Please Don't Talk About The Simpsons Unless You Know What You're Talking About
The Simpsons and the Noble Lie
HEY! So I’m thinking of starting to blog here again. At some point if I get my act together the updates will be regular, in any case, I’m just happy I wrote this. Feels good to finish something.
Anyway, enjoy and Free Palestine!
There were two classes of children when I was going to public school: the one’s who’s parents were compassionate and shielded their offspring from the dangers of the world, and the ones who threw them to the hyenas and let them watch The Simpsons. I wanted desperately to be chewed up and left bleeding by the ungodly creatures that roamed the savannah, laughing hysterically as I watched Maggie Simpson crucify her father with a nail gun. . I wanted the forbidden fruit, and when I tasted it (my uncle got me a VHS collection of the first season and my parents just gave up), there was no going back.
What I am trying to say is that unlike things like flossing, regular exercise, or microplastics, The Simpsons is something I care about and take seriously.
According to Fortune, some of the 100 students that were protesting the NYU’s involvement in Israeli apartheid have been asked to write reflection papers as a form of disciplinary punishment. These are standard “double spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman” academic papers that ask the students to reflect on their values and how they affect their decisions. It should be noted that the students are not allowed to use the papers to justify their actions, which essentially turns the process into an act of formalized grovelling.
Some other students have been asked to do an “Ethos Integrity Series,” which includes this section:
One section is based on an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Lisa uncharacteristically cheats on a test and is wracked by guilt. Principal Skinner, meanwhile, wants to keep the cheating under wraps so the school can get a grant. Questions in the ethics workbook include “What, if anything, could Lisa have done or thought about to make better decisions?” and “What are the potential and actual consequences of Principal Skinner’s decisions?”
Without seeing the entire module, but having seen this episode (“Lisa Gets an ‘A’”), I feel that asking this question as a way to have the students condemn their own actions is wildly ironic. If the students are suggested to respond by saying Lisa cheats on the test out of laziness and Skinner covers it up out of greed, this is not only one-dimensional understanding of the show, but a flawed view of human nature.
There are some plot details missing in Fortune’s article, so I’d like to include them here. The episode starts with Lisa getting sick. While she recovers, she ends up playing video games and neglecting her homework. She becomes so focused on gaming that she lies about her health to continue. Eventually, Marge has had enough of her ruse and takes her to school on the same day she’s supposed to write a test on The Wind in the Willows, the very book she neglected to read.
Panicking, she asks to be excused and runs into Bart, who takes her to the boys bathroom. Here we see Nelson Muntz is running a black-market for test answers. She takes the answers, aces the test (“A+++”), and as a result has won the school a financial grant. Ashamed, Lisa confesses to Principal Skinner that she had cheated and that the grant money is ill-gotten. Upon hearing this, Skinner tells her that she must keep this information to herself so the school can secure the grant, as the school is desperately in need of funding.
So back to the initial questions:
“What, if anything, could Lisa have done or thought about to make better decisions?”
It’s easy to see Lisa’s cheating arising as a result of her playing video games and neglecting her homework (nevermind that we’re currently seeing a wave of concern over how children are becoming addicted to digital media), but how was she even able to cheat? Well, Nelson is able to sell these test answers because the same tests are being used over and over. This is because the test is based on an educational practice that treats learning as a form of rote memorization (The first question on the test is: “Mr. Toad must [blank] his [blank] so he can [blank] his [blank],” what you would call a comprehension question). It also possible to infer that Nelson’s business is coming from an ongoing demand for these questions, meaning that all (if not most) of the tests the students are being given are similar. Tests like these are cheaper for schools since they can be re-used over and over instead of having to write new ones. This is a form of education that requires little engagement from teachers, but actually enables cheating. It’s no wonder Ms. Hoover is drinking while she’s grading them, the school isn’t even asking her to be a teacher, just a babysitter who hands out tests (“I got a B!”, “You got an F Ralph, I must have spilled some Kahlúa”).
Of course, we wouldn’t expect third graders to write an in-class essay on Wind in the Willows, but other forms of learning could be applied. They could be tasked with re-enacting scenes in a group, making art, or writing new chapters or endings. The problem with these kinds of assessments is that they are subjective, time-consuming, labour-intensive to grade, and — from what we know about Springfield Elementary school — the funding for this kind of education is simply not there. The building itself is falling apart, the tetherballs are literal cinderblocks, and the periodic tables are promotional ones from Oscar Meyer that feature elements such as “Balonium.”1
This is why Principal Skinner forces Lisa to keep lying: there is simply too much at stake. Although, yes for the sake of argument, the mismanagement of the school could be seen as his own fault, given that he declares he has already spent the grant money on an electronic scoreboard for the football team - an unnecessary purchase. That said, it doesn’t change how the school’s atrocious lack of funding is what both allowed Lisa to cheat (using the same test over and over), and incentivized it (school funding is tied to student performance).
