Thinking About Education After the Capitol Attack with Joel Westheimer

In which Dan talks about education in the context of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He's joined by Joel Westheimer (@joelwestheimer), professor of education at the University of Ottawa and someone's who done lots of thinking and writing about civics education. They talk about the Canadian view of the attack, the meaning of civics education, and how a lack of media literacy might be education's biggest blindspot. As always, we welcome comments and questions on Twitter @BigIdeaEd

Mentioned in the show:
What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children For the Common Good by Joel Westheimer
Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in American's Schools by Joel Westheimer
Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
Media Literacy on Common Sense Media

Music: "Que Extrano Es" by Molo courtesy of Tribe of Noise

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What's most important in schools is inculcating young people into a culture of democratic community, one where we discuss ideas and discuss multiple perspectives and learn how to dialogue about important things that matter to all of us, but that we don't all agree on. And I think schools have failed tremendously in that regard. And I I worry that even with this lesson in that's so starkly on our on our TV screens right now, that we will still uh return to this obsession with uh accountability and standards and testing on subject areas and not allow teachers to create the kind of social environments that maybe could prevent what happened on January 6th.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Welcome to What's the Big Idea? I'm your host, Dan Carney. The events of January 6th at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. shook the United States to its core. Sounds cliche, perhaps, but the very fundamentals of how this nation functions, interacts with its political leaders, and reacts to information in the media is now up in the air. Setting aside the question of whether or not we should have really been surprised by what occurred when the Capitol was stormed by a mob denying the reality that President Trump lost the election, there is the question of where did we go wrong? And for a lot of educators, this question is personal. I mean, the mob that stormed the Capitol is at least guilty of domestic terrorism and perhaps treason, and they are graduates of American schools. What blame does education carry in this? How should we now be reevaluating our approach, especially to social studies and civics? To get some perspective on these questions, I called on friend of the pod and professor of education of the University of Ottawa, Joel Westheimer. Joel's also the author of the excellent book, What Kind of Citizen and a Longtime Thinker about how schools can prepare students to be positive contributors to local, national, and international societies. If you're a teacher wrestling with education's place in causing this debacle, and also with how to be part of the solution, this interview is for you. Joel Westheimer, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. Appreciate you coming back to talk about the events from the U.S. Capitol and the implications on education. I wanted to start with your perspective from Canada. You teach at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, you edited a collection of essays about patriotism in the US post-9-11. And in the foreword to that book, you wrote about being an American living in Canada. Sometimes we see most clearly those forces that act on our lives only when we can, at least partially, step outside of their influence. I'm curious about how you've seen the events from in Canada, the events of the last couple weeks.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Yeah, it is really interesting, Dan. It's true that you get a kind of perspective from outside that is a different one than from being inside. And when I when I wrote that book, um Pledge in Allegiance, um I wasn't even aware of kind of having an outsider status until I was in the middle of the book. Um and then I you know I realized that it probably was significant. Um and so it is different seeing it here from Canada, but uh, but mostly the experience I've had is is one of you know deep sorrow uh about being an American at this at this moment in time and and seeing our our cherished institutions under attack like this. Now, um this has been going on for the last four years, but this is such a a kind of visceral display um of the collapse of our norms of of democratic exchange that it it kind of pulls into focus everything from from the last four years. Um, you know, Canada is not immune to uh these same trends, right? We we certainly um not like the US right now, but uh but we do have politicians and we do have um a certain percentage of the population that uh follows the same conspiracy theories and uh and and has the same kind of um autocratic tilt um to to discourse. And so Canadians watch with great interest what's going on in the US because usually over time the trends that go on in the US kind of seep across the border in a in a kindler, gentler form, um, but but do have an impact on what goes on here.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

How did the Canadian media cover the events in the Capitol?

