Classrooms Are Never Neutral Teaching, Power and the New Curriculum Wars

On a winter morning in western Pennsylvania, children stand shivering under a low gray sky. Their breath hangs in the air as they stand in a circle around the flagpole, saying a morning prayer while the flag snaps in the wind in front of a brick building that is part school, part home for the elderly. Inside, a wiry man with a Slavic accent has been arguing with teachers about the day’s lessons. Outside, he is leading what looks, at first glance, like a simple school ritual.

Thousands of miles and two centuries away, on a Caribbean sugar island, a woman sits in a back room with enslaved girls. The house has gone quiet. A battered primer lies open on the table as the girls trace letters with fingers stiff from a day of hard labor. The woman, Amelia Sayre, knows that if she is discovered teaching them to read, the consequences will fall hardest on them.

In Sheldon Greene’s novels, these rooms belong to The Lev Effect and Pursuit of Happiness. One is a Jewish boarding school and elder home in a decaying steel town. The other is a plantation on St Catherine’s, an island soaked in sugar and slavery. The details are different, and so is the weight of the classroom in each book. At Tikva, teaching is at the center of the whole experiment. On St Catherine’s, Amelia’s lessons are one small, charged thread in a story that is mostly about sugar, slavery and revolution. The underlying question is the same: what exactly are classrooms for, and who gets to decide what happens in them.

Greene writes about education with the instincts of someone who has spent years watching laws and institutions shape lives in ways that rarely make the news. His teachers are not neutral functionaries. They are political actors, whether they admit it or not.

The Myth of the Neutral Classroom

In the most flattering version of the story, schools exist to transmit knowledge and skills in a way that is above politics. Teachers are supposed to prepare children for work and citizenship, not to tell them what to think about history, race, faith or power. If they keep their heads down and “just teach the material,” the theory goes, the classroom can be a safe space outside the culture wars.

Greene’s fiction is deeply skeptical of that story. He has seen, in legal and public interest work, how schools can be tools of assimilation or exclusion, how curricula are used to decide whose language, religion and history counts as the default. Court cases over segregation, language rights and prayer in schools are just the visible edge of a deeper struggle over what kind of citizens a society is trying to produce.

In The Lev Effect and Pursuit of Happiness, Greene brings that struggle indoors. The rooms where Lev and Amelia teach are not side details. They are the place where the future is being shaped, quietly and at close range.

Tikva School: An Experiment in Who Belongs

Tikva School sits in a corner of Bolton, a town that has outlived its mills and much of its wealth. The building holds a Jewish boarding school and a home for elderly Jews under one roof. Money is tight. Staff are underpaid. The institution’s survival feels provisional even on its better days.

Into this setting comes Lev. In the Soviet Union, he was a Jewish scholar blocked from an academic career because he was Jewish and because he wanted to leave. He was forced into a role as a school “superintendent,” a highly educated caretaker in a system that would not fully admit him, and persecuted as a refusenik for his desire to emigrate. Tikva does not hire him to sweep floors. It hires him to lead the school as its director.

Lev approaches education with the seriousness of someone who has seen classrooms used as instruments of the state. Morning rituals at Tikva mix prayer, song, movement and flag raising. Staff meetings are long and argumentative. Decisions are reached by listening, then choosing, not by pretending everyone already agrees.

Most significant, Lev refuses to keep the world outside. Tikva admits Sami, a Palestinian Muslim boy, into what had been a Jewish space. The school stages “Nationality Day,” a deliberate collision of Israeli and Palestinian symbols in the same hall, asking children to see the humanity of people their communities have been taught to treat as enemies.

To some parents and board members, this looks like courage. To others it looks like reckless politics in a place that should be about religion, tradition and test scores. Lev’s insistence that the school acknowledge Palestinian suffering as well as Jewish suffering is experienced, by some, as disloyal.

From Lev’s perspective, the classroom was never neutral to begin with. Standing children in the cold to raise a flag is also politics. Pretending that only one narrative belongs on the walls is a choice, not a default.

