Yes, Professors ‘Groom’ Their Students

Politics is about children — about the world into which they will be born, about what they will be taught, and about what they will learn to desire. As Lee Edelman argued in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), there is no politics without fantasies about “our children’s future.” We seem to believe, intensely if inarticulately, that our having a good life in the present depends on assuming that perspectives like ours will be shared by the people of the future, who will be, at least spiritually, our heirs. Political activity, therefore, aims at producing such people, at reproducing ourselves. And we want perhaps not so much that the inhabitants of the future will believe what we believe as that they will want what we want. We want them to inherit our desire.

But we also like to imagine children as “innocent” (a century after Freud!). That is, we like to imagine them as without desire — and we speak as if it were important to keep them that way. We wish to preserve children from outside interference (or at least from anyone else’s interference), from being contaminated by the desires of others. Political discourse, in general and with special urgency recently, turns on our contradictory desires about children. Between our desire to populate the future with people like us, and our desire to guard children from the forces that would accomplish this reproduction — between treating children’s minds as the stakes and sites of politics, or as secret gardens sheltered from politics — our discourse wildly and stupidly swings.

This paradox is, of late, especially visible in national debates over education, from disputes over elementary- and secondary-school curricula to the hypervigilant scrutiny of college classrooms. What do liberal educators really want? What desires are they — are we — trying to elicit from students?

The recent salience of the terms “grooming” and “groomer” on the American right bears witness to the contradiction between these two positions. The concepts entered the discursive mainstream after the passage several weeks ago of the Parental Rights in Education (the “Don’t Say Gay”) bill in Florida, which limited elementary- and secondary-school teachers’ ability to discuss topics related to LGBTQ issues, on the grounds that such discussion violates parents’ rights over their children. Many conservative pundits — particularly younger, more online types who revel in stoking the culture wars — defended the bill and similar measures in other states by charging that opponents wanted to “groom” children.

By “grooming” conservatives usually do not mean literal sexual molestation — but rather hope to cast in its lurid glow the shaping of students’ ideas about sexuality and gender, and thus their desires and identities. This guidance, conservatives imply, is akin to the worst sex crimes, except when performed by parents. The American Conservative, for example, has run several articles defending the Florida bill and attacking “groomers.” In its pages Adam Ellwanger, a professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, argues that educators who teach students that, for example, masturbation is normal, or homosexuality legitimate, will alienate children from conservative parents. The latter, he suggests, should be able to control their children’s “sexual ethic,” sexual knowledge, and — by implication — sexual desire.

Emile Doak, who claims that gay rights are inseparable from pedophilia (we “can’t separate a movement built on the transgression of the male-female distinction with one that transgresses the adult-child one”), likewise condemns sex education as “sexualizing” students — communicating information to the ignorant and eliciting desire in the innocent seem to him indistinguishable. The American Conservative’s associate editor, Declan Leary, similarly warns that critics of the Florida “anti-grooming” bill are out to erase the lines “between family and state, between man and woman, and (God help us) between child and adult.” Children must be protected from adults (except their parents), Leary argues, and parents from the state.

But Leary and the right more generally are unable to leave children or parents alone. In a notorious article published last year, Leary defended the system of Canadian residential schools, a vast, long-running project in which the Canadian government, working with Protestant and Catholic churches, forced First Nations children to attend boarding schools far from their families, with the explicit aim of undermining Native cultures. The appalling conditions at these schools are testified by mass graves. But Leary claimed that bringing these “pagans” into the “Church of Christ” was “worth it” (italics his!), despite “the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families.”

Leary is not alone on the right in jettisoning appeals to parental rights whenever those rights seem to encumber daydreams of wielding the state to crush families and impose on children the one true faith. In 2018, First Things, which has descended over the last few years from an ecumenical journal of Christian thought to an ongoing apologia for clerico-fascism, published an essay defending the role of the Catholic Church in the 19th-century Mortara Affair, in which a Jewish boy was kidnapped by the pontifical government to be raised as a Catholic after the child had been secretly baptized by a Christian woman employed by his parents.

