In one way, things became a little easier for teachers this week. That’s because, for the past four years, it has been tricky espousing school values when they were in direct contradiction to those lived and breathed by the leader of the most powerful country in the world.
Fanning the flames of racism. Revelling in bullying and oneupmanship. Mocking people with disabilities. Building walls rather than bridges. Presiding over a regime that thought little of wrenching children from their immigrant parents. Undermining the integrity of all the pillars of democracy, from the judiciary to the media to the political process. Now, add to that the inability to lose with good grace.
Indulging in any of these would be to flout the values promoted in schools, colleges and, indeed, nurseries - the tantrums, selfishness and casual cruelty routinely exhibited by Donald Trump would jar if seen in a three-year-old, let alone the “leader of the free world”.
Values are front and centre in education these days, a constant underpinning of school life. But schools do not exist in a vacuum, and when someone with the influence and profile of the US president exhibits a different moral code entirely, it presents teachers with a headache: whatever values they try to instil in their students, they know that Trump is fuelling a sort of mass cognitive dissonance.
When ideas and ideologies that once seemed beyond the pale start moving into the mainstream, basic assumptions about respect and tolerance start to sway more unsteadily, whatever schools do.
Perhaps the most continually jarring aspect of Trump’s presidency has been his inability to show - indeed, his disregard for - kindness. In his harsh, binary, narcissistic world, there are only winners and losers. A man like Trump sees only two choices in life: lording it over your inferiors or succumbing to a wretched existence of cringeing impotence.
That the sort of values promoted by schools offer something of an antidote to Trumpian cruelty was clear in the recent report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) on its “global competence cognitive test”. It found, for example, that in Scotland - a country where schools have placed a strong emphasis on common values - students were among the most likely to understand and appreciate the perspective of others, including immigrants.
(As an aside, that chimes with another teacher, first lady-elect Jill Biden, who has said: “I teach a lot of immigrants and refugees, I love their stories, I love who they are as people, and I love the fact that I can help them on their path to success.”)
A previous US president, Barack Obama, loved a quote from Martin Luther King Jr so much that he had it woven into a rug at the Oval Office: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” There is a danger, however, that such quotes, while making us feel warm and fuzzy, can also lead to complacency by implying that good will inevitably prevail.
What’s less well known is that King was paraphrasing 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker - whose longer version betrayed that he was not entirely convinced the moral universe was headed in the right direction. He concluded that only through his actions, and those of others like him, would anything change.
Similarly, it’s all well and good for schools to pin up inspirational quotes in classrooms and corridors, but that’s not enough: values also have to be exemplified, discussed, lived and fought for. Even though Trump is on his way out of the White House, Trumpian values haven’t gone away. But schools and other places of learning - by promoting empathy, kindness and a determination not to accept injustice - can go a long way to dimming their power.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 13 November 2020 issue under the headline “Trump’s values won’t disappear, but schools can dim their power”