SPEAKER_01 5:17

You know, in utter disbelief, like like most of the world. I mean, I think that there is, unlike uh everything that was going on during a lot of the Trump presidency, I think um this scene of people storming the Capitol building, and especially because there are so many visuals, um, it's such a visceral reminder to so many people, you know, those those those views are very familiar to so many people who have witnessed um violent overthrows of their government in in their home countries. Canada, like the US, is a country full of immigrants, um, very uh multicultural. And uh and so people are coming from all over. And what I've really noticed about the coverage, um, you know, in Canada, you get Canadian coverage, but you also have a much, much greater awareness of the what's going on in the world and and world coverage as well. There's just the contrast between watching, even watching CNN that you watch in the US and CNN International is just a completely different experience. Um, and and one of the things that really did strike me about this is um is the the not just the kind of um disbelief and pity for Americans for this going on, but actual uh fear for the for themselves um around the world, you know, because no matter what we we criticize the US for and and no matter what the world thinks of the US, it it is undeniably true that it has in some sense been the symbol in some way of the endurance of the democratic dream. And to see it collapse in the way that so many uh democratic regimes have collapsed around the world, um, is was a very difficult thing for a lot of international viewers to see. Um and it and it seemed different than just saying, oh my God, look at the nuttiness that's going on in the US, um, you know, look at their president as a lunatic. Um it was different than that. It was a much more personal, um, people taking it personally and and and with a certain amount of fear about what's going on in the world.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah, that in the wake of the attack when the the Senate and the House returned to continue their work, there were a lot of actually really nice speeches that night. And there was uh Senator Angus King from Maine in his address, he said, kind of echoing what you just said, Joel, he he talked about how Americans we have this idea that the way our government works is just the way governments have always worked. Sort of kind of our the nearsightedness endemic to this country, that actually the history of the world is rife with dictators and autocrats and kings, and that what we have is actually very fragile. And we have to understand it's fragile, or else we will not treat it fragilely and and and nurture it. And I kind of hear you saying that up in Canada, you're feeling that this sort of real tension about like the threat to this fragile democracy that we have.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Exactly. I mean, that's a really nice way of putting it. And I would say, like, kind of um, you know, to compress what I said before, the world attention seems to me to have gone from pity and ridicule um to concern, um, concern for both uh for both the United States and and for the world. Um, you know, John Dewey said uh famously that uh democracy must be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. And I don't think that um we've ever seen more of uh uh an example of what Dewey was saying, um, which is that uh you know democracy is not self-winding. It is not something that once you have it, um, it's just there for good. Um it's something that needs to be renewed every generation and almost reinvented every generation. And I think that the complacency about that um has finally come back home to roost.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Yeah, so let's actually segue over here to education then. Last time you were on the show, we were talking about the power of civics education to create the kinds of citizens that will rewind democracy. Uh, since the attack on the Capitol, there's been a lot of soul searching from teachers online, a lot of where do we go wrong? I would say almost on some level amongst social studies and civics teachers, maybe even a bit of shame. Like, did we do this? How much blame do you think American education shoulders for what happened that day?

SPEAKER_01 10:07

You know, I've spent a good part of my professional life kind of, you know, making fun of the kind of civics education that teaches the branches of government and the history and the facts about civic education and how a bill becomes a law and and and all of those things. And um a little part of me, I still I still have reasons for not wanting schools to focus on the facts about democracy, but a little part of me um does feel like, hmm, maybe we really do need to teach people where these things came from and how our government is supposed to work because uh we seem to have a growing number of uh youth and young adults who don't really know um how that's supposed to work and why. Um but but aside from that, I think that my my feelings about education and and its relationship to these events are twofold. One is that we've experienced a kind of you know 20 or 30 year retreat from the idea that public education and public schools were to um you know were were specifically formed and founded to make a democratic society possible. And we've moved more and more towards jobs as uh schools as job training sites and um focused only on individual gain and not on a sense of collective mission and and collective engagement. And I think that that's taken its toll, right? Schools have been lonely places, lonely and stress-filled places for more and more kids and teachers, as the focus has been on math and literacy education to the complete exclusion of all other uh topics and concerns. And we see it now in the pandemic, right? That that the primary concern is how far children are falling behind in these subjects, right? How can we worry about that when the world is falling apart? I mean, behind is, you know, those are benchmarks that we've created. I mean, they're movable, um, they're they're movable goalposts. Um, what's most important in schools is inculcating young people into a culture of democratic community, one where we discuss ideas and discuss multiple perspectives uh and learn how to dialogue about important things that matter to all of us, but that we don't all agree on. And I think schools have failed tremendously in that regard. Uh, and I I worry that even with this uh with this lesson in um that's so starkly on our on our TV screens right now, um, that we will still uh return to this obsession with uh accountability and standards and and testing on subject areas and not allow teachers to create the kind of social environments that maybe could prevent what what happened on January 6th.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Not that they're mutually exclusive, but the idea of knowledge of civics and civic institutions versus the dispositions we have towards them, right? There's um I know also referring back to the book you wrote about patriotism in the beginning. You write about your love of political cartoons. Um, and I share that greatly. Um there's one that um, well, there's a lot that have come out since the attack on the Capitol um one here, um, in particular, um depicting the uh a segment from the First Amendment, uh Uncle Sam is adding below. It says Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech, and Uncle Sam is etching below it, except you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. Looking over his shoulder, Lady Liberty is adding, or shout stolen election in a hysterical crowd that has no respect for the constitution. And you wrote you wrote about in um what kind of citizen different types of citizens that schools can cultivate. And I wonder looking at this cartoon about this idea of respect for the constitution, really uh revering this fragile democracy. Um how can schools do that? How can we create the disposition to want to foster our fragile democracy and not just, well, you've memorized the branches and what they do. And so I suppose that's good enough.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

