Political Activism Undermines Academic Excellence
That’s because propaganda is generally poor scholarship
HSE appears to be rebranding their “Social, Emotional, and Equity Learning” (SEEL) program. It seems that they’re now going to call it something like “Employability Skills.” I gather that this name is more marketable because it doesn’t sound so political and brain washy. Hopefully this will amount to more than just a rebranding, and will involve a substantive move in the right direction.
In any case, as readers probably know, the SEEL program (by whatever name) has been criticized for containing political advocacy and seeking to undermine values that parents hold dear. That’s a significant worry. However, these lessons aren’t just occasionally tinged with propaganda. In some cases, they’re also very low-quality on an intellectual level. Let’s look at one such example.
The lesson I have in mind is called “Training our Brain” and was taught at high schools in HSE last year. According to this lesson, the human brain contains a “lizard brain” in which the amygdala plays an important role.
The lesson identifies the amygdala as the “guard dog” of the brain. Their idea is that the amygdala reacts negatively when a person encounters a physical or even social threat. The lesson goes on to assert that, when you are asked to talk about “sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism … [your lizard brain] is afraid that this conversation will make you vulnerable and open to some type of emotional or physical attack.” The lesson calls this phenomenon amygdala hijack, and it gives strategies to avoid such “hijacking.”
The source for this information is self-described “former writing teacher turned equity freedom fighter” Zaretta Hammond. Ms. Hammond holds an MA degree in English Instruction and currently runs a “consulting practice” that is “focused on helping educators strengthen the link between equity and instruction.” Her book is Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, from which some passages in the lesson were lifted verbatim (but without quotation marks!).1
I found no evidence that Ms. Hammond or anyone else involved in the publication of this book has any training whatsoever in neuroscience. This caused me to be skeptical of the scientific basis of the ideas in the lesson. And indeed it turns out that, when you spend about one minute researching the matter, it’s pretty easy to find extremely accomplished neuroscientists who explicitly say that these claims about your “lizard brain” hijacking your rational processes are false or discredited.
For example, consider Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, a prominent neuroscientist who holds appointments at Northeastern and Harvard Medical School. Prof. Barrett says plainly that “…you don’t have an inner lizard or an emotional beast-brain.” And here, in the extended notes for her most recent book, she says:
In the moments that people call “amygdala hijack,” you may feel as if your emotional brain has overwhelmed your logical brain... but you have only one brain. No matter how intuitive the “amygdala hijack” explanation seems, it is false.
Barrett explains that this “lizard brain” idea is part of a “triune brain” theory, which had some appeal in the mid-20th century when it was first proposed by Dr. Paul MacLean and popularized by Carl Sagan, but has since been discredited as the technology for studying the brain has vastly improved and better models of brain evolutionary development have emerged. She says of the discredited “triune brain” idea that “[i]ts continued popularity is an example of ideology rather than scientific inquiry.”
Moreover, Barrett is not alone. Professor Joseph LeDoux, another extremely accomplished neuroscientist, writes in his 2015 book Anxious that the “evolutionary basis” of this theory has been “discredited” (p. 24). And here is another recent publication which says that although the “triune brain” theory appears in various introductory psychology textbooks, it “has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution” (p. 255).
The fact that the “lizard brain” idea is discredited has even been picked up at the level of popular science. For example, here is Scientific American:
…the Triune Brain idea holds a certain allegorical appeal: The primal lizard—a sort of ancestral trickster god—lurking within each of us. But today, writers and speakers are dredging up the corpse of this old theory, dressing it with some smart-sounding jargon, and parading it around as if it’s scientific fact … Problem is, MacLean’s pet hypothesis doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
All of this leaves us with a mystery. Why is HSE teaching our kids poorly-researched lessons about the brain that were lifted from a book by an activist with no relevant expertise? It’s hard to say for sure what the motive is. But here are two observations.
First, one widely-cited study suggests that when bad explanations of a phenomenon are “dressed up” with irrelevant neuroscientific information, people are more likely to find the bad explanation satisfying. This provides an incentive to appeal to neurology when trying to convince freshmen in high school that they are implicitly biased against people of a certain race or gender—ideas they might find less plausible without the neuroscientific jargon backing it up.
Second, it is highly suspicious that the neuroscientific theory on offer is perfectly suited to serve the role of a trash can into which you can throw your political opponent’s objections without actually dealing with them on the merits. Suppose an activist in the district wants to make a controversial assertion about left-wing identity politics, such as the claim that the students are all implicitly biased against certain races. Then suppose some of the students find this claim implausible. With this brain “science” in hand, the activist has a nice strategy: claim that any negative thoughts or feelings students have in response to the controversial assertion are attributable to a non-rational mechanism—“amygdala hijack”—and can therefore be dismissed as illegitimate. If this strategy is successful, the activist can always discredit an opponent’s point by claiming that it is just an irrational emission of the lizard brain. The activist is then protected from needing to defend an extremely controversial or even flatly implausible political opinion, all the while looking like some kind of smarty-pants brain science enthusiast. It’s hard to be sure that this is what is going on, but it certainly looks like one possibility.
I’d suggest that if the district wants to teach introductory neuroscience to high school students, they should read some actual science written by scientists instead of reading a book by an activist with no relevant expertise. They should perhaps consider rewriting these lessons based on the two books that Prof. Barrett has published, and perhaps her popular TED talk.
I now want to emphasize something I’ve said before: if you are a teacher in the district and you have no expertise in neuroscience, or whatever other random topic is being covered in SEEL / SEL / Employability Skills lessons, then you have a responsibility to teach students to be skeptical of the ideas being presented in those lessons. And, if the district is pressuring you to do otherwise, you have a responsibility to resist that pressure. It’s hard. It may not be entirely safe, professionally speaking. But you have to do it because your integrity depends on it. Be strong and courageous! And know that you are not alone.
Whatever the motive of this lesson, it is clear that it is poorly researched and in fact it is an intellectual embarrassment. This is exactly what I expect when we stop focusing on education and instead focus on achieving political outcomes. Lessons like this do not live up to the standards of academic excellence that we expect from HSE schools. Let’s demand better.
And, in the meantime, enjoy this excellent video of the lizard brain in action:
The book was published by Corwyn Press, a publisher that appears to have a significant focus on left-wing advocacy, under an editor, Dan Alpert, who lists equity, diversity, and “social justice” in his bio for Corwyn.