With a bit of hesitation, but out of a sense of lexicographic duty, today I write about a new-to-me word that we’ve read about a lot recently here in the US: patriotic education.
When taken at face value, this is a neutral term: an education that’s, you know, patriotic. What’s not to like about that? However, and as we know, patriotic education is not a neutral term and was explicitly coined not to be one.
First, what is patriotic education? This is a curriculum that’s been proposed for American schools that emphasizes a “positive view” of American history. Although it was announced this week as an agenda item for Trump’s possible next term, the idea of a patriotic education has been floating around for a while. The idea got a big push after the New York Times launched the 1619 Project, an ongoing educational project that focuses on narratives such as the role of slavery in the country’s history. The people who are proposing patriotic education feel that such narratives teach young people the wrong idea about the country’s history.
But we’re not here to talk about curriculums. There are two things that are striking to me about the term patriotic education. The first is that it uses the word patriotic in a way that’s largely been claimed by the conservative/right-wing political side. Etymologically, patriot comes from Greek for “fellow-countryman,” as in compatriot. Nonetheless, if you see the word patriot in someone’s Twitter bio, it’s an almost sure sign that they’re conservative. Similarly, the “patriot movement” consists of “a collection of conservative, independent, mostly rural, small government, American nationalist social movements in the United States that include organized militia members, tax protesters, sovereign or state citizens, quasi-Christian apocalypticists/survivalists, and combinations thereof,” to quote Wikipedia.
So the word patriotic is a dog-whistle term for “conservative,” with overtones of jingoism, or as one paper puts it, “authoritarian patriotism.” It’s therefore clear at a glance what sort of slant (or bias, if you prefer) patriotic education is going to have. (To be clear, all education has a slant.)
The other thing that I found striking is that patriotic education is not a term limited to the United States and the present day. In the 1990s, China introduced a Patriotic Education Campaign that was nationalistic. Putin has implemented a patriotic (re)education movement in Russia. The discussion about how to capture the hearts and minds of citizens—especially young ones—is apparently going on everywhere, including in authoritarian regimes. Is it weird that we’re using the same term as they use in those countries? Maybe. See previous.
Ok, let’s move on to origins. I forget why, but I was wondering where we got the word tutor from. The word is both a noun and a verb. Test your sprachgefühl by trying to guess which came first.
Ready? Noun was first. It showed up in the late 1300s but in a sense that’s now obsolete: “guardian, custodian, protector.” If you had a ward, you were the ward’s tutor. However, very quickly thereafter it also got the sense of someone who was in charge of the “supervision and instruction of a youth in a private household.” The verbal sense (“to act as a tutor to”) took another 200 years to develop.
Curiously (a little, anyway), the ur-root of the word was a verb. The original was a Latin verb tuērī, which meant “to watch, guard.” Even in Latin, though, it developed a noun version (tūtor). We borrowed the noun form (via French, of course), and then in effect re-verbed it to develop our own verbal sense.
There are not many related words in English. One that might surprise you is tuition. It originally meant “the act of guarding or protecting”; a tutor provided tuition. The sense we have today of “money paid for education” probably came about this way: a tutor provided tuition, and you paid that person a tuition fee, which then just became tuition. Or so speculates Douglas Harper.
I realize only now that I inadvertently had an education theme today. Honestly, this was not deliberate. Although maybe I should have said that it was.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.