Am I arguing that educators must find a way to steer clear of the election? Of course not. Is there a way to wade into these issues that’s non-partisan and invites exploration rather than exhortation? Of course there is. But what tends to predominate are urgent calls for educators to take a side—and operate not as custodians of youthful inquiry but as unapologetically political actors. Indeed, teachers union presidents, academic associations, and teacher surveys make clear that too many have embraced the notion that pedagogy is (and should be) explicitly political. That kind of teaching-cum-advocacy is a disservice to learners and exacerbates our tribal divides.
There’s a healthier, more civically responsible way for educators to address the election. I was jarringly reminded of this the other day when I once again finished Joe Klein’s roman à clef Primary Colors (a book I seem to have started picking up every four years like clockwork). Unlike so much boilerplate political fiction, Klein’s novel of the ’92 Bill Clinton campaign is notable for how viscerally it captures the stew of ambition, belief, delusion, decency, sin, sincerity, compassion, and conviction that defines democratic politics.
If educators are going to wade into causes, candidates, and electoral contests, they’d do well to spend more time wrestling with that complexity and far less on plaster saints and banal bogeymen. What’s that look like? Well, in Primary Colors’ final pages, Jack Stanton (Klein’s faux-Clinton) offers a soliloquy that’s both a master class in rationalizing one’s failings and one of the most telling accounts of democratic leadership I’ve ever read. Stanton tells his disillusioned aide-de-camp:
Only certain kinds of people are cut out for this work—and, yeah, we are not princes, by and large. . . . Two-thirds of what we do is reprehensible. This isn’t the way a normal being acts. We smile, we listen. . . . We do our pathetic little favors. We fudge when we can’t. We tell them what they want to hear. . . . We live in an eternity of false smiles—and why? Because it’s the price you pay to lead. You don’t think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was a president? He had to tell his little stories and smile his shit-eating, backcountry grin. He did it all just so he’d get the opportunity, one day, to stand in front of the nation and appeal “to the better angels of our nature.” That’s when the bullshit stops.
As a long-ago civics teacher, I’ll once again submit that it would be better for all of us if we taught history and politics this frankly, if we routinely discussed Lincoln and Washington and Roosevelt (and Harris and Trump) with this kind of candor. We should teach students to recognize that motives are tangled and often self-serving, this has been the case since the nation’s founding, and it’s equally true today even of lionized advocates and activists. We should teach students to regard all of it with a mixture of skepticism, empathy, and grudging respect. Democratic educators should not be in the business of nurturing credulous fanatics or fueling fever dreams. Indeed, anyone sure that America’s future is on the ballot this year would do well to recall that the same has been said many times dating back to Adams-Jefferson in 1800.
