Myth, Manhood, and Curriculum

Note: I’ve just finished the manuscript for my third book titled Myth, Manhood, and Curriculum. The manuscript is currently in copy editing and should be out in a few months. Just so everyone can get an idea of the flavor of the book, I’m sharing the Preface below. More to follow.

When I applied to the doctoral program in curriculum and instruction at The George Washington University two decades ago, I, like many doctoral students, felt certain of my research interests. After a couple of semesters, however, Colin Green and Brian Casemore encouraged me to engage with curriculum studies and theorizing, and of the curriculum scholars to whom they introduced me, William F. Pinar has been the most important in my scholarly life. Indeed, the declaration by Pinar et al. in Understanding Curriculum that the era of curriculum development has ended changed my understanding of curriculum. The field’s reconceptualization has rearticulated curriculum studies as understanding curriculum by engaging with curricular issues through a myriad of textual forms, often intertextually referenced, and in which theory exists to provoke thought. The appeal to understand curriculum through the humanities further drew on my previous academic background in history, philosophy, and political theory. This book emerged from Pinar’s encouragement to return to my dissertation, a small study of how a group of six young men experienced and understood their masculinities, after nearly 15 years. In that study, I, a forty-something former Marine and high school teacher, discussed how a group of young men in late adolescence described the expectations of American manhood they negotiated, which they characterized as “the masculine convention” and “the masculinity thing,” expectations they articulated in familiar terms such as stoicism, heteronormativity, aggression, and violence. They also, however, explained how they consciously embodied their own manhood in ways that contradicted those expectations, and they emphasized the importance of relationships in their lives, including close same-sex friendships, the importance of family, which can extend beyond the nuclear family, and their rejection of gender and sexual expectations that contradicted their own feelings and desires.

Since I completed my dissertation and entered the professoriate, I have engaged in years of academic study. As a humanities-based researcher, my scholarly interests have both broadened and coalesced around historical issues of power, militarism, imperialism, violence, non-violence, tropes of manhood, fascism, religious nationalism, and the roles that schools and universities have played in both contributing to those problems and potentially providing spaces in which we might begin to think and act differently. My dissertation provoked me to think differently and more critically about the historical struggle to define “proper” manhood, which I see as a thread that runs through issues such as power, imperialist violence, and Christian Nationalism. The curricular implications I drew from that early work include the need to engage in more sophisticated and historicized deliberations about the complex conditions of possibility that have produced a seemingly commonsense connection between manhood and violence to which we continue to bear witness.

As a curriculum study, autobiography is crucial in situating oneself both socially and historically, and my lived educational experiences have certainly provoked my scholarly interests. Specific to this inquiry, for example, my family, like many American families, has a long tradition of military service, and the cost to my family of military service has been high. My paternal grandfather and great uncle were both killed during World War II, and my father followed them both into the US Navy. Having lost both her husband and her youngest brother to World War II, the supposed “good war” fought by the “greatest generation,” my grandmother impressed upon me that however war is marketed or propagandized, there is neither a good war, nor a greatest generation. Nevertheless, considering the family tradition, my own military service seemed inescapable with the exception that I enlisted in the US Marine Corps rather than the Navy.

Throughout my life, I have formed lasting relationships with family, friends, teachers, professors, military buddies, and authors both living and dead who never forgot how to question and who provoked me to think differently about what seemed to be common sense. While in the military, and during the interminable post-9/11 “war on terror,” I have also encountered maniacal figures who resemble characters in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, unthinking true believers singularly devoted to an existential battle with the manufactured enemy du jour. As the US, among other countries, slides toward our particular version of fascism, the trope of permanent war in search of an ever elusive peace remains a convenient and increasingly expansive shibboleth employed by autocrats across the political spectrum who, convinced of their own righteousness, hubristic confidence in their possession of the truth, and enthralled to power seek to obliterate inconvenient histories, heretical ideas, and those who maintain the courage to think, dissent, and embody what Foucault called the courage of truth. What Masha Gessen has characterized as the threat of autocracy now seems an international epidemic in what Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni suggest is a crisis of anti-politics and a grotesque surrender of thought to the uses and abuses of history about which Nietzsche prophetically wrote.

Having spent years participating in and studying the US imperial project, it seems increasingly clear to me that the American military tradition and our lust for and valorization of violence originated in the initial violent, religiously driven colonization of North America. In his trilogy about the myth of the American Frontier, Richard Slotkin concludes that regeneration through violence remains our nation’s “structuring metaphor,” which Slotkin further suggests comprises an inherently gendered and sexualized project. Regeneration through violence has, of course, functioned in protean fashion throughout our history, reflected in justifications for overseas and domestic wars against a myriad of others encapsulated in an encyclopedia of clichés—civilizing the savage, preserving the Union, spreading freedom, anti-communism, peace through strength, making the world safe for democracy, and protecting the homeland from the ever-expanding abstraction known as terror.

I realize that historical comparisons, particularly with the Nazis, must be undertaken carefully, but as Hannah Arendt suggested in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Adolph Eichmann’s inability to speak, other than in clichés, about his work as a Gestapo officer helping to orchestrate the “final solution to the Jewish question” reflected his inability to think, particularly from the perspective of others. Having read The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem while attending university after leaving the Marines, I see in the Strangelove-esque characters and rhetoric that I referred to above the “banality of evil” described by Arendt, specifically the ubiquity of Manichean clichés such as former US President George W. Bush’s post- 9/11 declaration that you’re either with us, or with the terrorists. And, in what seems to me a perverse irony, Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, which Arendt would, correctly I think, characterize as not only a war against Palestinians but as a war against the very concept of the human being, is a particularly grotesque example of the comfort provided by the clichés propagandized by both the Israeli government and its chief enabler, the imperial US political establishment. As I will discuss in subsequent sections of the book, the Zionist settler-colonial project has long reflected troubling associations with fascism, biopower, and the gendered and sexualized tropes that Slotkin discerned in his study of US settler-colonialism, which persist in the present.

