Judge Colleen McMahon followed other judges by taking a stand on behalf of freedom and democracy.
On July 25, the U.S. District judge for the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction stopping the mass cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to members of the Authors Guild.
McMahon found that “the defendants terminated the grants …. based on the recipients’ perceived viewpoint, in an effort to drive such views out of the marketplace of ideas.” She recognized the essential role the NEH plays in supporting the infrastructure of democracy in America’s schools, museums, libraries, and cultural life.
The Trump administration’s attack on that infrastructure has gone well beyond its cancellation of grants to writers. Last April, NEH rescinded grants made to support its program of summer institutes for K-12 teachers, which over the last decade have reached more than 11,000 teachers nationwide.
On August 6, a federal district judge ruled unconstitutional the president’s unilateral termination of federal-state partnership grants made by NEH. But no such rulings have been made about the summer institutes. Since its inception, the endowment has funded summer institutes at colleges and universities for K-12 teachers that have performed an essential civic function: bringing educators together across regions and ideologies to model the habits of mind that sustain a healthy democracy.
But not this summer.
Without these institutes, we lose a key resource that sustains democratic understanding in American education. People who care about protecting democracy need to make sure that what NEH used to do to help teachers acquire skills in democratic pedagogy is not lost.
Teaching those skills is not just the province of civics teachers. It should be a pervasive part of the curriculum in literature, history, social studies, and, yes, even math and science classes. As John Dewey wrote more than a century ago, “Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”
Today, K-12 teachers are often restricted from fostering such growth as they attend to the ever-bureaucratized tasks heaped upon them by school districts and administrators. They largely operate under a technocratic logic that prioritizes efficiency and standardization.
Teachers, like students, need experiences where they can escape those constraints. We know that when teachers have the opportunity to read deeply, think critically, engage in sustained dialogue about complex human questions, and reflect from the perspective of the learner, they become better educators.
That is what NEH programs used to provide.
By design, they offered common ground by re-prioritizing how to think over what to think and incentivizing exploration in the classroom without fear of censure. The rapid evaporation of this opportunity to find common ground has been well documented beyond the realm of education.
That is why it is urgent that our nation’s educators be given structured opportunities to practice civil discourse and encounter diverse perspectives. If we want the next generation to learn how to disagree without dehumanizing—and to embody what philosopher John Rawls called “reasonable pluralism” — it’s essential that we start with our nation’s teachers.
They need to be given the chance to learn how to cultivate the habits of democratic thinking in their classrooms and schools. If the idea sounds pollyannish in this fractured moment, the principles are attractively simple.
They resemble the habits that teachers of any subject would want students to bring to their classrooms.
Democratic thinking requires telling the truth as you know it, but it in a way that can be heard by others who don’t already agree with you. The goal is to give interlocutors a place to stand, not to just assert my truth and expect others simply to assent to it.
It also requires listening with curiosity — the obligation of democratic citizens is to “catch ideas in flight” and make them better — and practicing empathy before criticism. Democracy thrives when its citizens do not rush to righteousness but instead withhold judgment until they have achieved a thorough understanding of the positions of others whose ideas or actions they wish to judge.
Finally, democratic thinking requires humility, for democracy is as much about losing as winning. The phrase “I could be wrong, but…“ captures that kind of humility.
To be clear, this is not a plea for enlightened centrism. We affirm that sometimes strong partisan positions are desirable and even necessary in response to critical circumstances. But what we also know is that no one is convinced to change their perspective when they are berated and belittled. Democratic thinking requires understanding that even on the deepest issues, people of good will can disagree.
That is perhaps the most valuable lesson teachers can offer.
Asking students to think democratically is harder, but also more important than ever. If we are serious about safeguarding our democratic commitments for future generations, teachers should have opportunities to rediscover what it means to think freely, disagree respectfully, and educate for democracy.
Whether through the NEH or in other venues, we must fight to preserve such opportunities for our nation’s teachers.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Roy Blumenfeld is the director of City Semester, a civic engagement semester program at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.
