try and still be the kind of person he wants to be, because he met her first as a brave lady triumphing over handicaps and prejudice to create impressive paintings.
We know better
But the potentially dangerous influence of one unsavory triumphant pioneer is not the real problem with an education all about triumphant pioneers. Frida Kahlo's inclusion in the curriculum is an indicator of another and more pervasive danger in a curriculum put together from stories of people who triumphed over adversity — or at least of people who all triumphed over the particular kind of adversity that seemed to be the dominant theme at St. Francis. The story of Frida Kahlo is just the most notable of an endless catalogue of stories about people whose chief claim to the children's attention is that they were there when a barrier to equality came down. Some of these individuals may be of really bad character, like Frida Kahlo; others may be entirely admirable. Jackie Robinson, for example, is a very good example of iron self-control under provocation, a virtue to which we very much hope Billy will aspire. Even the mixed characters among these pioneers display some virtues worthy of emulation.
But the fact is that Billy never came home from school filled with awe at Jackie Robinson's superb self-command, or impressed by Martin Luther King's strategic intelligence. He never wished he had Robinson's patience, or raved about how cool it would be to pull off something like King's coup in turning white America against segregation, or tried to keep going when he was tired or sore because, after all, if Frida Kahlo could learn to paint while she was flat on her back and in pain from a trolley accident that sent a metal bar through her abdomen, he ought to be able to make it through his math homework even though he was tired. Instead he left school, day after day, filled with righteous indignation about how unjust the world used to be before he was born.
Did I know, he would ask me, that women didn't used to be allowed to wear pants? He thought that was unfair. And so on and so on, about the indignity of separate water fountains and the emotional devastation of boys who were crushed when neighbor boys wouldn't play with them just because of their skin color, back in the bad old days when the world was arranged with such diabolical cruelty by his ancestors, who were somehow too stupid and mean to see the obvious wrongness of it all.
The absolute nadir of this trend was a conversation in which Billy explained to me that he had learned in school that he had been all wrong about us and the Indians: We weren't really the good guys, and the Indians weren't really the bad guys; we stole their land.
What filled me with righteous indignation at his righteous indignation was the false memory that seemed to have been implanted by the lesson. I doubted that Billy — who from the age of 2 has enthusiastically played the Indian whenever he could persuade anybody else to play the cowboy — ever had believed that "we" were the good guys and the Indians the bad guys. But believing (falsely, as far as I could tell) that he had been misinformed and then enlightened seemed to be an essential part of the lesson, maybe the essential part. The emotional center, that innocent victims — an apparently endless parade of them — had suffered unjustly, and that he knew better.
At odds with education
I've heard many criticisms of multiculturalism in education. It does seem a shame (and also a danger) that the heirs of the civilization that invented chivalry and abolished slavery should be taught to blame the West for all the trials of women and "persons of color." It is tragic that race relations in America should be poisoned by education that fosters white liberal guilt (on the one hand) and self-excusing resentment of the "The Man" (on the other).
I find the celebration of "firsts" for women particularly irritating. The entry of women into the professions seems to me a natural result of economic growth and technological progress. Now that taking care of a baby doesn't mean washing all the diapers by hand, even the half of the human race primarily responsible for the care of small children can afford some leisure for education and the pursuit of public achievements. (The extent to which these accomplishments should be allowed to displace the nurture of children altogether is another question.) The condescension implicit in making an enormous fuss about the first women who actually (gee whiz) managed to become doctors and lawyers, just like men, seems uncomfortably close to the attitude expressed in Dr. Johnson's infamous remark: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
But our worry for Billy was at a level more basic than that of any of these concerns. We were able to argue him out of the more outrageous of the opinions he seemed in danger of forming. For example, having been led to assume that American Indians were coexisting with nature and each other in peace before they became the victims of the conquering Europeans, he was quite surprised to hear about the (still ongoing) conflict between the Hopi and the Navajo Indians. The Navajo have driven the Hopi (whose word for the Navajo means "head pounders") out of as much as 90 percent of the land they once occupied; the interference of European-descended Americans may well have saved the Hopi from extinction (you can see the Hopi reservation today as a tiny island in the middle of the Navajo one on the map of Arizona).
If the curriculum was designed to instill white liberal guilt, it was failing miserably, at least in the short term. It didn't seem to occur to Billy to blame himself for the injustices the pioneering women, black Americans, and so forth had suffered. And really, why should it? How was he responsible for the meanness and stupidity that had made each pioneer's life such a struggle before he was born?
Our concern was about the effect this kind of education seemed likely to have on Billy's basic intellectual and even moral development. What he was being taught seemed to encourage mental habits inimical to education as we understood it.
