Go ahead. Get into politics at school.

I once led a workshop with middle-school students that was to serve as a deep dive into the Constitution. In the final run-up to the workshop, I received several anxious emails asking that I avoid mentioning any particular politician. The school looked forward to me teaching the first Article of the Constitution, but there would be no need to name names. The message in being invited to teach about the presidency without naming the president—the same message I have consistently encountered in my twenty years in schools—was clear: we don’t get into politics.

I get it. Politics is messy. But it’s time for schools to stop conflating the examination of politics with partisanship. We have our own biases, and we must work hard to temper those. Agreed. We are not in the business of molding students in our ideological images. But if our collective strategy for maintaining impartiality is to shy away from teaching about government, discussing those who govern, and examining the issues that shape our collective experience, we are doing our students a grave disservice. The political landscape appears littered with landmines, but we must also see the clear opportunities before us.

First, the obvious: it’s a great time to bring civic education to life. An impeachment! A raging debate over the role of the federal government in managing a pandemic! Unprecedented protests! An election! Truly, and I say this without irony, it’s an exciting time to be teaching. At some level, I think we all know we should be seizing the moment, but the moment feels scary. We are afraid of how parents will react when they hear only part of the story about the day’s discussion, we’re skittish about revealing our own biases to students and worried about causing a scene in our classrooms. We can take steps to mitigate these worries, though.

Let’s bring parents into the loop. Let’s keep them updated on the conversations their children are having in school and invite them to share their hopes and concerns, rather than defending ourselves from attack later on. Let’s practice what we preach by working, ourselves, to honor ideological differences (see the previous post for more on that), and, above all, let us not be too afraid of making a mistake. We’re uncomfortable, because we feel ill-equipped to handle contentious or wounding speech, should it emerge in a “political” discussion. Yes, this is difficult. But this is also precisely the education our students desperately need. We simply cannot observe our national disfunction, our unwillingness to reach across lines of ideological divide, and conclude that the best course of action is to shield our students from disagreement or contentious discourse.

Schools have twisted themselves in knots, trying to tiptoe down some imaginary line that separates the merely “topical” from the “political.” Everything is political. Free speech, inequality, the locus of government power, climate change… even science itself—they are all political—and in this tricky, anxious, and exciting electoral season we should be purposefully leading our students through the work that will help them more capably navigate our nation’s political divide.