‘School shaming’ and the reactionary politics of neotrads

Recently, the phrase ‘school shaming’ has gained increasing currency among neotraditionalist reactionaries on Twitter in an attempt to restrict the public dialog about education. When Mercia, a free school in the UK, posted on their public website that they were looking for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff” to implement a ‘zero tolerance’ behavior policy, Debra Kidd was accused of ‘school shaming’ when she tweeted that “No. Definitely you’re not right for me. Or for my children. Or for any children with any special needs. But then, that’s probably the intention isn’t it..” In his reporting at Education Uncovered, Warwick Mansell notes that Mercia uses exactly the same wording about hiring teachers as Michaela, another ‘no excuses’ free school led by Katherine Birbalsingh, an advocate for “right wing thinking” in education.

Along with phrases appropriated directly from the so-called alt-right, a small group of neotraditionalist educators have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make their reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary. Criticize a school for how it treats students, and you’re ‘school shaming’. Talk about structural racism and curriculum, and you’re playing ‘identity politics’. Oppose calls to shore up the authority of teachers in the face of supposedly out-of-control youth, and you’re ‘virtue-signalling’.

‘Slut shaming’ is an attack on women and their identity in a patriarchal society; it’s part of a power dynamics meant to keep women in their place. By extension, we might imagine that the phrase ‘school shaming’ similarly works to expose a harmful power dynamic where schools who publicly advocate for ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards students are somehow oppressed by people who criticize those policies on social media. However, the concept of ‘school shaming’ gets the power dynamics exactly backwards: schools that shame students through authoritarian discipline policies should be open to criticism. Ironically, those who use the phrase ‘school shaming’ are looking for a nuanced and sympathetic treatment of ‘zero tolerance’ schools that the students who attend those schools are denied. Unlike the empty concept of ‘school shaming’ which seems to have been invented by Andrew Smith (@oldandrewuk), ‘student shaming’ functions as a critical concept to name what has long been called ‘deficit thinking’ about students. When a school looks for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff”, that’s in effect asking for teachers who know how to shame students.

Schools can’t feel shame. That’s what philosophers call a category mistake. However as Leslie Bayers and Eileen Camfield make clear, ‘student shaming’ is at root about a lack of empathetical imagination on the part of teachers and this has a real impact on the emotional lives of students. Quoting Brené Brown’s definition of shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love” (60), Bayers and Camfield go on to say that “we have a choice to cast … behavior in a more compassionate light. The student may be undergoing a crisis or negotiating competing and overwhelming demands.” Most importantly, there’s no benefit to feelings of shame.“She observes that shame produces fear, risk-aversion, and the creation of a negative shame spiral. In Brown’s description, shame has no prosocial effects: “Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all—there are no data to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior” (72). Given the comments we opened this article with, shame not only hurts students but in fact also creates barriers to equitable teaching and learning.”

What do we teach kids when we punish their peers for not having a pencil, or the wrong haircut, or dressing the wrong way? Do we want our students to grow into adults who show ‘zero tolerance’ to deviance from arbitrary rules? That ‘hidden curriculum’ behind ‘zero tolerance’ policies not only shames individuals in the present but it limits their long term visions of freedom. In a powerful piece about student shaming, Kevin Gannon asks us to consider the power dynamics of ‘punching down’ at students:

“I don’t know if my professors joked about me at the coffee pot, or traded stories about me at cocktail parties. But I do know that they took an interest in helping a student who was trying to get his act together. I do know that they helped build academic confidence for a student who may not have always been receptive to that help. … What might we lose tomorrow as a result of shaming today? What do we do to ourselves, our colleagues (present and future), and our students if we revel in punching down at folks who may not even know they’re targets?”

In her 2010 speech to the Conservative Party, Birbalsingh engaged in some very public ‘punching down’ at students. She showed pictures of children from her school and ridiculed them for talking about having anger management issues, claiming that one of them said “I am anger management”. More broadly, she implied that Black students were calling teachers racists simply to avoid punishments, saying that “accusations of racism.. stop schools from reprimanding these children.” “We need high expectations of everyone, even if you’re black”.From the Guardian: “When she returned to her school, deputy head Katharine Birbalsingh swiftly found she was out of a job after being confronted over pictures of children she used to illustrate her speech.” And from the BBC: Southwark Diocese said it was concerned that “the position of the academy should not be misrepresented”.”Generalisations about teachers and schools can be seen as insulting to many teachers who have worked hard to make a difference to the lives of the young people in their care.” It also said the Diocese was “concerned” by “her use of pictures of children from our school and made reference to them by name”. Ms Birbalsingh has said she had obtained consent from the school and parents for the use of the pictures, but it is not clear how much detail she had given of how and where they would used. Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers, said teachers should be free to express their views.

In Paul Warmington’s analysis, Birbalsingh fits comfortably into the broader thread of Black conservative analysis which argues that “liberal multiculturalists had eagerly blamed structural racism for black pupils’ continued underachievement, while shying away from black parents’ and pupils’ own role in creating damaging school relationships.” At root, there is a “somersaulting double-victimology” where black students are not victims of structural racism, but are victims of anti-racism.Warmington writes: “As with Sewell, this critique of anti-racist education is presented as homogenous but relies on discursive rifts: our schools and teachers are not racist, except when they are – that is, except when they are anti-racist. Moreover, the repudiation of the labelling of black communities as necessarily low-achieving relies, in Birbalsingh’s and Sewell’s accounts, on a deeply racialized depiction of black communities as (at least in some fractions) lacking commitment to education.” Warmington quotes Birbalsingh’s book:

