November 22, 2023, and July 17, 2024

Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and a new order emerges.

Margaret Wheatley

The world is in crisis and schools are in the middle of it. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, escalating humanitarian concerns, and heightened tensions on college campuses and city streets, have intensified an already deeply polarized political environment. Schools are on the front line in an emotionally charged space where existential threats amplify parental worries about their children’s safety, both physically and emotionally.

Amid this turmoil, it’s a priority to establish an authentic haven for students. This is the moment for educators to embrace being ‘good enough’, understanding that they will not always get it right and that missteps are inevitable. ‘Good enough’ is of course a concept inherited from the pediatrician and child analyst D.W. Winnicott. During WW2, he advised adults charged with caring for children to acknowledge feelings of fear, loss, grief, and anxiety but trust in their ability to create the stable environment students need. This is not a time for pursuing perfection or assuming that anyone holds all the answers. Teachers need to be reassured that their best efforts are enough. 

Winnicott understood the importance of a culture and an environment that do the work of emotional holding—the consistency of presence, flexibility, and support attuned to needs—and enable children and young people to thrive.

It is evident from media interviews that many of those involved in college campus and street activism have a very shallow understanding of the complexity of the issues. Some inappropriately apply the framework and language of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Gender Identity Theory as a simplistic solution. Slogans and words like ‘Queers for Palestine’, ‘Gays for Gaza’, ‘Zionism is White Supremacy’ and words like ‘oppression’, and ‘decolonization’, coupled with escalating allegations of apartheid and genocide, create a toxic mix of ignorance and passionate intensity.

But there’s an opportunity for direction here. Trusting in their traditional ability to educate and care, schools can bring people together across differences, bring diverse perspectives to bear, seek common ground, and emphasize relationships and shared humanity. Schools that equip graduates with a depth of understanding, critical thinking, and empathy rather than off-the-shelf activism and second-hand thinking can indeed be ‘good enough’.

How did we get here?  

In publications across the political spectrum, critics have highlighted the dangers of an obsession with identity and how it may have led us astray. In a powerful piece in The Atlantic, Simon Sebag Montefiore explained why The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False. In The Times, Yascha Mounk explained how the Obsession with identity has left too many blind towards Hamas and that faddish ideology has trapped liberal society.  A parent says that DEI is hurting students, a director explains how DEI has an anti-semitism problem, a young person explains  Why My Generation Hates Jews, and Sanje Ratnevale asks Is Anti-Racist Allyship Color-Blind to Anti-Semitism?

And to top it off there’s a call to end DEI altogether: It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.   

The rising chorus of dissent suggests a need to consider the impact of simplistic thought-terminating answers to complex human problems. As Eric Hoffer aptly warned, “Every good cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Nowhere is this caution more relevant than in the current landscape of DEI initiatives within schools. At its best, DEI aims to unite and drive positive change. Clumsy implementation breeds resentment, increases division, and hinders communication. Ideological DEI—with its focus on competing grievances and the race-defined binaries of oppression—exacerbates these issues. And does it even work? What does research say about the current paradigms for diversity training?

When acts of terrorism are celebrated on our college campuses something is amiss. When obscene displays of virulent anti-Semitism are set loose in the public arena, something has gone wrong.

When there’s an exponential rise in the number of teenagers—especially girls—seeking to escape their sexed bodies, something is amiss. When there are spikes in the number of young people demanding treatments that will likely lead to infertility, sexual dysfunction, and lifelong medical dependency, something has gone wrong.

Dismantling oppression (or racism, colonialism, and assorted phobias) is a worthy cause. The effort should not come at the expense of science and with intolerance of legitimate disagreements about history, literature, and social arrangements.

It is time to take a look at some of the unintended consequences of recent theories and ways of thinking. The relentless focus on identity is not working. A shift away from ideological frameworks could lead to emphasizing pragmatic and inclusive approaches focused on community building.

Three options for DEI going forward

1. Do nothing 
2. Evaluate and Recalibrate 
3. Dismantle DEI as currently conceived and realign and repurpose your resources.

Option #2: Evaluate and Recalibrate

DEI is embedded in our schools and their budgets. Turn this to advantage and return diversity work to its roots, reject divisive ideologies, and focus on community building. There is still plenty of work to be done, and now more urgent than ever. The industry has many good, effective, and experienced practitioners. Time to think anew about purpose and practice.

