Stop Teaching Anti-Trump Bias

Students were numb. Some wept with anxiety. Teachers wrestled with their own pain and blinked back tears of their own while helping their young charges make sense of the horror. Families across the land asked schools to comfort their children and reassure them that America would endure.

The date was Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001, and 3,000 innocents had just been murdered by Osama bin Laden’s jihadists.

You’d be forgiven, though, if you thought we were referring to last Wednesday, when schools and colleges treated a victory by the Republican presidential nominee much as they did the deadliest attack on American soil since the Civil War. Colleges canceled classes. At others, professors ignored their syllabi to explain their hatred of Republicans. Schools and school districts took dramatic steps to comfort their presumptively terrified students, an undertaking that allowed anguished teachers to fan every feverish rumor.

Educators talked in quavering voices about the horrors of the impending Trump administration. One school administrator lamented to the PBS NewsHour: “We won’t be able to teach math if they feel scared and if they feel like they are at risk.”

The superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, wrote to the constituents of his sprawling suburban district: “We must reassure our staff and students that our school buildings are safe places where we truly value and respect every single individual and do not tolerate bullying or hate speech.” The superintendent of the Denver Public Schools responded to Trump’s victory by flagging the “deep differences and bias in our country around race and ethnicity and class.”

Credit: Reuters

A thousand such missives criss-crossed the nation’s schools and colleges. The president of the University of Michigan told a campus vigil last Wednesday that students had voted overwhelmingly for Clinton: “Ninety percent of you rejected the kind of hate and the fractiousness and the longing for some sort of idealized version of a nonexistent yesterday.”

Had Hillary Clinton won the bitter contest, would any of this have still been deemed necessary by so many educators? Of course not.

We’re no fans of the president-elect, whose behavior has frequently been appalling, whose policy ignorance is vast, and who appears to lack any coherent philosophy of government. That said, we are astonished that so many educators, schools and colleges chose to treat his election as reason to alarm their students and to suggest that only a Democratic victory would have aligned with the nation’s values.

We understand that the country is divided and that some kids share their parents’ fears of potentially being deported or losing their health insurance. We’ve surely no objection to teachers comforting fearful children. That’s a responsibility of all adults who care for them. But we don’t believe that educators are supposed to make kids scared or teach that there is a right outcome and a wrong one to a presidential election. And we’re puzzled to see so many educators – and even education journalists – imagine that Trump’s election can only be understood through the prism of racism and xenophobia.

Wednesday should have been, and doubtless was, in some schools and classrooms that never made it onto TV, a rare opportunity to teach civics and history. To explain how the Electoral College works and why it exists; to point out how many times in America’s past, starting in 1800, an election upset has led to change and has been accompanied by the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another. Our schools do such a miserable job of imparting U.S. history and civics to their pupils that it’s important to exploit every “teachable moment,” and this was a vivid one. We fear that it’s been largely wasted or used instead for propagandizing.

Education leaders insist that their response to the election outcome is not ideological; that it’s simply a response to Trump’s unique grotesquery. That would be easier to believe if K-12 and higher education leaders weren’t so open to stripping the statues and names of revered presidents like Wilson, Jefferson and Washington from school and college buildings. If prominent Republicans weren’t routinely disinvited from universities. If decent men like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush had not been routinely depicted by educators as racists, crypto-fascists and war criminals. If so many schools hadn’t celebrated Obama’s two elections with rallies, songs of homage and ebullient videos.

Education leaders explain that their histrionics were made necessary by Trump’s divisive, mean-spirited campaign; that no response to a Clinton victory would have been necessary because Hillary Clinton – like President Obama before her – offered a warm-hearted and inclusive future. Cheery acceptance of a Clinton win, they suggest, would not have reflected bias, simply the fact that students (and others) would have had nothing to worry about.

Well. While progressives may not believe it, here are some of the students who might have had cause to fear a Clinton victory:

Evangelicals and Catholics whose religious schools and colleges are threatened by federal authorities for non-compliance with directives related to gender and sexual identity.
College students muzzled by progressive speech codes or sanctioned by “bias response teams” for posting Trump signs or celebrating America as a “melting pot,” and well aware that a Clinton administration would embrace such restrictions.
Kids bullied or in schools made chaotic by miscreants who would have been suspended if not for directives issued by the Obama Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights.
The children of police, who watched Clinton campaign alongside individuals who had called for acts of violence against uniformed officers.
Children in charter schools who understood that a Clinton win would be bad news for their school and might lead to its closure.
College students fearful of being falsely convicted by kangaroo campus courts and publicly pilloried or expelled under the Obama administration’s Star Chamber approach to sexual harassment, which has compelled universities to abandon the basic tenets of due process.

The anxieties of those young people would most certainly have been ignored had Clinton won. Indeed, imagine the Bill Maher gibes that would have followed had a single religious college canceled classes so students could mourn a Clinton victory.

We know that educational leaders think they’re doing the right thing. We do hope, however, that these same leaders might do a better job of asking whether their biases are coloring their judgment and aggravating the divisions they’re seeking to heal. After all, for those who supported Donald Trump because they think the nation’s elites hold them in contempt and have declared war on their values, we fear that the nation’s educators have done little this past week to disprove the point.

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