How to Teach about Privilege

It is now standard practice, in secondary education, for students to explore the topic of ‘privilege’ in History or Social Studies classes. Much could be said about how this is done: that it focuses on a history and a pattern of privilege possessed by certain demographic segments of the population to the exclusion of other segments, etc.

The routine discussion of ‘privilege’ in U.S. public secondary eduation centers on past injustices and the present aftereffects of those injustices. The reader might greet a forward-looking approach to teaching about privilege, one in which the understood goal is the extension of privilege to a broader and more inclusive set of individuals.

The U.S. Constitution has something to say about privilege, and students should explore especially Article 1, Article 4, and the 14th Amendment in this regard.

Section 9 of Article 1 states that “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended.” This privilege ensures, among other things, that an arrest cannot take place unless the arrest is warranted, i.e., a warrant has been issued, and unless the person making the arrest is authorized to do so. Anyone being arrested must be informed why the arrest is taking place, i.e., the specific crime alleged against him. Those arrested may not be held incommunicado but rather must be allowed some form of contact. Some manner of evidence or probably cause must be presented to justify the warrant and the arrest. All of this must be done to the satisfaction of a court. If the person making the arrest does not satisfy the court, the individual is judged to have been improperly arrested and will be released.

The “privilege” bestowed by Section 9 of Article 1 is one important foundation for many civil rights.

It is relevant to note that, immediately preceding this privilege, the same section has first defined that “slaves” are “persons,” that the Constitution forbids and brings to an end the importation of slaves, and that Congress has the right to levy taxes to deter slavery. Already at the very beginning of Section 9 of Article 1 is the foundation for the abolition of slavery. It is the clear intention of the text to discourage slavery.

The text proceeds from the discouragement of slavery to the encouragement of “privilege,” and this progression can only mean that the text extends such privilege to those who obtained liberty when slavery ended.

In Article 4, Section 2, the Constitution confirms that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” From this somewhat confusing phrase, it follows that anyone who is a citizen of a state has privileges, and that such privileges are not to be negated or abridged in the course of interstate commerce, travel, or trade.

This same section includes a reference to fugitive slaves, a reference undermined by the language in Article 1, Section 9, as noted above. The text sees the concept of fugitive slaves as a concept which will soon pass from relevance, once slavery is abolished.

Both in Article 1 and in Article 4, the mention of privilege is closely linked to the abolition of slavery and the securing of civil rights.

These mentions come to fruition in the 14th Amendment, in which again “privilege” and the abolition of slavery are linked. This Amendment extends privilege to those who had been enslaved and are now free:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In this way, privilege is synonymous with the end of slavery. Where there is no privilege, there is slavery. Where there is no slavery, there is privilege. The individual who is know longer a slave is a person of privilege.

Privilege is, then, the great goal and achievement of anything which may be properly called a “civil rights movement.” The difference between a “right” and a “privilege” is subtle.

One distinction is that privileges can be taken or given to individuals. Rights are had by individuals as a circumstance of birth.

Being born, an individual has human rights; this is true of all people, i.e., of all human beings. Being born in a particular place, an individual has civil rights; each location bestows civil rights equally on all who are born there.

Having a driver’s license, and driving a car, is a privilege, not a right.

Confusion about the difference between rights and privileges is common, and for several reasons: first, usage of these words has changed over time; second, there is more than one type of right, and more than one type of privilege; third, constitutional and legal usage of these words differs from the usage found in ordinary everyday life.

Students should find much to debate and explore in this approach to understanding privilege. A forward-looking approach will ask about how this concept is, and should be, applied to concrete situations and cases. The Constitution intends for privilege to be extended with no regard to color, race, age, wealth or poverty, ethnicity, etc.

The Constitution sets a high ideal. In which cases have we met that ideal? In which cases have we failed to meet that ideal?

The Educational System as the Instiller of Values: Instilling Despair into Students, Denying Parents Access to the Process

Vague impressions are sometimes more powerful than clearly delineated concepts. In primary and secondary education today, the general public has the impression that it’s not supposed to ask about how schools teach about sensitive social topics.

Communities have the feeling that it’s not their place to inquire about classroom discussions of controversial cultural questions, and they have the feeling that they don’t have the right or the ability to redirect public schools in this matter.