How might a school create a tolerant, welcoming learning community that values difference, and complexity of thought? How might a school encourage authentic conversation without fracture and division, canceling, and intimidation? Could schools become the places where people feel safe to express their ideas, empathize with others, hold contradictory thoughts, engage in critical thinking, seek common ground, and work together for change? Does the “D” allow for debate and difference? Does the “E” allow for differential outcomes based on effort, attitude, and aptitude? Can the “I” stop meaning the erosion of same-sex rights for girls in terms of facilities and sports? 

What’s a school to do? Here’s my short list of fixable problems along with some modest proposals for action.  No doubt you and your school have a list that aligns with your culture and community. 

1. Problem: The Overloaded Calendar  

It’s overstuffed with identity celebrations and commemorations. This November alone is Native American Heritage Month and Trans Awareness Month. It has Solidarity Week, Trans Parent Day, Intersex Day of Remembrance, Transgender Awareness Week, Transgender Day of Remembrance, International Day against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.  The proliferation of events is a sign of a curriculum failure, identity obsession, and a fractured society. With all these days and special events to plan for, it’s hard to imagine anyone gets anything done.

Solution: Clear the calendar clutter and evaluate the curriculum to integrate significant social movements and historical events. Remove the need for compensatory programming by including what matters in the main event.  Scrap the trimmings and the empty gestures like special assemblies and land acknowledgments. Don’t perform values. Live them, include them, and teach them. 

2. Problem: Symbolic Displays

In anxiety to compensate for past exclusions and discrimination, schools have drowned themselves in identitarian symbols. It is guaranteed that right now your school is offending some group or other by commission, omission, or perceived inadequate/inaccurate representation. Schools need to be politically neutral places for all to learn, not hotbeds of political activism with displays of virtue without substance. If something needs to be taught, then put it in the curriculum. Establish a truly inclusive environment, not a chaotic kaleidoscope of competing interests, identities, and competitive grievances. 

Solution: Mitigate Symbolic Signage:

Remove school-sponsored identity group flags, pronoun badges, posters, stickers, and signs to establish a neutral environment that prioritizes learning over political activism.

3. Problem: Critical Race Theory 

CRT views race as a social construct created to maintain white privilege and supremacy. It argues that historically, race was used to justify discrimination and oppression, especially of black people. By this theory, racism is embedded in the fabric of our lives as a system that perpetuates itself in structural ways that must be interrogated, opposed, and dismantled. When you hear ‘intersectional’, ‘white privilege’, ‘decolonization’, or ‘systemic racism’, you know you are in CRT land. 

CRT was developed by legal scholars and born out of an understandable frustration with incremental change, the idea of color blindness, and the failure to make greater progress in the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With post-modernism, it morphed into a template for understanding social relations and geopolitics. CRT is a serious theory worthy of study in higher education and law. Watered-down CRT as a structure for teaching history and social relations in schools is not. It oversimplifies complex issues. Not everything and everyone is so neatly divided into oppressed and oppressor and colonialism is not the only force that shaped the world. 

Solution 

Stop teaching CRT as the template for understanding history, geo-political events, and social relationships. When we teach students that they are surrounded by inescapable racism, hostility, and prejudice we teach them to be helpless and hopeless. This is not a lesson plan for mental health or social progress. If we teach children to be hyper-vigilant for insult, bias, and prejudice they may start to see the world as invariably hostile and fail to build the confidence and resilience they need to thrive. Make sure your program includes a rigorous examination of all the forces that have shaped history. Teach critical thinking and diverse perspectives that develop the capacity to understand complexity and develop empathy.

4. Problem: Gender Identity Theory 

This is the anti-scientific demand to accept that people should be classified not by biological sex but by the individual’s sense of gender identity. It is a belief system somewhat akin to religion. According to this theory, we are not male or female but have an inner sense of our own identity as one or the other, or neither, or both. In other words—choose your adventure. At its most extreme it allows for a person to identify as another animal or indeed an inanimate object. Identifying as a person of another race is not at the moment considered acceptable. Womanface is OK but blackface is not. 

When the theory allows for the denial of sex and self-identification as the opposite sex, it destroys all the accommodations girls and women need to play a full part in public life, from female toilets, changing rooms, award programs, and sports to rape crisis centers, domestic-violence shelters, and prisons. As a species, we are mammals that cannot change sex. There are no single-sex spaces if people of the other sex are allowed to use them. Denying this harms women and children. Substituting gender identity for sex erases same-sex orientation. 