Having spoken to many others in whose countries I was stationed while in the Marines, I began to conclude over the years that I hadn’t so much been defending freedom, liberating the oppressed, and spreading democracy—more clichés—but functioning as what Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, reflecting on his own actions in China, the Philippines, Mexico, and elsewhere, called a “gangster for capitalism.” Juxtaposing Butler with Arendt, I find the non-thinking of which Arendt wrote increasingly alarming, particularly as the US Republic has dissolved into what Chalmers Johnson called an empire of military bases supported by a permanent war economy. The destruction of the republic has, in my view, invited a uniquely American form of fascism that exploits, as has been the case in the past, our national myths, revolutionary traditions, and even our sense of justice to rationalize the militarization of the carceral techno-surveillance state, the obliteration of democratic institutions, including education, and the institutionalization of Christian Nationalism, paramilitarism, and moral panics about gender, sexuality, and immigration. Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here and Georgi Dimitrov’s 1938 The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War seem prophetic considering a resurgence of authoritarian populism that exhibits many of the features of fascism that scholars such as Umberto Eco and Jason Stanley have discussed.

The export of imperial violence and its reimportation to what remains of an anemic civil society rests to a significant degree, as scholars such as Slotkin, Bonnie Mann, William F. Pinar, Susan Faludi, Jason Stanley, Jasbir Puar, and Michael Kimmel suggest, on fears about a crisis of deficient manliness. Moral panics about depleted manhood have historically coexisted with fears about the depleted health of the state, which Bonnie Mann characterizes as a threat to a nation’s sovereign masculinity. In other words, fear of a manliness deficit historically reflects concomitant anxiety about the nation’s virility, especially in the gendered and sexualized terms of the nation’s violation by outsiders, the state’s inability to deter external and internal enemies, and the ability to wage imperial wars, which are inevitably wars of choice. During such panics—Reconstruction, previous “Red Scares,” jingoistic imperial adventurism, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, and, I would argue, Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians—aspiring autocrats have simultaneously attacked education as subversive of the nation’s purported ideals and, Jason Stanley suggests, attempted to reconfigure education to serve a twisted revanchist sense of progress—the obsession with restoring a mythic lost greatness—and the rehabilitation of individual and national manhood through physical violence and historical erasure. Current education legislative and policy efforts, notably in states like Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, reflect that ignominious history.

Donald Trump, elected to the US presidency in November 2024 four years after he lost his bid for a second term, fomented a violent riot at the US Capitol in January 2021, vowed to deport immigrants en masse, and promised to exact revenge on his political opponents, exemplifies the type of manhood this book examines. In terms of education, Trump’s election and the release of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, an updated blueprint to dismantle the administrative state, including public education, both mirrors and expands similar efforts that have already been undertaken at the state level. The true danger of current efforts to erase history in an already ahistoric social and educational milieu, lies in what Hannah Arendt discussed as the danger of using education and other social apparatuses to propagandize ideology—any ideology—that simplifies the complexities of the political world into a simple schema that requires no ethic of critical thought and through which people abandon the reality of lived experience.

Finally, speaking of truth, historical erasure and the reconfiguration of education, not only in schools and universities but through other social, cultural, and political apparatuses, reflects a war on ethics of seeking truth in terms of regulating both speech and the embodiment of truth in how we live—the courage of truth and hermeneutics of the technologies of the self, to which Foucault devoted his final years studying. Although I inquire in this book into the political mobilization of tropes of manhood associated with violence, I am not attempting to develop a unified grand theory of masculinity or of gender more broadly. Rather, my small contribution hopefully lies in better understanding and deliberating practices of manhood predicated on regimes of truth related to the relationship between manhood and the nation-state, particularly concerning violence. In other words, in the spirit of curriculum studies and theorizing, I am committed, as Pinar suggests, to provoking thought. Educational apparatuses, including schools and universities, are implicated historically in rationalizing various tropes of proper manhood, and they certainly can provide spaces in which to engage in complicated conversation about practices of manhood tethered to violence and deliberating ethics of non-violence, which seems to me a crucial curricular project. At the same time, I agree with Pinar’s suggestion in the first edition of What is Curriculum Theory? that we speak sparingly of the school and instead speak more of education because it seems to me that fetishizing the school potentially renders it an abstraction. The school, or university for that matter, bereft of the ethics of study, deliberation, situation of the self in the social and political world, historicality, criticality, and subjective presence could easily serve the destructive configurations of power that have coalesced throughout the neoliberal era. To roughly paraphrase Milan Kundera, I expect the struggle of humanity against power is indeed the struggle of memory against forgetting, and I expect the struggle to only intensify. This historical moment, characterized by resurgent authoritarian populism driven by various fascistic conditions, should make both the danger and the need to struggle abundantly clear. Indeed, I invoke the concept of danger from Foucault’s suggestion that not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, an invitation to question the regimes of truth that we have submitted to, which might result in the realization that we all have work to do.