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I’ll admit having spent most of the last several days glued to the news and social media, following the events in Ukraine. It has been heartening to see Western countries coordinate their sanctions as well as they have, and to see the Ukrainians defend themselves so well. It has been disheartening to see how shallow much of the American media coverage has been.
That’s where my educator side kicks in. Our students need to know enough to make sense of events like these.
Putin’s decision to invade had a history. For example, President Trump’s first impeachment was over trying to blackmail Ukrainian president Zelensky by withholding military aid unless Zelensky offered dirt on Joe Biden. (Characteristically, Zelensky refused.) When those dots aren’t connected, we get a misleading picture.
Or we could zoom out more, and look at both the Cold War and the history of Europe in the 20th century. The old joke is that Europe produced more history than it could consume, so it had to export it. Wars over territory are hardly new to Europe. The “end of history” that some were happy to declare around 1991 was an illusion in ways both obvious and subtle. One of the more damaging aspects of the “end of history” thesis is that it licensed people to take their eye off the ball. We’re feeling the effects of that now.
Those of us old enough to remember communism may crack a smile at seeing one of the ways the Western countries are sanctioning Russian oligarchs is freezing or seizing their property.
My concern as an educator, especially at the community college level, is that the valid task of job preparation has largely eclipsed the task of educating citizens for a democracy.
I can understand how that happened. Solid middle-class jobs have become less certain over the last few decades, and the “end of history” folks assured us that the question of democracy had been settled. It seemed prudent to shift focus towards the immediate. And there’s an obvious sense in which people need first to take care of their basic needs before they can devote meaningful attention to things happening thousands of miles away.
But to the extent that we reduce education to training, we neglect the crucial task of preparing citizens to run the country.
In fact, there’s a move afoot now to stifle any discussion of “divisive” topics at all. By stigmatizing the simple fact of disagreement, these proposals aim to strike at the heart of democracy. Given freedom to speak, people will disagree; James Madison noted that in the Federalist Papers, and it’s still true. The only way to prevent disagreement—or deliberation, if you prefer—is to deny the freedom to speak. That’s the point of those proposals, and anyone with a commitment to democracy needs to recognize that.
We routinely measure the starting salaries of graduates. We publish graduation rates—badly measured, but still—and sometimes employment rates. I can’t remember seeing a survey of the voting rates of a given college’s graduates.
What gets measured gets funded.
This weekend has reminded us that democracies are fragile. In the grand sweep of human history, they’re exceptions. There’s no guarantee that they’ll endure. They’re only as strong as their citizens’ devotion to them. The citizens of Ukraine have taken to the streets to defend theirs. We could at least bother to do some basic maintenance of our own.
