Herbet Kohl championed the idea of “creative maladjustment” in teaching in his book I Won’t Learn From You and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment (1994). Kohl argued that effective teachers, especially teachers working with inner city disenfranchised youth, have to learn how to break arbitrary or oppressive rules and get away with it. They need to find ways to manipulate the system in order to protect their students from injustice, create safe places for learning, and design lessons that connect with student lives and motivate them to learn.
The new champion of “creative maladjustment is Zander Moricz, the first openly gay class president of Pine View High School in Osprey, Florida. Moricz was forbidden to mention his sexual identity in his speech to graduates and told that if he referenced it the sound system would be silenced. To circumvent the ban, Moricz discussed how his identity as he grew up was shaped by his “curly hair,” which was clearly a euphemism.
Professors Dilys Schoorman and Rosanna Gatens at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton are circulating a manuscript that suggests a form of “creative maladjustment” can be used to circumvent laws in Florida and other states designed to prevent teaching about the history and current implications of race and racism in the United States.
According to Schoorman and Gatens, “There is no question that the intention of HB 7 was to chill excellence and equity in public education, particularly for diverse populations in our state. The rhetoric of being ‘anti- WOKE’ – a direct attack on White people who are becoming socially conscious and morally responsible – accompanied the bill as it was passed into law. However, the letter of the law, as analyzed herein, allows for teachers, school districts and businesses to continue to teach as they have done; the law is written against indoctrination and compelling people to believe which is hardly the goal of education.”
Florida law HB7 banned “Subjecting any individual, as a condition of employment, membership, certification, licensing, credentialing, or passing an examination, to training, instruction, or any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual to believe specified concepts constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”
But the purpose of education K-12 and in college as defined succinctly by James Baldwin in his 1963 “Talk to Teachers” is “to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions . . . To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.” Teachers, at least good teachers, in Florida and anywhere else, want students to think, understand, and support ideas with evidence. Teaching is not about promoting, advancing, or compelling students to agree with you.
Schoorman and Gatens argue that integrating multiple perspectives into lessons and highlighting a diversity of viewpoints is actually a defense “against indoctrination” and is it perfectly acceptable under the Florida law to “Teach about privilege and oppression using data that allow students to come to their own conclusions about the connections between race, gender, class, national origin and other social factors and one’s opportunities for success in society as privileged or marginalized.”
Schoorman and Gatens want students and teachers to “critically examine texts for such biases including but not limited to the following curricular biases: linguistic, stereotyping, invisibility, unreality, imbalance, fragmentation, cosmetic.” Ironically, the State of Florida is doing just that in an effort to ban books, including math texts that support an exploration of human diversity or suggest that students might need emotional support to deal with crises they face in their lives.
The Florida law bans teaching that some people are “inherently” racist, which is a good thing, because racism is not something you are born with, it is something that is learned. It also bans teaching that an “individual's moral character” is “determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin,” another good thing, because moral character is not inherent in the human genome, predetermined, or unchanging, but is shaped by experience, including experience in a racist society, and people have the ability to change what they believe and how they act. The whole purpose of critical thinking, multicultural education, diversity, equity and inclusive programs, and even Critical Race Theory, is to change the way people think, do support their ability to transform their “moral character.”
The Florida law bans teaching that any group or individual today is responsible for past injustices and “by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.” Rightwing ethno-nationalist groups like the Proud Boys argue that they are the real anti-racists because they don’t want race and racism highlighted when studying the history of the United States and passing corrective legislation and they claim they are actually challenging anti-white racism. Certainly these are claims that should be examined in classrooms. Should laws be color-blind without any regard to unequal and negative impact on minority groups? Are efforts to address passed discrimination racist? Examining and allowing students to draw conclusions based on documents does not constitute indoctrination, in fact, it is the point of education.
The University of Florida felt compelled to send faculty members a video explaining the new law and how they can remain in compliance. For example, Instructors may not suggest or assert that: “One group is morally superior to another, when the groups are defined by race, color, national origin or sex.” However, “concepts may be discussed in instructional settings, providing instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.”
To intimidate university professors and protect college students from exposure to dangerous ideas, the Florida state legislature mandated that students complete an email “University Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity” questionnaire. Students were asked whether “My professors or course instructors use class time to express their own social or political beliefs without objectively discussing opposing social or political beliefs;” “I feel comfortable speaking up and giving my views on controversial topics;” and “I have felt intimidated to share my ideas or political opinions because they were different from those of my professors.”
So thank you Governor Rick DeSantis and the bigots in Florida’s Republican controlled state legislature. By banning teaching about race and racism, you’ve made it a subject of focus in history and an examination of contemporary society. Schoorman and Gatens’s response to Florida’s anti-CRT legislation is worth reading in its entirety as teachers develop their own creative maladjustment strategies.
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1