Attack on the US Capitol: A Failure to Educate?
As the details about the violent and seditious breach of the US Capitol on January 6 are slowly revealed, there are no shortage of prognostications about the why and the how of our present moment and no shortage of culprits-- the media, economics, politics, and race. It has prompted educators to reflect about role of schools, colleges and universities in the face of the present challenges to democracy. Did the riots result, in part, from a failure to educate? Is our nation finally paying a price for more than a century of anti-intellectualism? Michael Reynolds/ EPA via Shutterstock If teaching and learning are dedicated to helping students wrestle with big ideas to discover truth, then educators have a role in helping to correct the challenges that we are facing in a post-truth nation. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, writing in the New York Times , says post-truth is a form of pre-fascism. "Without agreement on some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would al...