It's a trap!

Taking back our language from the left

I got into a Twitter spat earlier this week with someone on our side of the woke education fight. I want to write very briefly about it because it is illustrative of 1) what we’re up against and 2) what we need to do to ultimately win the culture war.

A former educator and now author Tweeted that there is no such thing as “values-neutral education” and that everything that happens in the classroom reflects “someone’s values.” I responded by saying that this is simplistic. Of course any good teacher promotes the values of study, hard work and good behavior, but that these virtues are very different from the ideological values such as social justice that have thoroughly taken over our country’s education system.

He disagreed, stating that a value such as “hard work” is equally ideological to one such as social justice. To support his point, he cited the example of the country’s largest charter school network, KIPP, dropping the slogan it had used since its founding, “Work hard, Be nice” in the summer of 2020 because, according to KIPP’s CEO,

“it ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.”

To which I responded, NO!

Hard work was never ideological. It was only framed as ideological by the progressive left and the social justice movement. Virtues like hard work are indistinguishable from what any reasonable person would call education. That is to say, knowledge cannot be passed down to the next generation without significant effort. This is true even in the animal kingdom.

My Twitter friend fell right into the trap laid by the left, a trap that comes right out of the postmodern tradition. He let the left define the language he used, and thus the rules of the game. If we concede that hard work is an ideological value, then they come back and say it’s not only an ideological value, but a white supremacist value. Now, we’re put in the much more difficult position of having to deny and defend what they call white supremacy (and to be clear, what the woke call “white supremacy” is just a synonym for western civilization).

The second part of the trap is even more devious. Now they’ve got us thinking about the purpose of education itself. If virtues like study, hard work, getting good grades, using proper grammar and behaving in the classroom, which have always been synonymous with good education, are all just an ideology, then maybe we’ve been wrong all along about the purpose of education. Maybe the role of education isn’t just to pass down knowledge. Maybe the proper purpose of education should be making society fair or just or equal. Now they’ve raised doubts in our mind, which is how the woke mind virus works.

What must be understood is that the left has co-opted and weaponized nearly every word in the English language. Not just the obvious slogans like “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion,” but everyday words like “community,” “democracy,” “harm,” “violence,” “freedom,” “ideology” and “values.”

Orwell warned us of this. He/she/they who controls language controls society. If we are ultimately going to win the culture war, we are going to have to take back our language. Question every word they use, and make them define them. Don’t engage in debate on issues like equality or social justice, or even the purpose of education, until your opponent specifies what those words mean. Most importantly, watch out for the insidious trap they’ve laid for us.

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As always, I want to share with you the latest episodes of the podcast I co-host with Beth Feeley, Take Back Our Schools, available on all major podcast outlets, including Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. 

Get Up and Fight

On this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I speak with Dr. Elana Yaron Fishbein, founder of the organization, No Left Turn in Education. Elana tells her story of how she became an activist in the parents movement and founded a national “boots on the ground” grassroots organization. She talks about the issues that motivated her to begin speaking up about the crises of K-12 education, including critical race theory and the sexualization of children. She also shares her views on what has changed in the parents movement over the past several years and where she thinks the parents movement is going.

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As always, please subscribe and share any ideas or suggestions, including for podcast guests. You can contact me through the website: speakupforeducation.org or email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. I am also on Twitter @AndrewGutmann.