OK. Now here’s question 2:
“What are the potential and actual consequences of Principal Skinner’s decisions?”
In the same way that the audience watching The Simpsons are not inclined to think about the state of the classroom where Lisa’s cheating took place (a school in dire need of support), the students at NYU are not supposed to discuss the matter they are protesting (an ongoing genocide). The focus of these reflections are of the students own actions, not the circumstances that lead to them. While the vast majority of these campus protests have been peaceful, in the case of NYU, the school has argued that because the protests were unauthorized and featured “disorderly, disruptive, and antagonizing behaviour,” the students had to be arrested in order to to maintain the safety of everyone on campus. This may be the case, but when pro-Palestine speech has been silenced for decades, more peaceful forms of protest have eventually given way to more radical ones. To suggest that radical action was the first choice of these activists is to willingly ignore how events like teach-ins and town halls were cancelled by university administrations all over the US before the encampments were built. The administration’s argument against more radical forms of protest is always one that values stability over justice. They are the pleas of MLK’s white moderate who admits that yes, I hear you, things are bad, but can you not do this during a “more convenient season[?]”
The difference between the protestors and Lisa, is that they have refused to wait for a more convenient time. For Skinner, by avoiding the issue of educational funding entirely, they have decided to fund the school in the most convenient way possible: without upsetting any balance of power.
What these questions are asking the students to reflect upon is the moral validity of “the noble lie.” The easy way to frame this question is to suggest that it’s weighing the cost of the greater good (keeping the school open) at the expense of “the truth,” but framing the question in this way would be ignoring an even greater problem. In the episode, Springfield Elementary is in desperate need of funds, but has to attain them with one hand tied behind its back. This poor distribution of educational funding is simply taken for granted. Since it cannot be changed, the problem rests on the morals of the individual characters, deferring power over to a crumbling public education system, and the oncoming a private system that benefits from its demise.
With this, we can see how Skinner’s plot to cheat his way into funding the school has two messages:
It is morally right to lie in order to ensure the wellbeing of others (The “greater good”).
Schools should be awarded funding based on student performance, not availability of resources.
This episode airing in 1998, attaching funding to standardized testing became policy in the US under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act has been criticized heavily by educational researchers and teachers alike, and is widely regarded as a failure of educational policy. The resulting pressure teachers faced to keep standardized test scores up is argued to have played a role in the Atlanta 2009 cheating scandal, in many ways a real-life version of this Simpsons episode. These are the consequences of Skinner’s actions: the idea that the actual students of Springfield elementary are not worth funding because they are simply not smart enough. The noble lie upheld by Skinner and the surrounding community is not that Lisa got an A+++ without cheating, it’s that a deeply rotten system is actually fair.
At the end of the episode, before the school is given the grant, Lisa can no longer hold in the truth and blurts out that she had cheated. Ironically, the comptroller presenting the grant is so moved by her speech that he awards the school the grant anyway. We then quickly learn that the entire ceremony was all an elaborate ruse put together by the school and the community in order to ensure they’d receive the grant without risking any interruptions from Lisa. The grant money is considered to be of such vital importance to the school that they cannot risk Lisa putting it in jeopardy. Despite Lisa’s attempt to do the moral thing and take accountability for her decision to cheat, confession is of no consequence to anyone but her. She confesses because she has faith in a moral system of law that will reward good deeds and punish bad ones, but that’s all an illusion. At the end of the episode, what we ultimately witness is the unfortunate situation of morality deferring to power.
This is the very thing the protesters at NYU already saw happening but by harnessing their collective power, they were able to challenge its institutional counterpart. After looking at images of IDF soldiers looting the homes of civilians, mocking the suffering of Palestinians, and destroying universities, hospitals, mosques, and schools they decided to protest their institution’s complicity. For those who were arrested, silenced, and disciplined, they are like Lisa bearing witness to injustice only to be told to keep their mouths shut. Here we have the university take on the role of Principal Skinner, both silencing the protesters, and refusing to condemn the violence perpetrated against the people of Gaza. The former action tells the lie that these protests are unjust, the latter tells the lie that the university and its administration are a force for social justice.
It’s clear from the protests that the NYU students had decided that these lies were no longer noble.
NOTE: This is an interesting example of the corporatization of public education, which has been used by the oil and gas industry to try and prevent children learning about climate change. If you think I’m reading into this too much (I probably am) I would refer you to the episode “Lisa’s Wedding” which takes place in 2010 (what was then “the future”) which features hundreds of kids packed into a single class watching “Pepsi Presents: Addition and Subtraction.”