Sep 4, 2025 2:08:00 PM
School began in Milwaukee this week. At my daughter’s elementary school, there was a balloon arch and a front walkway packed with students. Eager, anxious, bouncy. The unstoppable force of pre-adolescent kinetic energy colliding with the (not so) immovable object of outfits their parents begged them to please keep clean. A few pre-kindergarten wails, but mostly joy and the hope that this year might be perfect. At my son’s middle school, a mom wiped tears from her eyes. Her son is an eighth grader, far taller than her, but as she assured me, outside of his earshot, “he’s still my baby.” We had both spent the night before scrolling through old front porch pictures. They were so tiny. They aren’t anymore. But we’re still allowed to cry over them.
It’s a minor miracle, this whole business of sending your children to public school. Such an individually vulnerable act, but so dependent on trust in strangers, not just on teachers and immediate administrators, but on unseen district, state, and federal agencies. Hundreds of millions of families with our own unique dreams and dreads for our kids, but above and around us, a nation of anonymous somebodies charged with making a trillion decisions on our behalf.
We have been trained, thanks to a craven political project spanning an entire half-century, to distrust bureaucracy. A dirty word, that one. So too “red tape.” But as a parent, I am immensely grateful for all the decisions that I don’t have to make that enable my kids to walk in the door of a classroom every day. Not just the big pedagogical questions (what constitutes the least inclusive special education environment; how to train a teacher in the science of reading; what is calculus, exactly, and how does a high schooler show that they are proficient at it). I’m talking about the million accessory decisions. Which grade gets to have lunch at which time. Whether to start before or after Labor Day. Who wins the contract for cleaning supplies, for dry-erase boards, for murals that say “Home of the Wildcats who READ!”
When I say that I’m grateful, I’m not pretending that these decisions are always made well, or executed efficiently. Not all bureaucracies are created equal, and yes they should be lovingly held to account. I’m just remarking on the volume of necessary but tedious tasks that ensure that my kids and their peers enter buildings and are greeted warmly by teachers, and everybody gets to try their best to make it work.
It is not sexy celebrity-making stuff, the affairs of school administration. Or it shouldn’t be. And yet, the other thing that I did yesterday— after the pictures and the “happy first days” shouted at other parents— was participate in another human being’s stupid publicity stunt.
I took a test, ostensibly to determine if I should be allowed to teach children in Oklahoma. I took it for the same reason that local news anchors stand outside Dunkin outlets on made-up holidays like National Donut Hole Day. I took the bait. I fed the spectacle machine. I am sorry, but I was curious.
I know that I should ignore him, this PT Barnum MAGA also-ran. I know and care about numerous educators and students in Oklahoma. I don’t have the energy to critique the dude merely to show off how smart I am. I just want him to get off TV for a change and, I don’t know, figure out how to help kids read better.
I couldn’t resist the test, though. Just layers of artifice, shellacked with lies. An exam that purports to be part of that state’s certification process (it isn’t). That is developed by Prager University (not a college, just a YouTube channel). And which we’re told has been deployed to weed out Marxist teachers supposedly streaming in from New York and California, dead-set on indoctrinating impressionable young Okies (citation, um, needed).
I passed, by the way. Take that, Ryan Walters. Garrett Bucks— a Card-Carrying Woke Mob Backbencher— successfully scaled your culture war fortifications and stormed your castle. You thought I was buryable, Superintendent Walters, but I am a seed. A seed who, as per question 27, knows a thing or two about Martin Luther King Jr and how he was NOT WOKE.
“Don’t let them tell you I advocated for DEI,” the ghost of Martin Luther King Jr. whispers to Oklahoma schoolchildren. “Remember my famous quote, ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards racial equality under the law AND NOTHING ELSE.’”
Speaking of knowledge I possess, I am also an expert on “areas like sports and privacy.”
You know that I wanted to choose D there. So badly. That’s how woke I am. You ask me what anything is for, and my gut reaction will be “to enhance the self-esteem of transgender children.” That’s why the Federal Reserve exists, I assume, because of all those Critical Race Theory courses I once took.
