EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
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something; the discipline itself exists as a form of protest. And some of us
keep continuing to protest whenever we believe something to be wrong.
Jean Elshtain:
If we have arrived at a situation when talking about the
values that may adhere in tradition is to get oneself labeled as fascist, we
may as well pack our bags and go home. I think some people in the
Democratic Party are trying to get back to those kinds of debates and
discussions. One of the ways in which multiculturalism on the campus has
been coded, if you will, goes something like this: to recognize cultural
difference commits one to moral relativism. Those two things have
tended to go together, and, in turn, invite an attitude of non-judgmen–
talism. We can't make a judgment about someone else's life or way of
thinking. We can't criticize them because it's their culture. This bland
acceptance of whatever comes down the pike also has its analog, perhaps
even its origins, in elementary school, where the notion that we can't
teach values, only value clarification, because otherwise we would make
someone feel bad, became if not pervasive at least prevalent. My own
kids were coming home with heavy doses of that sort of stuff, refusing to
make judgments because they'd link into some kind of value that would
offend someone. But in a democracy - Edith in her initial questions tied
some of this to our view of a democracy - we're talking about politics
that encodes a very specific set of moral values, what it means to have
political standing, to engage in democratic debate, in contrast to living
in a world in which rules are laid down, where individuals have no
choices. So if we no longer can endorse the notion of democratic value
because we might judge people too harshly, then we're in a tough
situation.
Wilson
Moses: It's not only the multiculturalization. I teach two hun–
dred and fifty students at Boston University, in both English and history.
I go from my lecture on Teddy Roosevelt to my lecture on James Joyce.
There's one thing that's common about the two groups. I have one
black male among two hundred and fifty students. So much for affirma–
tive action. Out of those two hundred and fifty students, I had one who
protested the other day because I postponed a quiz. And he said, "I
wasted my time studying and it's all your fault." Now that's the kind of
problem I see. I'm sure this guy's got SATs over six hundred, and he's
going to go along and get admitted to some good law school or will
end up as a physician. The problem is that these students are not inter–
ested in what you're talking about, which is a tradition, let's call it lib–
eralism, a tradition of debate, of discourse, of dialectic, of a Talmudic
dialectic. It's very difficult to get our students engaged.