There is legitimate legislation, composed by various elected bodies, about privacy and confidentiality; there are rules and regulations by unelected agencies of dubious authority which address the same topics. The public is vaguely aware of laws like FERPA and IDEA which control access to information about a student’s educational records.

The public’s fuzzy perception fails to note that, e.g, FERPA applies to only postsecondary students, and IDEA applies to only a small percentage of K12 students. Many parents labor under the idea that it’s not their place to inspect, investigate, and sometimes adjust what public schools do. As authors Jane Robbins and Karin Effrem write,

Regardless of one’s opinions on a given issue, it is parents’ right and authority to discuss these issues with their children, not the government’s to set standardized norms about thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When government begins manipulating mindsets of still developing and impressionable children, the dangers are legion.

As the old proverb phrases it, schools are supposed to teach students how to think, not what to think.

Public educational systems, despite their clear denial of the fact, have ideologies which they attempt to instill into their students. On most major social and political questions, and especially on the most controversial ones, most public schools have a hidden but clearly-defined agenda.

Students, being often more perceptive about this matter than their parents, will often be able to tell you the social and political views of their school, despite the school’s claims of neutrality and objectivity. While individual teachers may have, and might sometimes reveal, their own individual ideologies, to varying extents, the institution as a whole will have an ideology as well.

Parents should be aware that their local public school isn’t a neutral playing field of ideas, but rather has assigned itself the task of promoting some ideas, while silencing other ideas. The same is often true of private schools, but they are often more transparent about the fact, being under less pressure to maintain the charade of neutrality and objectivity.

The indoctrination process is spread across the curriculum, infused into various classes and subjects. Indoctrination is also present in non-curricular activities, e.g., in middle school and high school counseling departments, as authors Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan note:

The growing emphasis on “social-emotional learning” provides cover for the government to probe intrusively into our children’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Race relations being a topic of inflammatory passion, indoctrinators seize upon this topic, hoping to harness the powerful emotions which it evokes. The accusation of racism is wielded by those who are themselves racists, using it to silence anyone who questions their motives or actions, as Hasson and Farnan report:

The accusation of “privilege” delegitimizes a person’s viewpoint, identity, or achievements. Anyone who is not part of a protected victim class may be told to “check your privilege” or to defer to the “lived experiences” of the protected class of the moment. The extremes to which this theory leads were evident in protests on college campuses around the country, where even “white allies” were directed to the back of the protest or shouted down.

In a complete reversal, those who are unequivocally racist hide their racism by level unmerited charges of racism against others. In such contexts, the surest sign that someone is a racist is that she or he will be accusing others of racism.

This tactic has been applied to other matters of identity. So it goes with religion, ethnicity, varying income levels, etc.

The strategy amounts to dividing populations, rather than uniting them, using these categories of identity. Once they have divided the individuals into identity groups, school administrators convince them that they are powerless to rise up and find opportunities. The only hope presented to the groups is that of following the prescribed ideologies presented by the K12 institutions. Hasson and Farnan phrase it this way:

Identity politics, then, is destructive not only because it divides us but also because it induces a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and despair — a poisonous drink for anyone but fatal to those who are, in fact, disadvantaged. They become convinced that no matter how hard they work they will never succeed.

In other words, the ideology of the school is presented as the only route to opportunity or equality for the groups that have been formed by isolating them from the general population by using identity as a knife with which to chop up society.

Individuals are programmed to believe that their only identity is that of race, religion, ethnicity, etc., and that there are no overarching unifying identities like, e.g., all being residents of the same community, etc. The system’s duplicity is intensified by the fact that the institution’s ideology will not help people obtain opportunity or equality, but rather is designed to reinforce the very inequalities is claims to work to eliminate.

Ideologues thrive on despair. A type of despair is instilled into the students, which discourages the students from following those paths which might lead to opportunity and equality:

If the system is rigged against them, what hope is there of succeeding?

The tactic of the bureaucracy is not to extend “privileges” to those who don’t currently have them, but rather to take “privileges” away from those who are alleged to have them. Setting aside the questions of what these privileges are, and whether they exist, the ideology makes no sense on its own terms: if an identity group doesn’t have privileges, or is made to believe that it doesn’t have privileges, then why not extend those privileges to the group? Why, instead, destroy another group’s alleged privileges?