Americans: Geographically, Historically and Culturally Unprepared for the Challenges of a Global Century?

If my students in introductory college classes were any indication, Americans in general are ill-equipped to understand our world and American policies.  Just as bad, most students evidenced little understanding of or interest in American history and the nature of our political institutions.  A significant number  didn’t know how to analyze a map.  All of these are essential skills for citizenship in a globally connected world—and especially essential to act as an informed citizen who can parse competing political claims that affect American policies.

It is also important to remember that the majority of American students never attend a post-secondary institution; the knowledge these students possess on leaving high school is what they bring to their responsibilities as citizens.  It is true that American students must have STEM skills in order to have the freedom to select higher educational and career pathways leading to  STEM employment.  Too many don’t have the basic math and science skills necessary to major in these areas in college.  Unfortunately, it is just as true that without adequate preparation in history, geography, and culture, students can neither understand nor effectively respond to issues and events that affect their daily lives.

Here are a few of the areas of ignorance that these students brought to my college introductory classes, skills and knowledge that I had assumed they had mastered in high school:

1. The causes of and participants in the American Revolution.  France was often identified as the nation the US had fought. Students were sometimes as much as a century off in dating the revolution. This ignorance was also tied to that of being able to identify the issues and debates that have characterized American history ever since.
2. The nature of American society and its stresses at the time of the Revolution. Those students who could accurately identify the two combatants and relative time period of the revolution sometimes labored under the false sense that America was primarily British and Christian, with little appreciation for its diversity in terms of origin, language and religion that represented the global reach of the early modern period—and therefore brought diverse peoples to American shores.  These cultural stresses challenged founders to unite  and lead the nation;  these same stresses continue to potentially divide us as a people today.  The threat of division and destruction from within has been part of us as a people from our start.
3. Geography and how to read a map. Too many students had to be taught to read a map and many could not place on a map the nations of the world.  In class after class, students would identify the Arabian peninsula as the location for Afghanistan and Pakistan. If these were majority Muslim states, they had to be on the Arabian peninsula, didn’t they?     One exchange student actually banged his knee with his fist in frustration at this ignorance, saying, “Every student in my country can place every nation in the world on a map. America is the world’s global power, and you don’t even know the countries of the world! How can America lead the world if you know nothing about it?”
4. Current events. This is less surprising. Since none of these students would ever be drafted to fight, a significant number didn’t have the urgency to understand US policies and their effects on the world that earlier generations experienced.
5. Comparative political process. From the point of view of a citizen, what effects on one’s life do the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches of government have? How does one understand these effects? What can citizens do about them?
6. Islam and other religions.  Many students assumed all Muslims were Arab and all Arabs were Muslims. They had no sense that Islam spread through Africa, Asia and parts of Europe by a variety of means to become a major world religion (one of five) with complex relations with the cultures that the religion had encountered along the way. These relations produced a diversity of practices. When European nations began their colonial expansions, Muslims found their ways to the Americas. Some fought in the American Revolution and have served in our wars ever since. These students didn’t realize that, before recent conflicts, the Middle East had been one of the most religiously diverse regions in the world. They also didn’t realize that this region had served as the repository for the knowledge of math, philosophy, and medicine that crusaders brought back to Europe. It was this body of knowledge that had fueled the Enlightenment in Europe and contributed to development of science and technological innovations of today. But then again, history was a weakness in general. The network of connections among thinkers in Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa as that had contributed so much to the development of western understanding was virtually unknown.

In short, too many of the students whom I experienced had few of the skills necessary to understand their own political history and civics in order to make use of that knowledge. They also lacked a basic understanding of the world in order to read the news critically. Today information is “weaponized.” Propaganda (fake news, manufactured news, fake research by fake think tanks) is used to arouse and manipulate people.  It is spread instantaneously and amplified by tweets, bots, and trolls. If STEM is essential for providing students with the skills for employment in emerging sectors of the economy, then it is just as important–in fact, it is critically important–to provide students with the knowledge of geography, history, and culture that will provide them the resources with which to think critically and act insightfully in the turbulence of globalization processes in the 21st century.

 

 

What Do Revitalization Movements and Elections Have in Common? And Why Does It Matter…Especially Now?