It's a really difficult um balance here, Dan, because I I love I love that cartoon. That is terrific. Um, but you know, in some ways, uh the protesters or insurrectionists or terrorists, um, depending on who you are and what you want to call them, have um embodied a lot of the things that progressive educators have said should be part of civic education. Um, we used to talk about the need for critical thinking, right? That you know, memorizing what the Constitution is isn't um what schooling should be about. It's about thinking critically about um the way things are and what we would want to change, and then engaging um to change them, being you know, politically active. Now, for sure that this was taken to an extreme and it's based on um on you know a bunch of lies and things that we as civic educators and as educators would have been difficult to anticipate a long time ago. But um, but in some ways they've fulfilled the let, you know, we can't say that they were apathetic. Um we can't say that they were just listening to what they're told without without um you know critically analyzing it. I mean, on the one hand, you can say that because they're being told all these lies, but basically the dot, you know, the dominant narrative is what they're trying to be critical of. Um and and so on the one hand, I'm thinking, you know, maybe, you know, we we missed something there, right, in telling people to be um just what does critical thinking actually mean, right? And how how do we deal with that in the in the social media environment um and the and the and the bifurcated media environment that we're now in? Uh and then on the other hand, of course, yeah, I think maybe respect and understanding of some of what our constitution is based on, um, we seem to need of renewed uh renewed lessons in that.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Yeah, you make a fair point. And you know, we a lot of those people traveled a long way to be in Washington. And we often we revere and glamorize that. People who believe so much in something, they're willing to go to the nation's capital and and and talk about it or discuss. Of course, they they took it too far. And and I certainly don't want to imply that the knowledge base of civics is it's important, um, but it's that sort of um uh reliance on memorization. But I think you've actually hit on what maybe is is it integral to civics or is it just tangential media literacy that as a country, we have really fallen behind on this. I feel like in many schools, we don't even try this. You know, you bring up media literacy through a group of teachers and they think you're talking about a work cited page or something. They don't, you know, uh because there's not sort of that one subject that media literacy fits neatly into, unless maybe you're in high school and your high school has a program for that. Could you reflect on that a bit? The breakdown in how we see the world driven largely by what we're seeing online. And to your to your point earlier, are we even thinking about it, or are we just kind of chasing the rabbit hole deeper and deeper following things that fit our worldview?

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Yeah. We haven't figured this out at all, right? And I and I think you're right in identifying this problem. I mean, when when the whole notion of media literacy hit the scene, um, it was you know a brilliant concept. And it was the idea that uh, I mean, it really started with advertising, right? That you you need to teach kids to be critical consumers of media, that just because someone tells you that this product is the best, you have different interests and they're going to be trying to push a product for a different reason than you might be wanting to use it. Um, and and media literacy advanced from there to say, okay, well, let's look at um, you know, how do we tell which websites are reliable? Is Wikipedia, you know, a reliable site? Is it different than a scholarly citation? Is the New York Times different than somewhere else? But my, you know, that almost seems quaint now, right? What we have now is people existing in an entire universe. Um, both we're talking about the people around them, uh, the media they consume, their church, uh, their local representatives, um, their families, their television stations, the news they consume, everything is built on a reality that doesn't exist, right? I mean, a reality that doesn't exist, meaning a fiction, right? Um it's built on a world that is a complete fabrication. And the the kind of modes and methods of media literacy haven't kept pace with that kind of situation, right? Where someone is immersed in a rabbit, in what we now call rabbit holes of pure of pure fiction, or or what Kellyanne Conway uh so famously called alternative facts, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yeah, I think too, it's with schools, we're we're combating that the you know, the fact that students might be hearing something at school and they might be hearing something completely different at home. And there's almost there can even no matter how much work we might do at school, even if we are attempting media literacy, civics, they those kids might go home and hear, you know, Kellyanne Conway's alternate truths. Um and so we're sort of having this delicate balancing act. Um what do you what do you hear from your own students about these kinds of things? Maybe not not just the particular incident of the Capitol, but um how they think about civics. Um, their your students are older, obviously you're at university, but how how do they process this media landscape that we're in?

