Amy J. Binder
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002
xi + 307 pp., $24.95 hc
Hugh Mercer Curtler
Philosophy
Southwest State University-Minnesota
A major hoax that has been played on the public is that Johnny and Jenny will perform beyond expectations in school if they are told they are wonderful. It has been called the "self-esteem movement," and its shortcomings and duplicities have been exposed for all to see by Maureen Stout in her excellent book, The Feel-Good Curriculum (2001). Stout deconstructs the ten "myths" undergirding the movement, such notions as that competition and grading are bad for students' self-esteem, that teachers should be counselors and friends with their students, that when students fail, it's the teacher's fault.
These myths have created not only an atmosphere that has bred poorer class performance and grade inflation, but a pervasive sense that no fact or theory should challenge or contradict one's self-regard, ethnic identify, or ideological assumptions. Indeed, the mania for political correctness is really a "compassionate" attempt to place beyond the pale of discussion any facts and theories that might "offend" the sensibilities of favored groups.
Amy J. Binder's Contentious Curricula examines two of the offshoots of the self-esteem movement--Afrocentric studies and creationism. An odd coupling, at first glace, but really an inspired choice (though she makes very little of it). For both Afrocentrism and creationism make egalitarian claims rooted in threatened self-esteem. They both present themselves as compensatory strategies for giving hitherto "excluded" points of view "equal time" in the curriculum, on the assumption that the theory that makes me feel good is as important as the theory that makes me think.
Several school districts, for example, have successfully integrated Afrocentric elements into the curriculum on the ground that doing so will improve student attendance, academic performance, character, and all around self-esteem. Creationists are now arguing for the same acceptance of their theory on roughly the same ground, that the "theory" of creationism should have the same standing in the curriculum as does Darwinian "theory." Not being treated "equally," after all, injures the self-esteem of creationist Christians (are there creationist Jews?).
After a careful exercise in defining the two terms along a sliding scale of intensity (from extreme to moderate), Binder provides a brief history of both movements. She describes several attempts to introduce Afrocentrist curricula into schools with sizable minority enrollments. In 1989, the Atlantic school district adopted an Afrocentric "infusion" program, but the "infusion" fizzled out. Teachers were not provided with incentives to actually use the system, and many balked at changing their curriculum, especially since the material would not be covered in state or national tests. In Washington and New York State, Afrocentrist efforts were pursued half-heartedly. The only reason the movement got any hearing at all was that it promised to improve black academic achievement (and to oppose it was to be called "racist").
For creationists, the road to curriculum change was even more bumpy. Their ballot measures and proposals were defeated at the state level in California, Kansas, and Louisiana, and at the local level in Vista, CA. In Vista, creationists won three of five school board seats, but then were recalled in a campaign led by teachers. According to Binder, Christian conservatives on the board were simply unable to convert their political positions into institutional power.
In this treatment of two radically different ideologies and constituencies, Binder--a sociologist at the University of Southern California--wants to redirect the sociological theory of social movements in a new direction. She wants to rethink concepts of insider and outsider, for example, and focus on how "organizational routines" in school systems and similar institutions (think universities) can help or thwart challenges. As she puts it, "organizations are not the unitary, purposive, rational entities that so much of the social movements literature depicts them to be."
What Binder is trying to do for her discipline may interest sociologists, but her treatment of these two curricular "therapies" is not nearly as probing or insightful as this reviewer would like it, especially after reading Stout's far more incisive treatment of the "feel-good curriculum." As a sociologist, Binder is assiduously objective, avoiding critical judgments in an effort to remain--as she sees it--properly "neutral." Her book illustrates the truth of Peter L. Berger's recent complaint that the "methodological fetish" of statistical analysis--a useful but limited tool--dominates most sociological research, leading to trivial or predictable observations about complex and important material.
Binder is satisfied to establish a rather unstartling conclusion--that advocates of creationism and the Afrocentrism adopt a number of similar tactics in their attempt to waggle their way into the mainstream of America's educational establishment. This is worth knowing but it is hardly amazing, and it is fairly quickly established. She leaves unexplored a number of questions that this reviewer would like to know the answers to.
