Ancient History Lessons for Homeschool Hegemonists

Always unschooled (and always ashamed of homeschooler hegemony) Favorite Daughter started her honors sociology class this week, with yet another Ph.D. prof who interests and inspires her.

Go, community college as real education, no matter who is “paying” for it!

Their first class discussion was about the complex meaning of identity, thinking critically about how (and why) you define who you are as an individual within any society — or mob — relentlessly pressing individuals to conform with (often quite radical) norms.

Stubborn symbolic belief in “who we are” beyond all reason and science is all some folks have, the only story with any power to put them on top of a social group, and so they are willing to turn the sciences of larger society upside down, on the basis of that belief.

High school is a universal example, I guess, but my own high school memories are history, almost as old as modern homeschooling! So let me be more current. A social norming eddy of enforcement that I lived through since the turn of the most recent century, but still can’t quite believe is “real” rather than just Internet fantasyland, is the Young Earth Republican fundamentalist homeschool hegemony, whose persecution complex defines their own little “activist community” with special moral and legal status as a sub-sub-society apart from the rest of us homeschooling heathens (on the strength of a self-proclaimed “history” of oh, 50 years or so??)

They so tightly clutch their own historic roles as the faithful and steadfast, the chosen leaders of their cult– whoops, I mean advocacy group — that maybe it shuts off the circulation of blood to their brain cells. They obsess over a fantastical identity so derailing to their train of thought, that it causes them to misread real history, science, humanities, economics and politics, constitutions, dictionaries, and the hearts of parents and children across the land. Their own holy writ and society’s best interests, too.

But that insulated little society of identity politics claiming to be grassroots activism based on “facts” and “research” is old news today. We have a new example to contemplate today, in news both newer and much, much older. Back to Favorite Daughter and real education:

Besides the sociology course, her chosen academic slate this semester also includes honors history, humanities and psychology. So “all things considered” — that’s an NPR pun — you couldn’t hope for a better story on the car radio driving to class this morning than this . . .

Ethnicity of King Tut Debated

Morning Edition, August 28, 2007 · The King Tut exhibition has drawn millions of visitors to museums across the country since it opened two years ago. But some African-American scholars believe the exhibition makes King Tut look too white. The debate over Tut’s race led the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, where the show is on display, to sponsor a conference on the subject.

It was science, not belief, that created this museum interpretation of the ancient king.

Hawass said three separate teams of researchers reviewing the data from the mummified corpse had concluded that Tutankhamun was a Caucasoid North African.

It is belief, not science, that objects. Science seems to be clear on the difference between belief and science. Belief — not so much.

The fatal flaw of Belief that promotes itself as Science (law, history, economics, education) is that in so doing, it blurs the very boundaries hegemonists insist are so immutable, that must be respected and enforced for human society to survive. If they were thinking clearly in the first place, surely they would see this for themselves, and therefore be unable to press their emotion-laden case as any form of honest intellectual inquiry?

We rant when hegemonists misdefine the science of natural selection with belief in biblical creation stories. I think these examples reflect exactly the same substitution of belief for reality. It insults educated intelligence to call it “clarity” as some homeschool creation-museum types insist.

I see no more clarity (much less reality) in defining King Tut as “jet-black” by misconstruing cultural symbolism in ancient Egypt than in defining “homeschool” by stubbornly misconstruing learning and education in America today, and I see no social, legal or educational value in either one. It’s all based on hardheaded, hardball political hegemony — not reason, science, history, understanding, not even fact. It is de-volution of the human mind to purposely confuse belief and identity symbols with science and education.

And when we do it anyway, the evidence suggests it quite logically makes “us” — whoever we tell ourselves we are in our little sub-societies — look pretty stupid.

Which brings my power of story for the day full circle back to NPR. Check this out:

“Passing for Egyptian”
All Things Considered, May 15, 2003 · When commentator Murad Kalam traveled to Egypt, he realized that, if he kept his mouth shut, he could pass for Egyptian. For the first time in his life, he felt ordinary. He could hail a cab at any hour, something he could not do in Boston or New York. But he was not “passing” in the American sense — a light-skinned black person passing for white. And even though he was passing, he knew that he was not truly Egyptian.

Favorite Daughter should get the last word and so she shall, about Barack Obama’s blurry but real identity, and history and society and how we keep rewriting it to suit us:

Somebody said that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

. . .“Oh, he totally is,” the conservative chooses this moment to jump in. “And I’d hate to see the day one of them gets elected to the highest office in our country.”

As we all sit there in a mild state of shock, wondering if she really just said what we just heard her say, she barrels on.

“You know, they all want to kill us. It says in their Koran that they have to kill the infidels.”

“No, it does not.” Kikki says definitively. “But - ” the conservative tries to say, but Kikki doesn’t let her get it out. “It does not. That is a load of crap.”

“No, you haven’t seen it,” the conservative says breathlessly. She doesn’t really know that Kikki hasn’t read the Koran, and I wouldn’t put it past her, but the leap in logic doesn’t appear to bother the conservative. “I have seen the section where it says that. They showed it to us in class.”

Time out from the story for a few paragraphs: There’s this movie called “Gentleman’s Agreement” from the just-barely-post-WWII-era. In it, Gregory Peck, a maverick reporter, pretends to be Jewish to uncover anti-Semitism. He meets, obviously, with a great many obstacles, including his girlfriend, Kathy, who is a ninny. But there’s a conversation Kathy has with Dave, another character, when she tells a story about a man making an anti-Semitic joke at a dinner party. Kathy observes how nobody called him on it, even though they were all sickened by it.

“I wonder if you’d feel so sick now, Kathy, if you had nailed him. There’s a funny kind of elation about socking back. I learned that a long time ago.” Dave says. “It was a story,” Kathy tells him lamely. “Sure, a man at a dinner table told a story - and the nice people didn’t laugh. They even despised him, sure. But they let it pass. ” Dave says. “If you don’t stop with that joke, where do you stop?”

I’m also reminded of a recent discussion Jules and I had about a TV station that showed Gone With the Wind and completely removed all traces of the n-word as though it never existed (read about it here).

“I agree that it’s offensive, damn straight, and I’m not going to associate with anyone who says it,” I told Jules, “But when it’s in a historical context, when you are trying to portray an era in which things were unequal, were prejudiced - you can’t act like people never said it. It’s a corruption of history.”