But no, I wanted to get the question right, so I read between the lines. That’s the key to succeeding on this quiz. Reading between lines, but in a world where the interstitial space sandwiched by those lines just reads “Please answer this as if you are a co-host of Fox and Friends and President Donald Trump could call in at any moment.” Consider, for example, this innocent question that definitely isn’t insinuating anything about which rights the authors of this quiz might want to strip from you and your neighbors.
Hey, remember voting, public education, reproductive rights, healthcare, and freedom from data collection and surveillance? I don’t either.
Speaking of thinking like a Prager University employee, I bet you can’t answer this next one, you hopelessly woke interloper. You probably graduated from the Judith Butler College of Medicine and America Destruction, where you learned that the main difference between genders is whether you know all the hand motions to “Hot To Go.”
I nailed all those questions, by the way. Though now would probably be the right time to admit the final layer of, um, factual elasticity at play. This test, designed theoretically to separate the Patriot Wheat from the Trans Maoist Chaff, is literally unfailable. If you get a question wrong, you just go back and answer it again. If you do so three times, it pretends you answered it correctly.
It’s actually a perfect metaphor. You, the test taker, don’t matter. Lord knows the students of Oklahoma don’t matter. It’s Potemkin Policy. The point is the headline. Oklahoma Unveils Anti-Woke Teacher Test. The point is that Prager University got to take out an ad in the New York Times and somewhere, no doubt, a hyper-online MAGA social media manager high-fived his friends and chuckled, “huh huh huh, so based.”
There’s a lot of talk these days, particularly regarding Trump, about which stunts are real and which are distractions. If you subscribe to that paradigm, the big dumb test clearly lands on the distraction side of the equation. Just as you are not actually required by law to eat a tiny pastry sphere on National Donut Hole Day, so too is this test just so much gossamer-winged nonsense.
But the problem is, the Situationists were right (terrible news, as they were smug and French).
Everything once lived is now a mere spectacle, but the spectacle can also kill you.
The troops on the streets of U.S. cities are real, but the pretense for their deployment isn’t. Four years of AI essays can deliver you to graduation, but your degree will be just as farcical as my shiny new Prager U certificate. Donald Trump lies about everything, but he’s surrounded by a nation of credulous sycophants who will drone on for hours about how you’re the real liar, for refusing to acknowledge his lies. “Stop hitting yourself,” a nation of pundits proclaims, as they grind your own arm into your side in perpetuity.
It strikes me, in a moment such as this, that the choice isn’t between “real threats” and “distractions.” It’s all the same project. Teach us to trust nothing (not reality, not each other, not our own agency). Trick us into believing that memes have material heft, and that the work of keeping each other alive is less pressing than the work of winning the argument. Give us neither bread nor circuses, just something new to comment on every day.
Yesterday I passed the big dumb test. And it was meaningless. Nothing was proven, either by my taking or critiquing it. As I did so, actual educators did their best to love my kids, and people in distant offices worked to ensure that their buildings don’t fall apart, that their teachers have health insurance, and that there will actually be a training planned for the next professional development day.
To Ryan Walters, none of that real work matters, just as faux populists like JD Vance and Donald Trump don’t actually want you to join a union. They want their most credulous supporters to hear the news and go, “Oh man, they did what? Sick! I bet the Marxists hated that.”
That’s not a distraction. Nor is it really a “cruelty is the point” situation. It’s a strategy of weaponized unreality, one that ensnares both their friends and foes.
On the worst days, they succeed. Not because we take the bait, but because if you pump the space between us with so much slop, you lose both the forest and the trees.
We, too, have a strategy, though. If we choose it.
There is still, despite everything they throw at us, the fact that I am still here and you are still here, and you can multiply that truth a billion times. None of us are fake. There is always somebody for whom you can care. There is always a new relationship to strengthen. There are (for now) legacy institutions that we can fight to make stronger and kinder. It’s how we bring truth to the subterfuge fight. It’s how we remember that the work that makes us alive is frequently tedious and ungratifying, but also sacred and glorious. Because it’s real, you see, and it’s for each other.
This piece was first published on Substack.
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