For instance, Binder points out that the creationists were not taken seriously by establishment educationists, whereas the supporters of the Afrocentric movement were. Why has Afrocentrism had relatively more success than creationism, despite the tens of millions of Americans who believe in the theory? Is Afrocentrism, because it is a softer theory (less amenable to testing and falsification), more likely to have its claims respected than the harder claims of creationism? Or has Afrocentrism been relatively more successful in academic settings because to accept it mitigates residual white guilt over slavery and discrimination? Are secular academics more likely to think that blacks have a stronger claim than do Christians? Binder makes almost no effort to tackle any of these or other questions.
Afrocentrism was more successful than creationism in making inroads into the curriculum because there is more truth, and moral suasion, in the African American's claim to have been wrongly excluded from American history for too long, whereas the creationist's claim to be a genuine scientific theory is totally groundless. In other words, it does not take reams of data and countless taped interviews and newspaper clippings to establish what is obvious to anyone who takes a moment to reflect.
Although Binder manages to remain "neutral" (for good or for bad), every so often she lets down her Shield of Sociology to reveal her sympathy for the Afrocentrist position. For instance, she praises ex-commissioner Thomas Sobol of New York for being "progressive" in thinking that "the intellectually and socially honest goal is not to protect the canon, but to open up [history and the social sciences] to more and greater knowledge, which can be gained through understanding different groups' perspectives on society and the world." Binder does not hint that this view should also be applied even-handedly to creationism.
At another time she muses that "history can and should be allowed to be more elastic to accommodate community demands." Unfortunately, she does not comment on whether scientific theory should be as "elastic" as "history" in order to accommodate the claims of creationism. Are educationists likely to view creationist Christians as legitimate members of the "community" who need to be pacified and stroked? Is Binder reluctant to pursue such issues because she is afraid of strengthening the case of creationism? Or of weakening the case of Afrocentrism?
Her failure to ask probing questions is nowhere more evident than in the case of her summary of the claim by J. Jerome Harris, newly hired Superintendent of Atlanta's public schools in the late '80s, who said that Afrocentric studies should be implemented in Atlanta because it would "allow children to learn about their distinguished past, thereby improving their academic performance." Binder simply doesn't see, or is not interested in, the non sequitur here. This book would certainly have been more interesting and valuable had Binder turned her attention to these deeper questions.
Perhaps Binder misses the important questions and spends far too much time trying--establishing the obvious because this book was originally her dissertation (which, she tells us, one of her advisors found "stunning!"), and so she was playing it safe, and loading up on statistics and "neutral" claims (as well as a lot of jargon and repeated material in lieu of argumentation).
Let me return where I began, with Stout's book, The Feel-Good Curriculum. Stout's concern is deeply humanistic. She feels that our children have been cheated and denied the opportunity to realize their human potential because the schools have bought into the myths perpetrated by the self-esteem movement--a movement of educators who also like to regard themselves as social scientists, but who disregard evidence that there is no correlation between self esteem insincerely placed and genuine accomplishment. As Stout has shown, the self-esteem movement is a failed experiment and it is time to look elsewhere for a more solid basis for educational theory.
But Amy Binder's book is of little help in this search, since she fails to question whether or not Afrocentric or creationistic movements are educationally defensible, that is, whether or not they would truly benefit children if adopted in the nation's public schools (as their advocates insist they would), or whether they are simply one more element in the bankrupt self-esteem movement.
When all is said and done, the really important questions remain, and Maureen Stout has faced them more squarely than Amy Binder. The questions all educators must consider have to do with the nature and purpose of education, which may, in the end, have a great deal more to do with process than with content. Mark Van Doren warned us long ago to "beware of thugs who want to tell you what to think, not how to think." Thus, it may not be a question of whether students learn about African-American History or creationism, but whether or not they learn to use their minds, to read, write, figure, and to think for themselves.