Here at City Journal, the lively quarterly of the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern has an essay on the influence of radical education theorist Paulo Freire on higher education in the United States. Deep in the essay it refers to the Modern Language Association as “ultra-politically correct,” a characterization common among conservative and libertarian critics, but one that, I think, misconstrues the political opinions of MLA members.
It is more accurate to say that the MLA is composed of more or less left-of-center folks, most of them moderate liberals but with a few ultra-left factions in operation, including the Radical Caucus. Yes, there is ample room for various racial and sexual identity preoccupations, but for people who want to do traditional literary scholarship that doesn’t invoke left-wing themes and goals, there is ample room as well.
It would be a mistake, though, to assume that what has made the MLA in popular representations appear ultra-PC or hard-leftist is the bias of conservative and libertarian critics. In large part it is due to the fact that those factions in the MLA that do take a hard-left line are forceful and outspoken and emphatic, enough so that they attract a disproportionate amount of attention.
I say this with admiration. I sat on two panels at the last MLA well attended by Radical Caucus members, and it was refreshing to see academics wear their convictions on their sleeves. (See here for an old statement.) They represent a position and they advocate it insistently. They don’t hesitate to dispatch wavering and soft liberals, and they won’t back off from their principles. They invite opponents into the circle, too.
Other academics aren’t like that, however, and even if they disagree with the radicals they tend to keep silent and go their own way in teaching and scholarship.
Not Gerald Graff, though. In a previous post I mentioned Graff’s criticisms of radical teaching in his MLA presidential address. An article in Radical Teacher a while back deserves notice as well.
It’s part of a forum on “Radical Teaching Now,” which appeared in Number 83 of the periodical (2008). It’s a strong challenge, and the piece that precedes it, by Andrew Ross, is a good introduction. Ross begins his contribution with a naked assertion of purpose:
“We spend most of our time in the typical undergraduate classroom breaking down the knowledge, beliefs, and values that our students have acquired from high school education, media bromides, popular culture, and family lore. It is an immensely laborious endeavor that we know is a necessary preparation in the grooming of radicals.”
There you have it, “the grooming of radicals.” Higher education is about disabusing the young of what they’ve assimilated from home, school, media, and culture and assisting them in a “radical turn.”
Here is Graff’s rejoinder to the radical teacher from the start:
“I think it’s immoral for teachers to try to get students in their classes ‘to work for egalitarian change,’ as you put it. What right do we have to be the self-appointed political conscience of our students?”
Graff notes the power inequities in the classroom and tells the radical teacher, “Pick on somebody your own size!”
Furthermore, “Making it the main object of teaching to open ‘students’ minds to left, feminist, anti-racist, and queer ideas’ and ‘stimulate’ them (nice euphemism that) ‘to work for egalitarian change’ has been the fatal mistake of the liberatory pedagogy movement from Freire in the 1960s to today.”
This is not to say that teachers must suppress their own political position in the classroom, Graff maintains. Play fair with other opinions, he argues, and you can offer your own. Indeed, “The more you fairly represent viewpoints strongly opposed to yours in the reading list, the more legitimate it becomes to push your own view. You can do that even more aggressively, though, if you invite colleagues who hold opposing views into your class, a tactic that also gives your students a model of how you can be disagreed with.”
This is to live out the model of discussion in Mill’s On Liberty, which says:
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them . . . He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
This means that the teacher must accept the risk that the student will leave the class agreeing with the adversary position, not with the teacher’s. Without accepting that risk, though, teaching does, in fact, turn into indoctrination.