Even his death turns into a kind of lesson. After Lev dies, someone steals his body from the funeral home. The mourners find an old resident in his clothes in the coffin, and the service that follows pulls students, staff, elders, neighbors and the town’s homeless into one hall for stories about a man who has unsettled them in different ways. Outside, cameras and microphones turn the confusion into a tale about a local saint or messiah. Inside, the community is forced to ask what sort of place Tikva has been, and what they learned from a director who insisted that their school could not shut the world out.

Amelia’s Secret Lessons: Literacy as Rebellion

In Pursuit of Happiness, the stakes are even clearer. The classroom there is a subplot rather than the spine of the book, which is driven by sugar, slavery, trade and war. The island of St Catherine’s is part of Britain’s Caribbean world in the eighteenth century, shaped by sugar, slavery and the currents of the coming American Revolution. Joshua, a Quaker, arrives with his own complicated commitments. Around him, Greene shows what it means to live inside an economy that depends on brutal labor and enforced ignorance.

Amelia Sayre is a planter’s wife. Her position is comfortable in material terms and suffocating in others. Bored, angry and uneasy with the casual cruelty around her, she does something small and dangerous. She teaches enslaved girls to read.

There is no ambiguity about how the law sees this. Literacy for enslaved people is a threat. If they can read, they can decipher orders, contracts and passages of scripture that might contradict the theology used to justify their condition. They can write passes, letters and plans. Teaching them is an act of rebellion.

Greene does not romanticize Amelia. Her motives are mixed, as most human motives are. Pity, conscience, restlessness and a desire to do at least one thing that is not wholly complicit all play their part. She is not leading a revolt. She is offering, at a small table under the eyes of no one, the tools that might make revolt imaginable.

The girls who learn to read in that room will return, after each lesson, to fields and punishments. Their minds, however, are being quietly altered. For them, the classroom is not an abstraction. It is a crack in a wall. The narrative visits this back room only briefly, but that brevity is part of its force. It shows how a few hours with a book can unsettle a world that otherwise runs on forced ignorance.

The Cost of Being the Wrong Kind of Teacher

In both novels, teachers who refuse neutrality pay for it.

Lev’s choices at Tikva put him under constant pressure. Board members worry that he is dragging the school into political controversy and jeopardizing donors. The admission of Sami and the staging of Nationality Day provoke debate not just about pedagogy, but about communal identity. Who is this school for? What does it mean to raise Jewish children alongside a Muslim classmate whose people are seen, in some Israel-centered narratives, only as adversaries?

Lev’s own position is precarious. Tikva is financially fragile. Staff accept late pay as part of their commitment. A misstep could give anxious stakeholders an excuse to push him out. The more he insists that classrooms should prepare children to think beyond narrow tribal lines, the more he risks the institution he has come to save. Even after his death, the confusion around his funeral and the media stories that follow show that the arguments he started about belonging and meaning have not ended. They have simply moved into another register.

Amelia’s risk is more immediate and more brutal. If her lessons are discovered, she will face social ruin and possibly legal sanctions. The girls will face worse. On a slave island, stepping over the line between sanctioned and forbidden knowledge can bring whippings, sale or worse. The power imbalance is stark. Amelia can retreat back into her status if she chooses. The girls cannot. The novel does not turn her lessons into the main engine of the plot, but it makes clear that this small act of teaching is the point where her complicity begins to crack.

Greene does not spare his readers the fact that in both cases, it is often the most vulnerable who bear the highest cost when teaching becomes dangerous. One of the questions his novels raise, without fully answering, is how far a teacher is entitled to expose students to risk for the sake of a different kind of future.

From Colonial to “Wokist”: Today’s Curriculum Wars

The conflicts around Tikva and Amelia’s back room feel very close to current arguments about education, even though Greene’s books predate today’s slogans.

On one side, there are efforts to “decolonize” curricula, to purge discourse of colonialist connotations and move beyond a simple frame of white versus brown that leaves deeper structures of power unexamined. Activists ask why certain authors, histories and maps are treated as central while others are optional. They make the case that teaching only one version of events is not neutral at all. It is an extension of conquest.

