The past six weeks of the presidential contest have already constituted a long year, and we’ve still got a long way to go. Voters will have to choose between two parties that have ditched any pretense of fiscal responsibility; seem alternately naïve and cavalier about the threats posed by China, Russia, and Iran; and treat respect for constitutional niceties regarding elections, an independent judiciary, or the rule of law as a disposable matter of convenience. It doesn’t help that Donald Trump is pathological and Kamala Harris unprincipled, or that both are frequently incoherent, engaged in a “cynical pander-off”, and most appealing when they’re kept under wraps or reading off a teleprompter.

But that’s a general lament. My education-specific concern is that many educators seem intent on encouraging students to set aside their critical faculties and treat this contest as a noble crusade between the forces of light and dark. Indeed, it’s not hard to find educators unabashedly urging colleagues to use classrooms as a platform to promote personal ideological and political agendas.

Am I arguing that educators must find a way to steer clear of the election? Of course not. Is there a way to wade into these issues that’s non-partisan and invites exploration rather than exhortation? Of course there is. But what tends to predominate are urgent calls for educators to take a side—and operate not as custodians of youthful inquiry but as unapologetically political actors. Indeed, teachers union presidents, academic associations, and teacher surveys make clear that too many have embraced the notion that pedagogy is (and should be) explicitly political. That kind of teaching-cum-advocacy is a disservice to learners and exacerbates our tribal divides.

There’s a healthier, more civically responsible way for educators to address the election. I was jarringly reminded of this the other day when I once again finished Joe Klein’s roman à clef Primary Colors (a book I seem to have started picking up every four years like clockwork). Unlike so much boilerplate political fiction, Klein’s novel of the ’92 Bill Clinton campaign is notable for how viscerally it captures the stew of ambition, belief, delusion, decency, sin, sincerity, compassion, and conviction that defines democratic politics.

If educators are going to wade into causes, candidates, and electoral contests, they’d do well to spend more time wrestling with that complexity and far less on plaster saints and banal bogeymen. What’s that look like? Well, in Primary Colors’ final pages, Jack Stanton (Klein’s faux-Clinton) offers a soliloquy that’s both a master class in rationalizing one’s failings and one of the most telling accounts of democratic leadership I’ve ever read. Stanton tells his disillusioned aide-de-camp:

Only certain kinds of people are cut out for this work—and, yeah, we are not princes, by and large. . . . Two-thirds of what we do is reprehensible. This isn’t the way a normal being acts. We smile, we listen. . . . We do our pathetic little favors. We fudge when we can’t. We tell them what they want to hear. . . . We live in an eternity of false smiles—and why? Because it’s the price you pay to lead. You don’t think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was a president? He had to tell his little stories and smile his shit-eating, backcountry grin. He did it all just so he’d get the opportunity, one day, to stand in front of the nation and appeal “to the better angels of our nature.” That’s when the bullshit stops.

As a long-ago civics teacher, I’ll once again submit that it would be better for all of us if we taught history and politics this frankly, if we routinely discussed Lincoln and Washington and Roosevelt (and Harris and Trump) with this kind of candor. We should teach students to recognize that motives are tangled and often self-serving, this has been the case since the nation’s founding, and it’s equally true today even of lionized advocates and activists. We should teach students to regard all of it with a mixture of skepticism, empathy, and grudging respect. Democratic educators should not be in the business of nurturing credulous fanatics or fueling fever dreams. Indeed, anyone sure that America’s future is on the ballot this year would do well to recall that the same has been said many times dating back to Adams-Jefferson in 1800.

That kind of awareness can create room for reflection, tempering certainty and giving students more room to ask and inquire. When taught that the world is on the knife’s edge of catastrophe, attentive students feel obligated to pick a side and rush to the barricades. An education that suggests that these issues are less clear-cut, the motives murkier, and the claims more deserving of scrutiny can help to foster honest discourse and identify common ground.

There’s a remarkable speech, delivered by Freddy Picker (Klein’s faux-Perot), which I wish educators would adopt as a leitmotif. As the mania for his candidacy is building, Picker addresses a stadium crowd. He tells them:

Look, could you do me a favor and not cheer so loud? No, I really mean it. I really want everyone to calm down. And I guess I mean everyone. I guess I mean the press, and the TV folks, and my colleagues. . . . I think we all need to calm down. This is a really terrific country, but we get a little crazy sometimes. I guess the craziness is part of what makes us great, it’s part of our freedom. But we have to watch out. We have to be careful about it. There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to continue this—this high-wire act, this democracy. If we don’t calm down, it all may just spin out of control. I mean, the world keeps getting more complicated and we keep having to explain it to you in simpler terms, so we can get our little oversimplified explanations on the evening news. Eventually, instead of even trying to explain it, we just give up and sling mud at each other—and it’s a show, it keeps you watching, like you watch a car wreck or maybe wrestling. . . . We don’t know any other way to get you all riled up, to get you out to vote. But there are some serious things we have to talk about now. There are some decisions we have to make, as a people, together. And it’s gonna be hard to make them if we don’t slow this thing down a little, calm it down, have a conversation amongst ourselves.

How’s that for a mantra when educators teach about this fall’s election? “Harris v. Trump ’24: This is a really terrific country, but we get a little crazy sometimes.”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”