DEMOCRACY

Political Polarization and the Classroom: Exposure Versus Indoctrination

By Ashley Rogers Berner

It’s election time, and classrooms are not livin’ easy. America’s schools are both collateral damage of the culture-warring and polarization that characterize the public square and also, often, the objects of direct attack.

This atmosphere constrains educators’ ability to fulfill the fundamental task of preparing the next generation for democratic citizenship. Indeed, our adversarial culture can make it feel well-nigh impossible to pull two classroom levers that contribute to adult civic participation: knowledge-building and routine debate and deliberation.

Knowledge-building and civic participation:
What Diane Ravitch called “the academic curriculum” and others might call, “the liberal arts,” is not merely about grade-level instruction or standards-aligned materials. Rather, it is about the systematic acquisition of literature, world geography, foreign languages, history, and comparative philosophy and religion, across a student’s K-12 experience. Studies from around the world suggest that when young people have access to the liberal arts, achievement gaps close and civic capacities increase.

But a liberal arts curriculum, by definition, involves ideas and concepts with which individual families disagree and that individual students may dislike. This is par for the course in democracies around the world, as I describe in my recent HEP book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy (2024). The reactive sensitivities that currently afflict both Right and Left, however, make it difficult to teach about basic, foundational subjects – say, the roles of slavery and abolitionism at the Constitutional Convention, the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf, or the tenets of the world’s major religions, to name a few.  An “open classroom climate” means giving students routine opportunities to engage with opposing viewpoints across the major school subjects (from social studies to science and literature), scaffolded by clear teacher norms and expectations.

Debate, Discussion and an Open Classroom Climate:
Importantly, the open classroom climate predicts civil tolerance, which means neither indifference nor quiet resignation but, rather, the ability to hold strong views while also respecting the opinions of others.

A routine of classroom-based deliberation (or, “open classroom climate”) leads to civic capacities in adulthood, a finding that has held steady for forty years across more than twenty-four democracies, country-level studies, and research in the United States (49).

Civil tolerance is learned rather than innate, and we count on schools to help students practice the skill.

Routine classroom debate is always difficult to pull off, and many studies have found it to be rare in U.S. schools. There are many contributing factors, some of which are longstanding. But the collective impact of right-leaning bans on painful and controversial topics and left-leaning tendencies to define human beings according to simplistic categories, has made teachers’ pedagogical legroom smaller still.

What we can do to support civic development:
Given the above, how can educators responsibly fulfill their mandate to support civic development in the classrooms of today? Here are three concrete suggestions, drawn from Educational Pluralism and Democracy, that might be of use.

First, source before lens. Starting with primary sources can protect classrooms against a purely ideological lens. The team I lead at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy reviews English Language Arts (ELA) and social studies curricula (both published and district-designed). All too often, we find the materials that teachers are expected to use come at the issues from one ideological extreme or the other, e.g.,

…describe[ing] the European colonization of North America as a journey towards religious freedom, while omitting the reality of Native American and African Americans’ freedom on those shores…or teach[ing] the United States’ history of enslavement as the sole factor behind the Revolutionary War and the new government, without considering abolitionists’ activities during this period or the political arguments on both sides of the Atlantic (57).

When we start with primary sources, students can absorb the words and their contemporaneous meaning, assess which concepts were novel for their time, and connect the dots to other contemporaneous events and ideas.

Second, add multiple perspectives. Once students have mastered a primary text or, in the case of very important sources, even learned them by heart, teachers can introduce important controversies and interpretive frameworks. Sometimes this will come later in the students’ K-12 journey, of course. Back to our example above, “multiple perspectives” might mean pairing the 1619 Project with interpretations by more traditional historians; reading the actual debates that took place about slavery at the Constitutional Convention (out loud?); or encountering slave narratives or Frederick Douglass’s masterful use of the Constitution to argue for universal freedom. Educators can let other primary sources, and high-quality secondary ones, work for them in the classroom. This can be protective of teachers in politically charged environments, while also constituting just really good pedagogy.

Third, ask the big questions. All subjects should connect students to the universal questions with which human life inevitably engages. What is the nature of a just society? What is the right foundation for human dignity? How about the relationship between culture and truth? What about the benefits and constraints of scientific discovery? Or the responsibilities of one people group to another – both within a society and between them? What are the forms and content of friendship, and where do we see it in the novels we read and the stories we tell?

Teaching becomes exhilarating when it’s about something bigger than just one lesson in one subject. Indeed, the “something bigger than” is why many of us (myself included) went into teaching in the first place.

Of course, classrooms don’t exist in isolation. Administrative leadership matters; parents’ voices matter; the larger political whirlwinds inevitably press upon educational systems, as they always will. The 2024 current election may indeed make it more difficult to provide rigorous content and to nurture students’ habits of deliberation. Which only makes them more important.

About the Author

Ashley Rogers Berner is director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor of education. She is the author of Educational Pluralism and Democracy, which was published in 2024 by Harvard Education Press.