SPEAKER_01 20:49

You know, since I I mean I teach um mostly students who are in the field of education, although not exclusively. And of course they're you know very concerned about these very same issues. Um but I'll tell you that the ones who are becoming teachers um are most concerned about the idea that they will be discouraged from or not even allowed to discuss current events or politics in their classrooms. And I hear that from a lot of current teachers as well. And and this, of course, is you know the death knoll of democracy. I mean, um to the idea of discussing competing ideas uh and and discussing controversial issues in classrooms are key to getting us out of this place where we are. Um, you know, one of the things that your your questions are making me think about is um is this idea that uh that it's exciting to learn that something you've been told all your life is wrong. So uh while you and I and And many of your listeners might have read Lewin's Lies My Teacher Told Me, or Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, with a kind of thrill to learn the truth, you know, and to pit it against all our education that came before. We have to recognize that I think the same emotional and psychological dynamics are at play with a lot of people who are unfortunately not learning a truth, but learning a new fiction, but putting it against what they what they formerly thought was true. So that's an exciting thing. And I think we don't want to push that away. We want to be able to harness the idea that shuffling through what you're being told and trying to figure out what's true and what's new and interesting information is important. We don't want to get away, we don't want to get away from that, right? It was as important, uh it's as important now as it was for anyone who first read a People's History of the United States. Um but our problem now is that we're just so we're in this, you know, or weird Orwellian 1984 moment where there is no um conception of the difference between truth and fiction. And that's something that I think media literacy um experts are only beginning to grapple with. And it's something that my students um are only beginning to grapple with. An idea that students could be coming into their classrooms um with a completely made up version of what they think is reality.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yeah, I think that's I think that's a really excellent point. Um, even now, I think we all experience those times in our life when we, oh, wow, that thing that I held in such reverence, the curtain gets pulled back and you realize, oh, okay, that's not what I thought. And yeah, and absolutely we want to encourage that kind of skepticism, frankly, uh, of institutions and and corporations. But um, when it becomes a separate reality, we have we have an issue. And I think with the people I think on far-right media, they talk about themselves as being red pillars, maybe like from the matrix, they've swallowed the pill and they've seen the light, that kind of thing. They've moved away.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

I mean, I like what you said about you know, skepticism, right? I mean, it's we may maybe the issue is how do we teach um skepticism without opening ourselves up to a kind of unhinged skepticism that leads people to, you know, actually believe that that the the Clintons are running a pedophile um child abuse ring under a pizza shop. I mean, how how where is the is that is that part of the same spectrum or is it something completely different? And I don't think we know yet.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

That's where just evidence comes into play, right? Skepticism with evidence is healthy skepticism, but evidence without. And I I've run into this even since the election with families that, you know, they just 100% believe they're sticking to their story that the election was stolen. And they're they and they can tell me, oh no, there's so much evidence the liberal media is not printing. Okay, but where is it? Oh, it's out there, it's there. But you know, they haven't seen it. And so there's that skepticism without the evidence that is troubling. There, I wanted to read this statement from the superintendent of Alameda Unified School District in California. Um, she wrote that education holds the potential to counter the chaos and discord that we're witnessing today, and that work is crucial to our stemming the tide of intolerance and violent immaturity that we and unfortunately our children are watching. I think emphasis there on potential. What advice would you give to administrators, teachers, especially media and civics teachers right now? Where can we go from here? Um, it may seem a little daunting. Like I said, a lot of teachers may be feeling like, are we to blame for this? Um, but what what steps would you recommend to teachers and educational institutions right now?

