From “Woke” to Comatose

The Long-Term Goal of Curricular Fascism

According to Ron DeSantis and other right-wing culture warriors, education should aim to make white middle-class conservative Christians comfortable by offering belief-affirming care. To achieve that, all books, lectures, and classroom discussions must mirror what those home-schooled Bible-raised students want to think and feel about themselves (or at least, what their parents and pastors want for them). To screen out unpleasant truths, the state must ban certain books, police syllabi and lecture material, pass laws against thought crimes, and encourage citizens to report on one another. It must also surveil classrooms using cameras and microphones.

The educational ayatollahs in red-state governments also have foot soldiers in local communities, such as the Orwellian "Moms for Liberty," whose aim is to crush pedagogical liberty and enforce Christian fascist discipline on teachers. They were so smitten with DeSantis's smiting that the group awarded him the "Sword of Liberty" for his holy war against the secular humanists corrupting Florida's students with fact-based lesson plans.

The new right-wing mandate for education is that students should be soothed, not challenged. It is not simply that discussions of race, class, gender, or sexuality are taboo. What must be banished are ideas about those aspects of public and private life that depart from conservative orthodoxy. MAGA Republicans seem to view college, in particular, as academic massage parlors. The aim is to rub you the right way and assign history books that give you a happy ending.

It would be tempting to view these various authoritarian moves in education as just pre-election culture-war performances. The hysteria about “woke” in schools does keep credulous Fox News viewers fixated on fantasy threats like CRT in kindergarten, pedophilic cannibal drag-queens, and cat-identified middle-schoolers – while ignoring real ones, like the corporate predators who profit off of poisoning the land, air, and water upon which we all depend. But those efforts are not just short-term tactics to mobilize the MAGA base. They are also part of a long-term strategy to remake schools and, beyond that, to remake citizens.

One way we know that is, at least in red states, censoriousness, the purge of “liberal” ideas, valorization of bigotry, and denial of science and history are inscribed in law and policy. Conservatives see education as a way to ensure that certain kinds of students emerge from schools, those who, as adults, will consolidate right-wing dominance in politics and culture for many decades. If fascist pedagogy can begin at an early age, young people can be brainwashed long before Fox commandeers their frontal lobes.

The right-wing coup in education can be compared to conservative efforts to control reproductive health care. Anti-abortion activists began with protests, clinic harassment, death threats, bombings, and murders. But over many decades, through patient propagandizing, electing Republicans (who in turn gerrymandered state districts to increase their power further), and ultimately the placement of anti-choice justices on the Supreme Court, conservatives have turned a profoundly unpopular policy into the law of the land in half the country. The government now owns your uterus if you are a woman in a red state.

Similarly, conservative efforts to take over education partly began locally. What may have looked like a grassroots movement of enraged right-wing parents showing up and making threats at a school board meeting has actually been a nationally-funded effort. The partially successful aim has been to get conservatives elected to those boards so they can begin the book bans and efforts to mandate other kinds of educational censorship. At first, they were marginal hysterics spouting Fox-fueled conspiracy narratives and demanding that religious superstition replace science and wishful national nostalgia substitute for history. Now, board members in conservative school districts across the country are determining what is taught.  

How to Make a MAGA Mind

School curricula comprise the intellectual soil for developing minds. Should you want to grow fascist/authoritarian citizens, it helps to provide students with a singular worldview – one that focuses on monolithic, black-and-white truths that cannot be questioned. It is vital to cultivate obedience to religious and political authorities but skepticism and suspicion toward experts that rely on evidence. Science should be regarded as just another faith, on par with theology. Both should be taught as equivalent belief systems.

Conservatives are not wrong about the threat posed by evidence-based scholarship in history, social studies, and science. Indeed, they carry the risk of disconfirming prior beliefs, challenging religious superstition, and, worst of all, creating liberal citizens. A 2009 survey found that 55% of scientists identify as Democrats, in contrast to 32% who are independents and only 6% who are affiliated with the GOP. Similarly, in a 2016 study of college graduates, 54% describe themselves as liberal, 22% hold a mix of liberal and conservative views, whereas 24% identify as conservative. One striking finding in that research is that the relationship between political liberalism and years of education is a linear one. The more schooling students have, the more likely they are to be liberal. It is also possible that these correlations have bidirectional causes. In other words, it may not be that education simply creates liberal thinkers but also that liberals are particularly drawn to education. It may be that their intellectual curiosity and capacity for complex thinking override any threat that schooling might pose to their long-standing and cherished beliefs.

