We Shall Meet in the Place Where There is No Darkness
On Education and Rereading 1984
In an effort to meet new people, I joined a local Banned Book Club. Each month, we meet to discuss a text from a list of most frequently banned or challenged books. This month I have been tasked with re-reading a classic: 1984 by George Orwell. I was hesitant to pick up 1984 again, especially since living in the reality of an Orwellian nightmare seems like enough dystopia for the time being. But, like Douglas Hofstadter who said, “Anything I think about becomes part of my professional life,” I found a new connection between Winston’s experiences and my daily vocation:
“With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.”
Once, while teaching Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, I was called into a meeting with the principal, school counselor, a student, and an angry parent. The student had taken issue with the language of the play and that I had allowed the class the option of saying “damn” and “bastard” out loud while playing their parts. Unlike Winston, I didn’t blame the student for reporting me. I grew up as an evangelical Christian, so I understood the kind of discomfort that comes with an upbringing dependent upon blind acceptance. This was just one moment of many that reminded me what happens when we allow education to be captured by those who conflate virtue and the limitation of thought.
The thing I talk about the least here but think about the most in my life is education. I spent thirteen years as a public high school English teacher, as well as an instructional coach, soccer game supervisor, tutor, detention monitor, backstage choir herder, Gay-Straight Alliance sponsor, librarian, and bathroom vape monitor. During the pandemic, while teaching full-time, I finished my doctorate in educational leadership. The focus of my study was how conservative politics impacts the way rural social studies teachers cover topics of race and racism in their curriculum. You can guess what I uncovered. I presented my dissertation findings at the American Educational Research Association’s spring conference in 2023.
Now I train in-practice teachers as part of a statewide focus on teacher retention and recruitment. My job was designed to meet two very prevalent challenges that are interconnected: the increasing number of untrained teachers in classrooms as a result of a dismal exodus of certified educators from the profession. Teachers spend four or five full days with me each year, covering topics like classroom management, lesson planning, social emotional growth, neuroscience, culturally responsive pedagogy, time and stress management, and community building.
As part of my work, I travel to districts and conferences to speak: the topic most frequently requested is critical thinking. Teachers complain that children just don’t want to think anymore. Occassionally, one person scoffs at what I show them, arguing that their students cannot engage in deep thinking and learning because their behaviors are so unmanageable. To combat these behaviors, they (and, admittedly, so have I—a former scoffer myself) use knowledge as a management tool: plopping students in front of worksheets or computers and demanding silence and compliance. I tell them that when we say “my students can’t ______,” then that is our sign to do it more, not less.
But I wasn't a always good teacher and am never as good as I want to be. I just want my conversations with these other highly intelligent and empathetic people to be focused on those rare magical moments in education. You know the ones. I want us to reflect on them and ask ourselves how we can have more.
One thing we have uncovered together is that to teach critical thinking, we must be critical thinkers ourselves. We must have what educator bell hooks describes as “radical openness.” For teachers, this means casting a critical eye toward their own work and approaches. For all of us, it means tracing the family tree of thought back to the beginning and interrogating the origins of knowledge.
Many of the people I meet both in and outside of education have developed strong opinions about schools that are based upon what they experienced when they were children: that is, education that was often devoid of dignity-preservation and meaningful learning. But while my teachers work tirelessly to heal what is broken, the things I cannot teach them–bound by the ever-increasing constraints as a government employee in a red state–would reveal to them that what we are doing is trying to reverse-engineer something that was doomed from the start.
Without a historical or philosophical framework, educators struggle to understand that raising children to be critical thinkers means raising them to be non-compliant, and that this is actually a good thing. If we want students to experience the kind of critical consciousness that Paulo Freire describes or the transformative civic education that James Banks tells us will enable students to acquire the skills, knowledge, and values they need to confront and combat inequality, then we must first recognize the problems of the system that we inherited. Researchers like Michael Apple, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Linda Darling-Hammond have dedicated their careers to uncovering the history of this system and identifying ways to break it.
In the early 1900s, submitting to what bell hooks refers to as “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” schools adopted the factory model, treating students like products to be pushed along a conveyor belt, thereby creating an emphasis on shallow, rote learning. The function of schools was to select and sort students into different classes, often based on race.
In 1921, University of Michigan professor of psychology W.B. Pillsbury articulated the goal: “We can picture the educational system as having a very important function as a selecting agency, a means of separating the men of best intelligence from the deficient and mediocre. All are poured into the system at the bottom; the incapable are soon rejected or drop out after repeating various grades and pass into the ranks of unskilled labor. The really defective go at once to the homes for dependents and to penal institutions.”
The skeleton of this structure remains. Teachers are isolated, overworked, undertrained, undervalued, and underpaid. Students rotate through disparate classrooms to receive a standardized curriculum that was designed by white architects. Compliance and the successful homogenization into white culture and ways of thinking are predictors of academic success. While the Civil Rights Movement challenged this socially irresponsible model, No Child Left Behind doubled down on inequity. The Trump administration has taken a machine gun approach to dismantling progress, particularly in education, and no one knows where to first apply aid and attention. I humbly suggest we begin with the classroom.
We must be diligent in understanding what our students are absorbing, and not absorbing, and why, because whatever tyranny we face now only increases if our children are raised without access to critical thought. Michael Apple explains that “the ‘cultural capital’ declared to be official knowledge, then, is compromised knowledge, knowledge that is filtered through a complicated set of political screens and decisions before it gets to be declared legitimate.” This official and compromised knowledge has lasting effects. Just ask Orwell.
In 1984, Winston despises children for their adherence to the Party, their viciousness, and their inability to think for themselves. Yet, the main character lacks an understanding of how his own actions contribute to the problem. Winston carefully rewrites news articles and historical documents to reflect the Party’s values and to preserve its reputation, thereby shaping official knowledge. The weak and wobbly education we offer our students today is the product of countless moments of undermining transformative learning. If we fail to give it our attention–either because the result of inadequate education always feels like tomorrow’s problem or because our perceptions are clouded by our own negative associations with school–we risk, well, everything.
I maintain, however, that there is hope. I can attest that today’s young people are better than the generations before them, and that will always be the case. I once had an adult ask me if I thought students were getting progressively worse. I answered, “Students don’t get worse, but adults do.” Young people have and always will bring change. Compliance comes with an expiration date.
I think I prefer Fahrenheit 451 to 1984, and that’s because of Clarisse. When all her classmates are swimming in violence, Clarisse looks at a dandelion and wonders. Orwell fails to recognize that children are predisposed to be critical thinkers. They are conductors of why. Despite our best efforts to shape and inform them, children show us how to learn. Paulo Freire said that “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” May they reinvent and restore us. May we allow them to do so.