Such hypocrisy from conservatives is contemptible. It is also symptomatic of larger contradictions. The American right, increasingly, is torn in its culture-war polemics between appeals to liberal principles to resist the growing hegemony of the “woke” left and illiberal dreams of annihilating its enemies. In their more lucid moments, right-wingers invoke the innocence of children and the preservation of the family to insist that there should be limits to the use of state power, in schools and elsewhere, to advance particular and controversial worldviews. And here they make a fair point, if on the false premises that parents have a natural monopoly over the shaping of their children’s beliefs and desires. Teaching elementary-school children about gender and sexuality, as well as race, religion, and other sensitive topics, can risk eroding, if not the rights of parents over their children (a concept that makes the latter sound like a form of property), then the spirit of tolerance for alternative worldviews on which a pluralistic society like ours depends.

There is, of course, always some point of view being privileged in teaching, and to avoid teaching such subjects is itself a lesson to students. But caution should be taken to make curricula inclusive not only of diverse sexualities but of the range of thinking about sexuality in our society. Indeed, a truly liberal sexual education would aim to allow students not to feel “valid” about their sexuality, gender, etc., or merely to possess objective information about the facts of sex, but to articulate their own views on such matters, in consciousness of there being a number of alternatives. This aim, however, is not neutral: It is the expression of a liberal worldview that holds up as the best form of life — and the best kind of sexuality — one pursued in a spirit of critical self-reflection.

And so many of us are torn: We want the future to have a certain kind of person in it, someone we can recognize as our heir — and we want young people to be protected from the pressures that desires like ours bring to bear on them. These contradictions are not only features of our national political discourse, but the stuff of our everyday life as educators. We are all, in various ways, groomers.

I was awakened to this a few years ago, when one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago — and one of the few followers of Leo Strauss on campus under the age of 75 — confided excitedly to me that, after a little guidance, one of his students (a sophomore in his “great books”-style core class) had become an atheist. This appeared to my colleague as joyful news since, from his Straussian perspective, rejecting religion is a necessary condition for undertaking what is called the “philosophical life.” Apparently a pursuit of open-ended questioning, at least according to the thinkers in my colleague’s coterie, such an intellectual trajectory seems in fact disturbingly predictable, finding in a small canon of classic texts and their interpreters the established questions — and, barely concealed under “esoteric” mummery, their established answers.

I didn’t tell my colleague that what he had done constituted “grooming” — the word was not yet so insistently pressed to the forefront of our consciousness as it has been in recent weeks — but I felt the sort of revulsion that usually accompanies the use of the word as an accusation. My colleague didn’t tell me under what circumstances exactly he had led his student toward his own view of religion. But the very fact of his taking an intense, personal interest in the topic struck me as perverse and perverting, a violation of what I had thought was a general, if unspoken, professional commitment to clear the path for students’ questions, rather than divert them into our answers. A process of personal development that should have unfolded in the obscurity of this boy’s private thought had been wrenched into a preconceived shape by a powerful older person —- and not in the public visibility of classroom discussion but in the pseudo-intimacy of a relationship my colleague imagined as one of mentoring. The student had been prevented from making up his own mind about one of life’s most important problems free from the pressure of knowing what a trusted and respected teacher thought — and wanted him to think.

The Stapleton Collection, Bridgeman Images

For some time after, I held my disgust as a kind of touchstone against which to measure my own and others’ teaching. I thought about colleagues, of a far more numerous human type than the Straussians, who spoke with missionary enthusiasm about their efforts to reach apparently backward and recalcitrant “straight white frat boys,” “econ bros,” and other demographic groups taken to need special effort to bring into the progressive fold. One professor, who had once been a Teach for America volunteer and brought that same civilizing mission to her college classroom, recounted over the course of a quarter her efforts to bring to heel a boy she suspected of being conservative. She was less successful than my Straussian colleague; the latter offered select students the narcissistic pleasure of being worthy of admission into a philosophical “elite,” while the former, in a school-marmish fashion, held all her students to one code of political-ethical propriety. Neither appealed to me. Having grown up in a Southern Baptist megachurch, I’d had too much of youth pastors to become one myself.