Virtue is inclusive
As I listened to Billy talk about what he was learning in school, I kept comparing the attitudes he was learning from this parade of the oppressed with the attitudes that an old-fashioned American education aimed to produce.
Second graders all used to have heard, for example, that George Washington had chopped down his father's cherry tree with his new axe, but had honestly owned up to it. They were supposed to admire George Washington and want to tell the truth, even when it was difficult, so they could be like him.
The same kind of aspiration to virtue was the point of much of the material elementary school children typically encountered. All over the world, little English-speaking boys whose teachers hoped they would grow up to be brave men memorized the St. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's Henry V. They learned the story of the Battle of Thermoplyae, and also know about the Spartan boy who let the stolen fox chew his innards rather than cry out. A lot of them learned Latin so they could read Horace on the rightness, even the sweetness, of death in battle. If they were Americans, they learned to admire Nathan Hale and despise Benedict Arnold.
The problem with the old-fashioned kind of education, from the multiculturalist point of view, is that it "privileged" the West, and men, and white people, and treated outsiders as "other." There are many different arguments for jettisoning "the canon" of standard things everybody used to learn and replacing it with multicultural lessons celebrating the achievements of persons belonging to formerly underappreciated groups.
One of the more sympathetic of these reasons is anxiety that some students might feel left out, or think that somehow the whole thing doesn't apply to them, because they're the wrong color. If Billy had been getting something that differed from the old education only in being more "inclusive" in this sense, I don't think we would've been disturbed. It's easy to imagine a program that would take pains to include heroes from a wider range of cultures while leaving the moral aims of traditional education undisturbed. Boys could be encouraged to emulate the bravery and generalship of Crazy Horse and Toussaint L'Overture as well as of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Along with the story of the Trojan Horse, children could read about how Frederick Douglass, forbidden education as a slave boy, tricked little white boys into teaching him how to write the letters of the alphabet. There is absolutely nothing to stop non-traditional heroes from becoming examples of real and even traditionally prized virtues to which children could aspire. But this is not what Billy learned at St. Francis, and I am sorry to say that I am pretty sure this is not the kind of multicultural education many students are getting anywhere.
On pygmies' shoulders?
Even a multicultural education that was a more extreme repudiation of traditional Western educational aims — that held up the impassivity of the Buddha, say, for emulation — would be more like traditional education than Billy's experience. I can understand, if not agree with, the position that courage has been overrated in the crusader nations of the West and that our children need to learn the moderation of Confucius instead of the bravery of Henry V. We would not have been pleased to discover that Billy's Catholic school was teaching him to emulate the Buddha, but we would not have thought it as intellectually corrupting as what he was actually learning. An education celebrating the sages of the East would be an education that used non-Western examples to inculcate non-Western virtues. But it would still be recognizable as an attempt to do what education (not just in the West) used to do: civilize children by teaching them to aspire to the virtues and achievements of their fathers before them.
Traditional education saw admiration of past greatness as the natural spur to accomplishment. A student — a 5th-century Athenian, say, aiming at military skill and toughness because he loved and wanted something he saw in Homer's heroes — submitted himself to discipline (which is necessary for any kind of learning) so that he could master what he aspired to. The St. Francis curriculum seemed arranged to short circuit this process at its beginning. Instead of teaching Billy to admire his fathers before him, it was teaching him to despise them as cruel and stupid. Instead of learning to aspire to something higher than himself, he was learning that he knew already — without any effort or discipline, just from his immediate emotional reaction to the obvious unfairness of it all — everything he needed to know, in order to be better than his ancestors. Billy seemed to be getting almost an anti-education, even an inoculation against the very possibility of education.
At one point in my frustration with what was going on at Billy's school, I was reminded by the multiculturalist education-by-catalogue-of-pioneers of a scene from one of C.S. Lewis's science fiction novels. In Perelandra, set on the planet Venus, a new Eve is being tempted by a new Serpent ("the Un-Man"). For the Un-Man to persuade the Lady to eat the forbidden fruit, as it were, he must convince her to do so before the return of her husband, and against what she guesses would be his disapproval. To accomplish his purpose, the Un-Man must undermine her confidence in her husband. In one temptation scene, the protagonist, Ransom, hears the Un-Man
speaking gently and continuously . . . It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories, and at first Ransom could not perceive any connecting link between them. They were all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world's history and in quite different circumstances . . . The heroines of the stories all seemed to have suffered a great deal — they had been oppressed by fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, happily; sometimes with honors and praises to a heroine still living, more often with tardy acknowledgement and unavailing tears after her death . . . At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise details were often not very easy to follow. Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we would call witches or perverts.
