We Don't Need Educational "Cleansing"
In fact, we need the opposite.

What I mean by educational cleansing in the current trend in removing any figure from history with a "problematic" past.

Human beings are "problematic" and people of their times. What's in vogue at one time (currently, neoracism under the guise of anti-bigotry) is not at another.

What we can do is choose to take the value out of an artist's work without putting them on trial in the present for any of their values we find ugly and wrong.

At Quillette, Bruno Chaouat writes:

A French Jew from a modest background in provincial France, my experience of wonder and astonishment came up first with hearing a friend of mine playing Bach on the piano. We were 10 at the time. He came from a family of musicians, and I was enthralled by the music I was hearing for the first time. Back in the 1970s I bought all the Bach LPs I could find, then came a passion for Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms. My family had no musical sophistication whatsoever. Later at university I discovered canonical works of literature and philosophy. I was intoxicated by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and even the dry Kant and the byzantine Hegel were able to transport me. For my undergraduate studies in literature, my most meaningful experience was reading and commenting and being lectured on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of the most infamous anti-Semitic novelists of the past century but also one of the most revolutionary. Did I need to shelter in a safe space to avoid reading and hearing about Céline? Quite the opposite. I was amazed by Céline's innovative prose. The critical judgment would come later, once I started reading about the author's notorious anti-Semitic writings. Did I feel betrayed by my teacher at the time for downplaying or overlooking Céline's anti-Semitism? Not at all. I still feel grateful for his guidance in Céline's baroque and psychotic universe.

Still later, I decided to write a dissertation on François-René de Chateaubriand, a French Catholic aristocrat of the early 19th century--light years away from the experience of a French Jew, son of a shopkeeper in the north of France.

Those "lightyears away" are what make education so valuable.

To abandon the familiar, to forsake the already known, and take the risk of reading and listening and encountering the irreducibly unfamiliar--such is my conception of aesthetic and critical education.

In the 1970s, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze founded the intriguing concept of "deterritorialization." His idea was that art and literature and philosophy are forces of deterritorialization, of defamiliarization. Educators and artists should promote the uncanny instead of repatriating their students within their social, cultural, and ethnic milieu. Deleuze also spoke of "lines of flight," or "lines of escape"--all those strategies that we imagine to weigh anchor from the familiar, the homey, the comfortable and invent new narratives and ways of being. The mission of education consists in providing students with the means of departing from familiar territory.

Education is an unsafe business. Forsaking the familiar is always an existential risk. An education based on reinforcing identity will end up weakening it, because identity is a process rather than a thing. Identity politics, today, is reifying and fetishizing identities instead of recognizing their fluidity and dynamism. A strong identity is one that has been tested against unfamiliar ideas and destabilized by literature and art. To my many friends on the Left who seem to buy into this new identity politics, I would remind you that this politics has a disturbing corollary--the rise of social media and of their commodification of identities. Today, one's identity has become a currency used and exchanged by "surveillance capitalism."

The only way students can resist this commodification of their identities is by occupying an unsafe space--getting an education that will encourage them to escape what they think they already are.