Why Is Civil Discourse So Hard to Achieve at a School for Government?

“I’m really careful about the posts I like on social media,” a friend of mine mentioned, offhandedly. “Sometimes people, they screenshot things I’ve liked and post them on their story, and call me a b****. One person tried to report to a college that I supported Trump. Not that I had been racist or been hateful, but just report that I support Trump.” Hearing this, I was forced to reflect on my own opinions. How would I feel if my education was on the line for supporting a politician, no less the President of the United States? In another incident earlier this year, an Instagram account that “exposed” Trump supporters at Maggie Walker began hurling personal insults that could be defined as cyber bullying. Civil discourse at Maggie Walker is devolving due to the polarization of the last few years in the political sphere, and students as a whole are much less willing to engage in healthy debate. While I fully agree that students don’t have to debate politics if they are not willing, I believe that every student should be able to voice their opinions respectfully, with evidence, and the ability to stop before crossing a line.

Today’s political culture on Capitol Hill has seeped into the rest of the country; senators and representatives of both parties refuse to cooperate, and as a result, so does the rest of the country. However, our school is an outlier with around 85-90% of the students self-identifying as liberal, and many of them are also involved in political campaigns and advocacy groups. In the last year, polarization at our local level has grown more intense, with groups like the Black Lives Matter movement calling for a change in the school’s admissions policy and the 2020 election growing in spectacle. Our school community is facing hard realities about the homogenous political culture and its effect on respectful debate in and out of school.

Personally, I’ve always been comforted by the implication that there will always be someone on my side in political debates. When I celebrate that President-elect Biden won the election, I know the majority of my classmates will be by my side. However, before I attended Maggie Walker, I lived in the Deep South where I never voiced a political opinion, let alone enter a debate, because I was afraid to do so. I interviewed the president of the Young Republicans club, Ross George (‘21), and asked him about the effect of being a political minority. The most demoralizing effect he mentioned was “peer censorship.” He went on to say that he doesn’t believe conservatives are in any way “oppressed,” but the reality of most conservatives was defined by harassment when they voiced any opinion at all. The question is, why do people lash out online and attempt to “peer censor”? When I interviewed a Young Democrats officer (‘20), he brought up racial microaggressions, which target BIPOC kids and are often ignored by the school administration. During my classes, I have witnessed teachers make inappropriate comments regarding certain religions and regions of the world. Though I’ve never been a target, I could understand how someone would be tempted to lash out privately if they felt harassed or targeted by someone’s prejudiced beliefs, especially without administrative interference.

Maggie Walker should change the method by which they approach political debate. Most teachers are not at liberty, or refuse, to disclose their political affiliations and beliefs. One teacher I asked said that the primary responsibility in the classroom is to keep students safe intellectually and emotionally. 

While I agree that students do need a safe space to learn, school should also be a catalyst for intellectual growth. School is where students should learn to evaluate bias in the media they consume every day and respectfully argue their viewpoints. The teacher I interviewed mentioned that, in recent years, debates have become a byword for winning, instead of reaching an agreement or at least an understanding of the other viewpoint. Another teacher believed that presenting a range of views on different issues would help expose students to varied beliefs over time. 

Many teenagers are only exposed to their parents’ political views before starting high school; I, for example, had no knowledge of conservative viewpoints earlier. If teachers revealed their own political bias, they could prepare children to deal with a world that requires that they learn how to pinpoint bias in their everyday lives. Additionally, teachers would act as fact-checkers, teaching how to use facts as evidence and to avoid logical fallacies. Political debates in schools could offer an outlet for students to argue their views without resorting to harassment or hiding their thoughts. Open discussion of race and party politics would help decrease the rhetoric students wield outside the classroom at their peers. Civil discourse lies at the base of American political thought, and Maggie Walker cannot fully prepare students without teaching the basics.