[At this point in the narrative, I can't help but think of Frida Kahlo and her vices.]
but that was all in the background. What emerged from the stories was rather an image than an idea — the picture of the tall, slender form, unbowed though the world's weight rested upon its shoulders, stepping forth friendless and fearless into the dark to do for others what those others forbade it to do yet needed to have done. And all the time, as a sort of background to these goddess shapes, the speaker was building up a picture of the other sex. No word was directly spoken on the subject: but one felt them there as a huge, dim multitude of creatures pitifully childish and complacently arrogant; timid, meticulous, unoriginating; sluggish and ox-like, rooted to the earth almost in their indolence, prepared to try nothing, to risk nothing, to make no exertion, and capable of being raised to full life only by the unthanked and rebellious virtue of their females. Ransom, who had little of the pride of sex, found himself for a few moments all but believing it."
Except that what Billy was getting the ugly picture of, in the background of the noble stories of multicultural barrier-breakers, wasn't so much the male sex (or white people, or America, or even Western civilization) as the entire past of the human race. Traditional education fostered an attitude of intellectual humility, a sense that we could see so far only because we were standing on the shoulders of giants. The multiculturalist education seems rather designed to create the impression that we are trampling the bodies of a lot of wicked and greedy dwarfs.
Screwtape's wisdom
This attitude of superiority to the past seems fatal to almost any kind of education. In the first place, how can these children be persuaded to take any philosophy, religion, morality, or literature seriously? Their earliest (and continually underlined and repeated) impression of our history will be that until about 40 years ago, the whole human race was blind to gross injustices the wickedness of which is obvious to any 7-year-old.
To cut the next generation off from the wisdom of the past seems to be an especially bad idea at the current moment — as we blunder into "therapeutic cloning" and send the mothers of toddlers to war. As Screwtape, C.S. Lewis's senior devil, writes to his nephew Wormwood, tempter-in-training, in The Screwtape Letters (27):
since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
But I think the harm goes even deeper than intellectual isolation from our past. Even a purely technical education demands a certain humility, a willingness to submit yourself to discipline so that you can achieve mastery of your subject. Will children whose early education consists of repeated doses of intoxicating self-righteous condemnation of others' stupidity and evil have the moral stamina for science or engineering? Or will they naturally gravitate toward careers as environmental advocates, diversity consultants, trial lawyers, and "gender studies" professors?
Chesterton pointed out that a man feels taller when he kneels. An education that replaces aspiration with smug moral superiority diminishes the student. It seemed to us that Billy ought to feel humbled before the achievements of our history, not to sit in judgment, weighing it and finding it wanting. Not, by any means, that we wanted him deceived by some noble lie that his ancestors could do no wrong. We believe in original sin, and human history seems full of proofs of that doctrine. But learning to recognize sin first closer to home seems more edifying than finding fault with all our fathers before us.
We were delighted when we learned that a new school offering something closer to a traditional curriculum would be within our reach (at the cost of that additional 90 minutes of commuting) the next year. Not that we thought St. Francis was part of a concerted plot to stunt the children's moral growth — or rather, insofar as we thought there was a plot, we figured the plotters weren't the St. Francis teachers, or even the officers of the National Education Association, but Screwtape and Wormwood.
It seems to me that multiculturalist educators have fallen afoul of one of the laws of human nature, one of those limits inherent in the way people think and behave that you can't erase altogether. Human nature has limited malleability, and some fundamental structures of our experience are hydra-headed: when you try to cut them off, they grow back seven-fold. When the Communists tried to abolish private property, end a man's particular and superior care for what was his own, and stamp out inequality, they got greed and injustice exponentially worse than the greed and injustice they were unwilling to tolerate to begin with. In almost the same way, multicultural education tries to blot out an "us-them" dynamic that is probably ineradicable from the human experience. When the textbooks all assumed that "we" were the settlers and the Indians were "they," some schoolchildren on reservations were hurt. But the solution cannot be found in an attempt to eradicate what it is in human nature that wants them to be our side and their side. If you try to stamp it out in one place it crops up in another. The question is not whether there will be sides, but where the line between the sides will be drawn.
While the old patriotic American history, with its fulminations against "the despots of Europe," had its limitations and inaccuracies, it seems better for Billy than the new multicultural kind. If "we" are the Americans who "got our independence," then Billy is a very junior partner to George Washington, from whom he might actually learn something.
Elizabeth Kantor is a writer and editor who lives in Virginia, works in Washington, DC, and takes her son to school in Maryland by bus and train every morning.
This item 6566 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