SPEAKER_01 26:12

I think the first thing that we have to recognize, um, and and this is something that I I think has been, you know, as I said, brewing for at least two decades. Um, and that is this is something that has nothing to do with civic education. It has nothing to do with media literacy, um, but it has to do with education writ large. And that is we have to rehumanize education. We have to come back to what so many teachers went into the profession for, which was to um build relationships such that uh we can influence each other in positive ways. Right. We need to um move schools back to and forward to a place where community and humanity are the central pillars of the work that we do, right? Where our essential humanity and connection to others is what we're focused on, not on increasing scores on standardized tests. Of course, kids need to learn subject matter, um, but that all has to be against the backdrop of being inculcated into the norms and habits of a functioning democratic society. I don't think that means that schools all have to be turned into, you know, democracies where kids run the school. I mean, I think some will do that, and that can work very well, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a focus on relationships, making relationships primary in the educational process. And that's something that teachers have been prevented from doing now again and again for the last 20 or 30 years. And I think we need to remove the straitjackets that have been placed on them by uh short-sighted policymakers and enable them to build the kind of relationships and build the kind of classroom and school communities that um would not allow people to develop these strains of hatred that we're seeing expressed now. Um, and in particular among the the these terrorists uh that we saw on January 6th.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

I think circling back to a point you brought up about your the your own students, I think empowering teachers to not just not be afraid to talk about events and politics in the classroom, but embrace it. Um I I think too it's it's when it comes to things like um these sticky situations, controversial topics, timely topics. We don't have to get it right as teachers. We just but the stuff we need the students need to see us trying to get it right. Uh it's you know, it's this isn't a do you know the answer or not? This is how can we civilly work through our our own processing.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

You know, here's like one one thing that students rarely get the opportunity to see in school is adults in the school disagreeing on things that are important to them. Um, first of all, students rarely get to see adults together at all in schools. I mean, teachers operate in these, in you know, what Dan Lordy called the egg crate vision of schools where every teacher is in one of those little egg crate pods and never gets to see anyone else. And um, students don't get to see adults in their lives um disagreeing on things that they care about passionately and that have important um consequences for the way we live our lives. I think one of the most important questions that students should be asking in schools and that teachers should be helping them to ask is the question, how should we live, right? How should we organize our lives in a way that works when we are a country and a world of many different backgrounds and many different beliefs? Um what's what's possible and how should we move forward? And that's something that I think is is critically important for us to rethink in these in these years ahead. Um the other thing is, as we've talked about, is this this issue of um truth and fiction, and and that's a very difficult, uh, a very difficult nut to crack, I think, right now. I mean, you pointed to it as you know um being critical with evidence. Um, and then we have to teach people, of course, what what evidence is and where it comes from, but but it's very difficult. You know, I've I've um uh I've been working on this piece now where I I returned to Hannah Verlant, um, whose whose writings I love. And um one of the things I I just saw, I've got her, I gotta read you this. Um, this is she this is in The Origins of the Totalitarianism, and she, you know, which was published just after um Orwell died. And she says this the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, that is to say, the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false, that is to say, the standards of thought, no longer exist. And it's it's chilling the degree to which that applies to where we are today. And it's something that I think as uh educators are going to have to get their their minds around um and grapple with in the in the months to ten years to come.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

If I'm being really cynical right now, I think one of the ultimate goals of advertising and especially corporate advertising is passive consumption of media, right? Brings back to media, like you said, we're gonna flatten what's this this what's real and what's not, and we're just gonna make it indistinguishable. And the more passive our consumption of media is, the easier that becomes.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Have you seen the movie The Social Dilemma?

SPEAKER_00 32:05

I have, yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

I mean, boy, every one of your listeners, if anyone has not seen The Social Dilemma, go out and and get it now. It's not perfect, but um it's brilliant, and it's brilliant in the in the playful way it teaches us um what's going on. But what I'd like to see is a kind of um political redux of the of the social dilemma movie, um, where they take on more specifically the way people are sucked into rabbit holes of political ideology with no evidence um and and no basis in reality. Um and but because what the social dilemma shows us is the the wildly different interests that social media companies have than we as citizens have as members of a democratic community. Wildly different interests that are often at odds with one another.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

