Against Reactionary Populism: Opening a Needed Conversation in Education

Abstract

In the early throes of the U.S. counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, Bob Dylan sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Less a critique of experts than a commentary on the observable cross-currents in U.S. (and global) politics and culture at the time, Dylan slyly paid homage to the capacities of average citizens to find their own way through the mess, while indicting a heavy-handed government consolidating power in a world gone wrong. Like then, we find ourselves in a world that is seemingly going wrong at every turn and with no dearth of heavy-handed governments. We see this each time we compulsively reach for our phones or turn on our computers, get our daily drip of division, distraction, or news (a 24/7 version of the two minutes of hate in Orwell’s 1984 coupled with a steady supply of soma from A Brave New World), check our feeds, or resend someone’s 150 characters of revelation. If these things fail to satiate one’s penchant for pain or desire to confirm the end times, then we can get a concentrated version of the malaise when the person in the position of president of the U.S. tweets, often multiple times per day, an alphabet soup of very rarely coded nativism, isolationism, conspiracy theories, and wounded white male entitlement. Unlike the time in which the young Dylan briefly railed, it seems we would not trust the insight of a meteorologist (or any expert, for that matter) even when we need it, much less have a basic hope in the capacities of others to help us through the thicket that is the current political and cultural landscape. Or, so we are instructed: Be afraid, be distrustful and, most of all, be aggrieved. Outside of an insightful run of books by Giroux over the past two decades, very little has been said about the role of schooling and education, more broadly, in challenging the great fracture and regression. This special issue seeks, admittedly in a modest way, to begin broader conversations about the role of schooling and education in enriching democracy and challenging reactionary populisms.