Whenever my Anthropology of Religion class coincided with an election cycle, I would task students to bring to class examples in which a campaign showed characteristics of a  religious revitalization movement.  Campaigns always do.  It’s how one motivates voters to vote: You either promise something totally new or you slap a “new and improved” label on the campaign, depending on whether you are from the party in or out of power.

So, what’s a revitalization movement and why should anyone care…especially now?

In stripped down terms, a revitalization movement is one that combines religious elements and political elements. These movements appear at moments of extreme social stress, and their members seek a variety of goals-political, economic and/or military- that allow them a to survive in a way that feels connected to core values and historical roots.

To achieve that sense of historic and cultural continuity, there are often calls to purify society in terms of its founding principles.   These movements reinterpret this distant, often mythical, past to address the novel challenges of the present.

Revitalization movements take many forms, both nonviolent and violent. They may be nativistic in that they affirm the rights of the “native” against the outsider. They are sometimes millenarial movements that claim that they are to create a radical transformation that ends the world as it is currently known.

Elections? Really?

A quick historical background helps to make the connection.

It was only in relatively recent European history that political power began to be disconnected from religious power.  The Thirty Years War of the early 1600’s was a brutal, religiously motivated war that raged in Europe and devastated the states involved. Thereafter, states separated from the Roman Catholic Church and adopted various Protestant sects.  Religion and politics remained deeply enmeshed in these states. The British monarchs, who separated from the Roman Catholic Church under King Henry VIII,  were relieved to grant land in the colonies for Catholics and troublesome sects of Protestants who were both a nuisance to the Crown and a threat to its hegemony.

In looking back at this bloody history and at the struggles faced by various religious groups in the American colonies, our founders enshrined freedom of religion in the first amendment of the Constitution.

Nonetheless, the language and motivating forces for political action continue to bear a strong resemblance to those of religious movements.  Indeed, it was religious progressivism in the nineteenth century that was a strong political force for abolition, women’s suffrage, and the creation of institutions to serve the vulnerable. Quakers and Methodists especially led the movement for a nation that reflected their religious principles of social equality, economic security, and social responsibility.  Schools, orphanages, and hospitals were built to provide for the welfare of the young and the vulnerable.

So, what about today?

“Make America Great Again” is a revitalization slogan.  As in all good slogans, it’s vague enough that everyone can define it in his or her own way.  My “great” may not be your “great.”  But how can one not agree that greatness is a good?

With “again,” the slogan looks to an unspecified purer past…vague and undefined.  As such, it can evoke both the nation’s founders and the mid-twentieth century, when the United States dominated the world economy in the aftermath of WWII.  To those who remember history, the slogan revives one that was nativistic. The slogan takes on multiple meanings, some of which conflict.

The slogan could have referred to the great progressivism of the nineteenth century.  However, when deployed at rallies and in advertisements, it did the opposite. Those vulnerable groups championed by religious progressives in the nineteenth century were not just left out of the campaign and its slogan, they were scapegoated.

The scapegoating of women and minorities gave this campaign and its heated rhetoric a particular nativistic character– valorizing white men. The bruising campaign rhetoric deployed at highly emotional rallies had the feel of a nineteenth century religious revival. Heady in its effect, profound in its ability to generate identity and action.  The rallies produced a sense of nationhood exclusive in its definition of benefits and one that challenges the first, thirteenth, and nineteenth amendments. Nativism limits who is a “real” member of the group.

What is the difference between a religious revitalization movement and an election in the United States?

Religious revitalization movements may succeed or fail in the end. They either remake or reform society in ways that address the distress which gave them impetus or the movements peter out.

In the United States, winners of an election don’t sweep the boards clean on behalf of their “devotees.”  The constitution was created with reliance upon the Enlightenment principle that reasonable people can and will work to compromise in finding common ground–in other words, to “make sausage.”

Therefore, under our constitution, a political revitalization movement has limits:  all stakeholders have a place in decision making.  Checks and balances also limit power.

The problem for a democracy is demagogues.

Put a demagogue together with a close circle of loyalists who wield power and a base of “believers” with the intensity of a revitalization movement in times of social stress, and democracy too easily comes unhinged. This was 1930’s Germany.

This set of factors is a threat to democratic societies. A threat that outside powers may seek to manipulate for their own benefit.

Political movements share elements of religious movements..and therein lies the danger.