In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

159 chapter nine Deconstructing the Doublethink Aimed at Dismantling Ethnic Studies in Tucson Jeff Duncan-Andrade Anyone that spends time in schools serving the children of working-class and poor people knows how rare it is to find classrooms where students are genuinely engaged in what they are learning. Year after year, school districts all over the country rack their brains and spend billions of tax payers’ dollars trying to figure out how to improve these classroom experiences. At the end of the day, that is what most parents want for their children. It should also be what our society wants for all children, as the benefits of engaging classrooms echo across communities for multiple generations. This is what makes the state of Arizona’s decision to kill the MexicanAmerican Studies (MAS) program in the Tucson Unified School District so baffling. In those classrooms, levels of student engagement were remarkably high. Of course, there was also the elevated achievement that comes along with greater engagement in rich and meaningful academic work. Had there actually been rigorous evaluations of all classes in those schools, there may very well indeed have been cause for outcry about the education students are receiving in Tucson’s public schools. However, I doubt seriously that any evaluators that recognize good teaching would have had cause for concern with the ethnic studies classes because they would have encountered the very conditions that we claim to want for all our students. Instead, the outrage would have been directed at many of the other classes where hour after hour these same students experienced social, emotional, and intellectual disconnection. There should be a statelevel investigation into Tucson’s public schools, and every public school 160 · Jeff Duncan-Andrade district in the country for that matter, where the failure of large percentages of children has gone unaddressed for decades. There should be policies outlawing certain types of classes and teaching; places where drill-and-kill test-driven curricula slip creative young minds into borderline comatose relationships to learning, crushing their intellectual engagement in school. The widespread nature of these conditions is cause for alarm, and it is indeed a threat to national security that warrants a House bill outlawing it. Sadly, this sort of inquiry into school failure did not happen in Arizona. That is not shocking since it has not happened anywhere else in the country and there is no real state of national commitment to radically rethinking how we educate poor and working-class children or children of color. What makes the Arizona situation so utterly absurd is not that they failed to outlaw bad teaching, but that they actually outlawed good teaching. They actually passed a law that put an end to a program that was working for large numbers of students; the same students, by the way, that the state and the district admit they are not serving effectively. What has gone on in Arizona is doublethink at its finest. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, he coins the term “doublethink,” which he describes as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The [participant] . . . knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious , or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt” (Orwell 2003, 220). Doublethink is not just lying. It is selfdeception that requires people to fool themselves. Orwell’s insight, then, is that to tranquilize such blatant cognitive dissonance requires not only ideology but also a kind of self-hypnosis. One need not be a particularly keen observer to see the layers of doublethink used to justify Arizona’s House Bill 2281. It is a worthwhile exercise, however, to continue to call attention to the strategies used by white supremacists and others looking to maintain elements of the status quo that do documentable harm to members of our society. In this vein, this chapter illuminates three examples of doublethink used to justify the elimination of effective teaching in Tucson’s public schools: teaching about oppression is bad; achievement is irrelevant; government should obstruct community choice. The first example comes from the contradictory arguments used to suggest that teaching students (of color) from the lens of their own cultural history is inappropriate and...

Share