Besides, if a college teacher is looking for a pedagogical challenge, it’s not very interesting to get students to come around to one’s own point of view. Students often want to be “groomed,” to have a teacher give some direction to anxious intellectual and ethical searching. In the privacy of office hours, they have solicited me to solve personal dilemmas. “How can I be an ally to people of color?” an earnest Asian American woman asked me after we’d read Frantz Fanon. “Should I go to grad school or become a consultant?” an immigrant from Eastern Europe asked, as if these were obviously the two choices available. In the last week alone, I met with two former students at their request about what, after the pretexts of our conversations quickly faded, was revealed to be their desire — in friction with their parents’ more conventional and remunerative desires for them — to become writers.

I refuse to answer those questions. As in class discussion, I redirect the conversation to what they think, what they want. Whether in my office or the classroom, the point of our speaking together is not for me to articulate, or embody, some model of correct opinion to be replicated in the student’s consciousness, but to demonstrate my desire for the student to bring into language and put into practice her own ideas. Which is a kind of answer — not only to the question of writing (to which it is, of course, a “yes”) but to the real questions pulsing behind all the others, “What should I want? What do you want of me?”

My ostensible disavowal of power, or of having any agenda of my own, has as precise an effect of “grooming” as anything I might tell students they must believe (indeed, it may be more effective for not taking the form of an injunction). When I call on a student and ask him what he thinks about the text, I pretend to think that he is already thinking something, that he has some private opinion inside him, and that I am interested in bringing it out. None of this is quite true. He probably wasn’t thinking anything in particular, and whatever he was thinking is likely to be not at all “his own” thought but something half-understood and secondhand. Nor am I in fact interested in “what he has to say,” that is, in its content — if I were interested in that sense, then I would be concerned with whether his opinions were correct (factually, politically) or not, and concerned to align his views with what I consider to be the truth. Instead, I perform interest in the student giving me more of his thoughts, more thoughtfully. I respond, “But what about … ?” “What do you mean by … ?” Or simply, “Tell me more!” I am not drawing out of him and hammering into shape an existing individual view, but I am seducing him into my desire that he have his own thoughts.

In an essay called “To the Seminar,” Roland Barthes put such desire at the center of a form of teaching that does not impart content or model a practice, but that rather resembles the way a mother teaches her child to walk. She stands in front of him, desiring his progress, beckoning him with love, and the child moves toward her. In a homelier version of the move from the bodily to the intellectual described in Plato’s Symposium, almost in a reversal, moving here from the purity of infantile love to the practical problem of bipedal motion, the mother incites the child’s desire for her and recircuits that desire toward the child’s flourishing.

When I read that essay 15 years ago, in a college seminar on literary theory, the relatively young new professor teaching the course was the fleeting, unattainable object of a crush. I desperately, flailingly wanted to impress him by appearing as brilliant as possible, an experience that, at the time, seemed to confirm Barthes’ point about the way students, desiring to impress their teachers, learn, in spite of themselves, to stand on their own feet. It is only now, as I’ve begun work on a book on Barthes, that I learned he wrote this essay while teaching a class that included a graduate student, Roland Havas, with whom he was already falling so achingly in love that he came, a few years later, to write Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse as a testament and something of a cure. The Platonic sublimation fails or, rather, succeeds (Barthes did write a book, I did learn literary theory) as a self-fulfilling lie that covers up the falsity of its foundations.

This is how liberal education works, to the extent that it does. No form of education — no form of politics — leaves children alone. We are all grooming them, enlisting them in our projects for making the future. We say that we wish other adults would leave them alone, but we mean that we wish we could be left alone with them, to shape them and the future to our will. What can possibly legitimate this — or what could distinguish liberal education from all other pedagogies, authoritarian power-fantasies of parental, ecclesiastical, or governmental omnipotence? Only that there is a way of desiring the desire of others that frees them, in the end, from even our desire.