ABSTRACT
Many philosophers and social theorists whose specializations include philosophy of education have taught in elementary and secondary schools. I am no exception. I was a high school social studies teacher in the Bronx, New York, for the latter half of the 1980s. That experience has left an indelible mark on me, as I am sure it has on many who took a similar path. I had entered the New York public school system with lots of the misguided presumptions of many young people at the time. That was during the Reagan administration, and one of the tactics of that administration was to take advantage of the media edge afforded the president on pressing social issues. The president and his tacticians knew that they could simply present any controversial claim before the American public—true or false, though often false—and then leave it up to their opposition to prove otherwise. The problem was that their opposition didn’t have a competitive level of resources, and besides, something sociologically new had emerged on the scene, to which I will later turn. What the president and his cohorts knew was that once something was presented in a public forum, especially a national or international one, it took on the veneer of “truth.” Thus, as long as he and his associates never recanted their position, it stood, continuing its life as though true. The Black Welfare Queen was one of those falsehoods, false because it was advanced as exemplification of a norm instead of an exception and accepted in American society because of the bad-faith presumption of black life as abnormal. But more germane here is the infamous manifesto of that administration’s position on public education—A Nation at Risk. That work was pushed with the fervor of few misrepresentations of American reality in years past. The reverberations of its pronouncements are still felt by many of us: American workers are noncompetitive because they are badly educated through left-wing pedagogical innovations of the 1970s. Instead of pedagogy aimed at developing a politically informed citizenry, the nation should focus on skills-based education and a small set of texts and concepts geared at the most centrist understanding of American civic life—that is, the hijacking of the American Revolution by its right wing—namely, a good number of the founding fathers, and the body of literature that forged an Anglo-Saxon American identity. 1 The result, as is also well known, is that much federal, state, and private funding shifted during the 1980s from schools and classrooms to teacher education programs. 2 The effect was catastrophic on the morale of teachers: In effect, the American teacher became the proverbial scapegoat, and the task became to “fix” this derelict creature.