On the other side, there is a growing backlash against what is labelled “wokist” teaching. Critics accuse schools and universities of smuggling ideology into lessons on race, gender and history, of undermining national narratives and traditional values. They call for bans on certain books and topics, insisting that classrooms should stick to neutral facts and leave politics at the door.

Greene’s fiction recognizes elements of truth and danger in both impulses. Lev’s practice at Tikva looks, in some ways, like a decolonizing project. He refuses to let Jewish children grow up with a single, self-justifying picture of the Middle East. He insists that they see Palestinians as real people with their own narratives. He is not satisfied with a curriculum that treats Jewish suffering as the only story worth teaching.

At the same time, he is wary of slogans. His rituals at Tikva combine prayer, civic duty and bodily discipline in a way that some critics might find troubling. He does not reject national identity; he tries to complicate it. The school under his direction is hardly an advertisement for a simple “wokist” or nationalist approach. It is messy, contradictory, alive.

Amelia’s lessons prefigure contemporary arguments about which stories belong in a syllabus. Under slavery, the official curriculum for enslaved people is obedience and work. Teaching them to read is, quite literally, a decolonizing act. It challenges a regime built on forced ignorance. It also raises uncomfortable questions about who controls literacy and why.

Seen in this light, Greene’s classrooms are not quaint historical or speculative settings. They are mirrors. They show that the fight over whose story gets told, and how, is much older than the latest headline about textbooks.

Why Greene Keeps Returning to the Classroom

Across his novels, Greene writes about war, revolution, espionage and courtrooms. Yet again and again, crucial scenes take place not on battlefields or in parliaments, but in schools, study halls and improvised lessons.

There is a reason for this. Battles and laws are downstream from education. The men who staffed death camps, the planters who oversaw whippings, the politicians and judges who draw boundaries and write orders were all once children in somebody’s classroom, formal or informal. What they were taught to see as normal, as unquestionable, as sacred, mattered.

Lev’s morning assemblies and Amelia’s secret lessons are small acts set against large forces. Greene gives them narrative weight precisely because he understands how such acts accumulate. In his legal and public interest work, change often began with explaining a right to a client who did not know they had it, or with walking someone through a form. These are also lessons, just held at kitchen tables and office desks rather than school desks.

Fiction allows him to slow those moments down. A child realizing that letters form words. A teenager at Tikva standing under Israeli and Palestinian flags hung in the same doorway, feeling the discomfort and possibility of that gesture. A teacher deciding what to say and what to leave unsaid. These details are not decorative. They are the mechanisms by which a different future becomes possible, or impossible.

What Kind of Learning Are We Willing to Live with?

By the end of The Lev Effect and Pursuit of Happiness, there is no tidy resolution to the question of how political a classroom should be. Tikva remains contested ground. Amelia’s island moves toward revolution and remains deeply compromised. No narrator steps in to declare which lesson plans were correct.

What Greene’s work makes hard to believe is the idea that classrooms can ever be neutral. Every choice, from the stories assigned to the rituals performed, declares whose experience matters and whose can be ignored. Refusing to talk about colonialism or race is as political as addressing it. Teaching enslaved girls to read is not the same kind of act as drilling them in hymns about obedience.

Modern arguments about decolonizing curricula and resisting “wokism” tend to demand simple answers. Greene’s novels offer something more demanding: a recognition that teaching will always shape the moral and political horizons of the next generation, whether we own that fact or not.

The question his classrooms leave with the reader is not “can we keep politics out of school.” It is “what kind of politics are we already teaching, and are we willing to admit it.”

The Lev Effect keeps the life of a school at its center. Pursuit of Happiness lets its secret classroom appear only at the edge of a larger story about empire and revolt. Together they suggest that even when teaching looks like a subplot, it is still one of the quiet places where history begins.

More of Sheldon Greene’s reflections on law, history and education can be found on his 

Substack: https://sheldongreenee.substack.com/

https://www.sheldongreene.com/