“Black kids all have that winning ace up their sleeve, which they can play when the going gets really tough – the race card: “It’s cause I is black, innit… She hates us ’cause we is black” … if the black kid has got himself a slightly scared new white teacher, he is in serious business. He has got them running scared. (Birbalsingh 2011, 55)”

In fact, Black students have been over-disciplined and ‘zero tolerance’ programs hurt students of color. Yet, Birbalsingh’s conservative thought (2018) continues to push aside structural racism (and classism and sexism), arguing “But the best thing you can do in life is ignore those obstacles and plough on ahead as if they don’t exist.” Birbalsingh’s focus on individual behavior fits into a long conservative tradition described by Cornel West (1992):

 

Virtue Signalling and Identity Politics

While neotraditionalists invented the concept of ‘school shaming’, in other cases they have appropriated the language of other reactionaries. If you criticize schools for the way they treat students, you’re ‘virtue signalling’ - trying to make yourself look good and nothing more. If you bring in an analysis of structural racism into that criticism, you’re playing ‘identity politics’ when we’re all supposed to colorblind. Katherine Birbalsingh packs both phrases into one tweet that accuses progressives of ‘virtue signalling’ and playing ‘identity politics’.

David Shariatmadari breaks down the logic of what he calls the ‘lazy putdown’ of ‘virtue signaling’ which is “becoming indistinguishable from the thing it was designed to call out: smug posturing from a position of self-appointed authority.”

“In many cases, the thinking goes like this (with the left a frequent target):

1. Bill is saying something right-on
2. Virtue-signalling is when you say something right-on just to sound good
3. Therefore Bill is virtue-signalling

But 3. is not justified by 1. and 2. You can argue for something that happens to make you look virtuous because you genuinely think it is the best solution.”

I have had the accusation of playing ‘identity politics’ leveled at me by David Didau when I criticized his writing about ‘racial differences in IQ’. The accusation of playing identity politics relies on an erasure of history, implying that people are trying to make identity matter now when it has never mattered before. As one example, the curriculum has always been put together according to an identity politics based on race, gender, and power. But when people argue for a change to that edifice, they are depicted as playing a devious game based on identity. In her testimony to the parliament (2010), Katharine Birbalsingh argues that seeing behaviour at school through the lens of engagement and culturally responsive curriculum would upset some kind of ‘balance’:

“…the argument is often made that black pupils will be more interested in black writers than in white writers. There is some truth in that-they will be. However, does that mean you only teach them black writing and never teach them any white writing? I don’t think so. There needs to be some kind of balance. Similarly, when you teach history, the argument is made that black pupils will be more interested in black history than in other types of history, and there is some truth in that. Does that mean you only teach them black history and do not teach them any other type of history? No, I don’t think so. You have to find a balance, which is difficult.”

Oddly, some try to deny that there are any political implications behind neotraditionalist pedagogy. Writing in the right-wing Quillette, Greg Ashman tries to show that politically progressive philosophers like Antonio Gramsci in fact advocated for traditionalist pedagogy, while the fascists were pedagogical progressives.

“It is important to note that the alignment of progressive education with progressive politics is loose at best, with anyone espousing a more modern and funky education system, from whatever part of the political spectrum, tending to draw upon its reservoir of ideas. In 1930s Italy, it was Mussolini’s education minister who pursued progressive education, while Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, offered a traditionalist critique. Progressive education’s focus on the individual and the insistence that some children are simply not cut-out for academic learning plays well to sections of the political Right. In contrast, the rise of postmodernism since the 1960s and its capture of some parts of the political Left has found a parallel in the progressive argument against a knowledge-rich curriculum. Whose knowledge should be taught? Is it the knowledge of dead, white, European males? If all facts are socially constructed, why privilege one body of knowledge over another? Educational progressivism, with its focus only on content that is interesting and relevant to the individual child—and taking into account the ‘oppressed’ groups that child belongs to—seems like a natural outcrop of the postmodernist critique of traditional subject knowledge.”

Like neoconservative reactionary thought more broadly, Ashman can’t bring himself to write oppressed except in scare quotes. Ashman suggests that progressives suffer from a false consciousness of sorts, only hearing Gramsci when he talks about hegemony but not pedagogy, but surely the neoconservative reactionaries are guilty of liking only a partial caricature of Gramsci also.

As you might expect, the real story about Gramsci is a bit more complicated than what Ashman hints at. To the extent that Gramsci called for what sounds like traditionalist teaching, Peter Mayo argues that Gramsci always aimed at the “critical appropriation of dominant knowledge.” Mayo notes that Gramsci also argued for pedagogical relationships that run counter to neoconservative politics where “every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher.”Quote by Mayo, Gramsci, 1971a, pp. 349, 350. But why stop the conversation about politics and pedagogy with a philosopher from near a century ago?

Much like Gramsci did indeed advocate for teaching working class students the dominant culture, Lisa Delpit (1988) argues that White liberal and progressive educators have ignored the importance of teaching Black students what they need to know about how to operate in the dominant culture, but in both cases, their solution isn’t some back to basics approach or a ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Deplit argues that “to deny students their own expert knowledge is to disempower them.” “They must be encouraged to understand the value of the code they already possess as well as to understand the power realities in this country.” Nor is it enough to change pedagogy without addressing broader power systems and “pushing gatekeepers to open their doors to a variety of styles and codes.”

The problem lies not in teachers lacking authority over youth - nor in being afraid to discipline Black students - but in the broader refusal to examine the power dynamics of how authority operates in educational institutions. In his writing on ‘student shaming’, Jesse Stommel says,

“Any authority within the space must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of the community. And this depends on a recognition of the power dynamics and hierarchies that this kind of learning environment must actively and continuously work against. There is no place for shame in the work of education.”

 

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