Peter Walks for Democracy

“Schools should be apolitical.” I hear this a lot. Most recently, this has come up because Louisiana’s governor has signed a law that requires schools place the Ten Commandments in schools. Last year and the year before, it was the Moms for Liberty trying to ban books based on their religious hopes for indoctrinating your kids. Before that, it was how to respond to COVID-19. How do we handle bathrooms when we have transgender-identifying children in our schools?

While it seems like a nice aspiration for schools to be apolitical, it’s not possible in a democratic system where special interest groups are so active. School curriculum, school spending, and school board policy have never have been and never will be apolitical. Ever. Schools are where we teach our community’s, our state’s, and our nation’s values and the knowledge, skills, and competencies that inform our labor force and citizenry. Those values & skills are necessarily political because we don’t agree about them. Our publics are in competition with one another as John Dewey would say. In the United States, the fact that we have parochial, board and non-boarding schools, single- and mix-sex schools, charter, public magnet, and public schools proves the fact of that disagreement. Those different schools separate factions and publics. They each emphasize different things because they see different purposes for people in this world.

But I’m thinking about public schools because I’m on a public school board. Public schools in the U.S. are dependent on an interaction between established laws, norms and customs in the electorate, and the people they elect. Public schools result from an interaction of people, ideas, money, and the resources these mobilize. All of those are subject to politics whether we like it or not.

A question as innocuous as “How do we teach science?” is political. Do we or don’t we teach the scientific method and the history of people’s discoveries, errors, challenges, and abuses using that method? How do we teach it and at what age do we introduce it?

To get more specific, what questions do we ask about the atmosphere itself? What about human interactions with the atmosphere? Yeah, the atmosphere is made of gases. Some gases trap heat (greenhouse gases). One of those greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide. Burning fossil fuels increases the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere thereby trapping more heat. We burn a lot of fossil fuels. If we double the amount of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels we would end up with profound global heating. All that was investigated by scientists in the 19th century and can be accomplished in schools today. These are just gases. Currently, humans pour tens of gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels, leading to a 50% increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the 19th century (from about 280 parts per million to 420 parts per million). The earth has warmed about 1.3 degrees Celsius in the last century, with most of the warming happening in recent decades and the increase in temperature accelerating even within those decades. The gases are not political right?

But we make them political because they come from economic and political activity. Increased greenhouse gas concentration results in more heat which generates violent precipitation, droughts, fires, sea level rise, glacial and sea ice melting, and the transformation of ecosystems from the impact on species’ optimums, including humans. Because the United States is the historic biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, we are tied to the largest fraction of heating and damage. So, what is the responsibility of America for historical warming’s impacts, for current impacts, for impacts as they arrive, and for taking action on future impacts? 

What part of America? If you’re in Louisiana and your government is occupied by fossil fuel special interests and a certain brand of fundamentalist Christian American, you might not like this science stuff. Maybe you’ll pass a law in 2008 (Senate Bill No. 733) to cast doubt on “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” In 2021, a Republican lawmaker, Danny McCormick, put forward a bill to make Louisiana a fossil fuel sanctuary state. He tweeted an image of a pregnant woman near a Christmas tree, with text describing the image as the “ideal female body” in “peak performance.” In another, he posted anti-Semitic images and said COVID safety measures and said, “People who don’t wear a mask will be soon painted as the enemy. Just as they did to Jews in Nazi Germany.” He removed both of these tweets. And. what happened last week? Louisiana Governor Landry signed a law that will place the Ten Commandments in every school.

We can fight for what’s right, fight for what’s wrong, or stand to the side and wish for something different. But standing by won’t make it apolitical. Wishing it were apolitical won’t make it apolitical and results purely wasted energy.

I know what I’m going to keep doing: protect the rights of kids, keeping them free from religious indoctrination, advancing reality- and values-based understanding of climate change, and strong science and democratic (small d) education. Yeah. It’s political.