When you hear “sex assigned at birth”, “gender identities”, “ born in the wrong body”, “a girl’s brain in a boy’s body”, or “sex is a spectrum” you know you are in gender identity land. 

Solution  

Stop promoting contested beliefs about gender as fact and ensure that what you teach is evidence-based. No more genderbread person, gender unicorn, or sex as a spectrum. 

If we teach children lies about sex and to disassociate from their sexed bodies we put them at risk. Do not teach that everyone has a gender identity. Do not teach that male and female and sexual orientations are gender identities.  

Children should not be immersed in other people’s fictions and should not be led towards a path of medicalization designed to realign their bodies with their emotional state. This means an end to all the pronoun rituals and never asking children for their “pronouns”.

Understand the difference between indoctrination and education. Remember child development. Let that guide what you teach, how, and when. Don’t use the word gender when you mean sex. Take issue with accreditation bodies that erase sex as a category for the collection of demographic data. 

5. Problem: Institutional Partners and Accrediting Associations 

Schools often outsource aspects of their curriculum or purchase ready-made programs, especially in social-emotional learning and sex and health education. Accrediting associations sometimes urge schools to focus on ideologically conceived DEI work.

Solution 

Review external contributions for ideological bias and challenge accrediting bodies that narrow resources and recommendations to specific ideologies. Broaden your school’s understanding of the issues and options and make informed decisions. 

6. Problem: Intolerance and Fragility

When hearing different opinions civilly expressed makes people feel “unsafe” it is a sign of intolerance. It is a form of intimidation and bullying that leads to silencing and canceling. It should not be countenanced. When stating basic biology is called literal violence we are unmoored from reality. When people don’t feel free to express a countervailing point of view of history or politics we have the chilling effect of totalitarianism.

Solution: Emphasize common humanity and relationships, civil discourse, hope over despair, reality over delusion, and an empathetic climate that welcomes diverse perspectives and cares about the individual. 

Identify which people and whose voices are silenced or stifled and do something about it. Become a community where it is safe to be different.

7. Problem:  Responding to Events.

Managing responses to events is complicated. Stuff speeds at school leaders from all directions.

Solution: Apart from all the cliches about holding steady, North Stars, moral compasses, mission, and putting on your oxygen mask here are a few things to consider:

1. Ask whether your school needs to make a public position statement in response to disturbing or controversial events beyond your control. Consider a policy on how to make that decision. 
2. Don’t require DEI statements from candidates. Don’t turn hiring into a loyalty test.
3. Be aware of the voices of detransitioners and the growing number of lawsuits. Be concerned about your reputation and risk management. The law firms and lawsuits are already cranking up on several fronts.  
4. Assess your climate. How strong and resilient is your community? Do you need to restore or build an emphasis on values including civility, respect for difference, the importance of free speech, and the exchange of ideas? Whose opinions are marginalized? Would it be safe to question DEI and its embrace of CRT and gender identity theory? How safe is your school for those whose opinions are not in the majority? How do you know? How could you find out?

A renewed commitment to justice, complexity of thought, and genuine inclusion would lead to recalibrating at least some DEI initiatives. This would mitigate unintended consequences by emphasizing community building, critical thinking, and evidence-based approaches.

Option #3: Dismantle DEI

Scrap the whole kit and caboodle:

1. Calculate your current DEI spending plus any physical resources – office spaces, book budgets, etc. 
2. Consider all the ways to repurpose those resources in service of community-developed and owned values and goals. This might include tuition assistance, additional counseling or learning support, community outreach, and cultural enrichment. The list is only limited by the imagination, needs, and goals of those charged with the work. 
3. Identify all those currently charged with DEI work and consider how their talents and perspectives can continue to enrich the community in more expansive and integrated roles as teachers, deans, heads of departments, and school leaders.
4. Charge everyone with the responsibility of building the community you want. Add it to the title and job description. Consider providing everyone with a stipend or salary boost in recognition of the ongoing learning work this requires. 
5. Calendar regular meetings to assess progress, identify emerging needs, refresh goals, and recommit to the work. And celebrate!

Margaret Wheatley tells us that there is no problem to which community is not the answer. Put that power to work!

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You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Josie Holford for Intrepid Ed News.