And also, I think we have such, at least in the US, we have such an obsession with national politics, and we have almost no interest in local politics. People in America generally don't even vote for mayor. People are odd often uh completely unaware of what's happening in their own communities, but we have such a such a social media, such a fixation on well, but what is this poll from Georgia? Can you believe what this person said in the Senate? And we don't even know what's going on in our own backyard. And to your earlier point that students don't see teachers disagree, they probably don't even, as they don't, we don't even know what kind of healthy disagreements are happening in our local politics. Uh, and that might be a way too of sort of turning back away from these rabbit holes and seeing that we can actually make a difference, our voice locally, where we live, and not chasing these fantasies that apply in Washington, DC.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

I think that's such a good point. I, you know, I thought you were going somewhere else with that, which is that Americans um, you know, see only national politics and don't see international politics, which is an right, another point, which is, and I think it's very important to know about international politics, not only because it's important to know what's going on in the world, but because it's important to know that countries choose different ways to do things and that there's no natural state of affairs, you know, despite any doctrine of American exceptionalism, which is now blown to the smithereens, I would say, um, it there's there's there are choices we make about how we want to live, and different countries choose differently, countries that we all respect and love to visit, you know, and it gives people it gives students the sense that that there are choices and that they should be part of making those choices. But then what you said further reinforces that, which is it's only through local politics, especially in a country of 340 million people, it's only through local politics that you can get a sense, gain a sense of agency, right? That that what what you have to say matters. Um and and it is an amazing thing that that uh we don't take advantage of enough. I mean, you can, you know, in local politics, if you organize uh, you know, a few dozen of your friends to go to a meeting and vote for something, you can change the outcome of the vote. Uh and it's so it's it's tremendously powerful. It's a tremendously powerful experience. And I think you're absolutely right um to pinpoint that as a as a problem that we don't pay attention to what's going on right around us.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

Yeah, the the people that attacked the Capitol obviously felt like they could make a difference. Um, they of course were acting on something that didn't have any evidence. They chose to go to the seat of power that our media is obsessed with.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Exactly. I I get uncomfortable when um the mob, let's call them, that attack the Capitol are painted with one brush. Um, because look, let's face it, under different circumstances, I I I might see I'm I'm not going to do a violent uh overthrow of the government, but I could see myself want, you know, wanting to go to the Capitol to perform civil disobedience, um, to violate the law in all kinds of ways, um, to fight for something I believe in. Now, clearly among the people who went into the Capitol are um, you know, right-wing terrorists, uh racist, anti-Semitic fascists, right? And and so uh, and I'm willing to write them off. Um there'll always be a fringe group uh with that, right? I'm willing to put them aside. But that wasn't everyone, right? And you could you and I can imagine if we were convinced that an election was stolen, um, we might also want to protest in um in dramatic ways. Uh and you know, I don't think I'd be going around calling for hanging the vice president, but um, but I I we might want to protest in dramatic ways. So there's something under here that's not quite being gotten to yet. The issue isn't just um we have to teach people they can't behave that way and that they have to respect norms of democracy. We have to deal with the fact that people were lied to um from the highest positions of government up to the president, um, and that uh we're gonna have to grapple with um that as a as a cause of the unrest and not just um people's you know, right wing or violent tendencies.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Well, Jill Busheimer, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. In addition to um media literacy, something I recommend for all teachers to look into through Common Sense Media and other sites. Your book, What Kind of Citizen, is an excellent guide for teachers thinking about how to develop um dispositions and thoughtful citizens, uh, students that are going to come from school uh ready to make a difference locally, uh, nationally, internationally. And uh always appreciate your insights on these issues.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Thanks so much, and I always appreciate uh talking with you and uh let's do this again soon.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Some very wise words there from Joel Westheimer. Great insights. And if you're an educator wrestling with where to go next, I think he has some really good advice for all of us. Um encourage all social studies teachers to look at your curriculum mapping, look at your scope and sequence, think long and hard about what kind of dispositions that you are instilling and developing among your students. Um what kind of citizens are we building? And we touched on media literacy, which I think is a huge issue for schools. In fact, uh coming up in a couple of episodes, I'm gonna be speaking to a teacher from Washington, D.C. who has spent a career thinking about this and has a lot to say. So be uh sure to uh check in then um for for more on that. And um wish you all the best of luck uh as we continue to get through uh COVID and uh the political issues around this country and uh take Jules' uh words to heart. Uh the connections, the relationships, the humanness of education um is perhaps our best bet to see us through this. And thanks for checking out what's the big idea. Uh check us out next time. We got Julie Stern and her co-authors on a new book coming up, and later um, an episode on media literacy. All right, thanks everyone.