Given the trend of conservatives increasingly confining themselves to the post-truth information ghettos of Fox and other right-wing media, those correlations will likely grow even more stark. Since 2016, their leader, Donald Trump, has identified experts of all kinds – scientists, physicians, professors, journalists, or anyone who challenges him – as enemies of the people.

This analysis is complicated by the fact that a number of the most extreme reality-denying right-wingers, like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, JD Vance, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, and Blake Masters, have graduated from the same elite ivy league colleges and graduate schools they condemn. That illustrates more than their hypocrisy. It shows the very real limits of advanced education. Graduate degrees cannot be a moral constraint for those whose paychecks and political power depend on lying about what they know to be true. Only a conscience can do that. In contrast, for those who are true believers of the fictions they proclaim, something less obvious is at work.

Tribe over Truth

Anyone who has attempted to challenge false beliefs – whether Trump's stolen election lie, anti-vax delusions, or climate change denial – held by family members or friends has probably run into shockingly obdurate resistance and may have triggered the end of those relationships. One of the biggest reasons people cling so tenaciously to those notions is that they are inextricably woven into their individual and group identities. Psychological researcher, Dan Kahan, argues in an insightful review paper that the relationship between misinformation and partisan identity is, to some extent, the reverse of what we commonly think. In other words, it is less the case that fake news can persuade us to align with one political tribe or another, although that can certainly occur. More significantly, we seek out information, fake or not, that is congruent with what we believe other members of our tribe hold.

What Kahan calls identity-protective cognition leads him to a strikingly counter-intuitive conclusion. People who readily believe rumors, fake news, and conspiratorial fictions that have no basis in evidence are not irrational. Instead, they are driven by a less obvious rationality, which is indifferent to truth-seeking. As individuals, our group attachments are more muscular and prior to our beliefs. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Hatreds We Love, we have evolved to value our group membership above nearly every other consideration. So, securing our place in the tribe by thinking like our peers is far more critical than whether the facts support our understanding. Expressing the beliefs shared by our tribe is a way of signaling to others that we are members in good standing.

Cognitive scientists have long known that confronting someone whose group membership is predicated on a false belief with facts does not win them over. It creates an identity threat. And the more compelling the disconfirming evidence, the greater the threat. A true believer will double down on the false belief to combat that challenge. Counterintuitively, that reaction increases in highly educated people. That is because they can recruit their knowledge to construct more authoritative-sounding and, thus, more reassuring rationalizations. Perhaps the most striking examples are the few outlier scientists who repudiate the reality of human-caused global warming or the fringe MAGA-cult physicians who rant against vaccines and other public health measures.

Gestating Critical Thinkers

If you want to design educational structures that can help children grow into critically thinking adults and become citizens invested in democratic self-governance, a different approach is needed. The soil for that sort of person requires curricula that contain multiple perspectives and classrooms in which students are encouraged to safely and respectfully debate contesting points of view. Faith-based belief systems can undoubtedly be included in any course where ideas are the focus. However, in physical and social science and history classes, students must learn to evaluate evidence and differentiate it from speculation.

In some ways, the same criteria that guide science and good journalism should inform education. While absolute objectivity is not possible, students can learn how to reflect on their biases and unexamined assumptions. When someone makes a truth claim, the reflexive questions must be: "How do you know that?" Who are your sources?" "Upon what data, gathered in what ways, do you base your conclusions?"

Regarding evidence-based course material, its factual validity should determine its inclusion. Religious taboos, cultural traditions, student discomfort, and identity-driven beliefs can be acknowledged without allowing them to become a censorious fetter on the pursuit of truth.

Critical thinking is not only a threat to the conservative worldview, but right-wingers seem to understand that quite well. And they have understood it for a long time. We could date their loathing for critical thinking and fact-based education at least as far back as 1925 when John Scopes was arrested, tried, and convicted by Tennessee authorities for the crime of teaching the science of evolution. But an example from this century is even more explicit.

The Texas Republican Party had opposition to critical thinking courses written into their 2012 party platform. "We oppose the teaching of 'Higher Order Thinking Skills' (HOT), values clarification, [and] critical thinking skills," it said. The document denounced what they viewed as the purpose of such nefarious coursework: to challenge "the student's fixed beliefs" with the ultimate aim of "undermining parental authority." They also expounded on the evils of early childhood education, sex education, and anything that included multicultural perspectives. They did approve of “school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded.” If they knew anything about the love of debate and contestation in the Jewish tradition, they probably would have been less sanguine about the Judeo part.