Education or tug of war?

By James Nall

While I was doing some work on a former teacher's home, she and I got into a discussion about my cousin, who preceded me by a year in her class. She said he would often challenge her on government and history and that sometimes he seemed to know more on the subjects than she did.

She went on to say that she would engage him in debate on the subject matter in which they disagreed. The respect she showed for her students' opinions played an important role in their education.

Thanks to the intervention of central planning, teachers today cannot be as liberal as she was in the classroom. The opinion of the state is all that matters. Teachers and textbooks must reflect that opinion and must suppress opposing views. Therefore, debate simply is not acceptable.

Today there is a tug of war going on between the puritanical Christian right and the puritanical politically correct left. How teachers can perform at all in this political environment amazes me, but many still do, and that is to their credit.

Diane Ravitch, in her book "Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," points out that "the right is interested in censoring topics, while the left wants to control language and images. For both, the intention is to try to engineer social behavior by creating a hermetic bubble around the learning environment. The right believes that avoiding descriptions of bad behavior on the page will lead to more moral behavior in real life; the left believes that describing an ideal society without prejudice or poverty will help bring it about. Either way, the purpose of education is betrayed because children are denied access to reality. Of course, since they are thinking individuals, the students don't buy it and are bored to tears."

If Ravitch is right, which I think she is, then why do we most often put the blame for being a poorly educated society on the teachers? Shouldn't we be leveling our sights on this political environment in the classroom, created by central planners who seem to know next to nothing about true education?

Why not allow schools to have open discussions and debates on any subject matter? Who says Ted Kennedy and George Bush know more about educating children than anyone else in the country?

We watched as central planning destroyed the Soviet Union. Yet we are forcing our children to conform to the same programming.

Although I'm against having a public education system and think that all schools should be private, I believe that since we do have public schools we should allow teachers in them the freedom to teach without interference by political expediency.

I have fond memories and some not-so-fond memories of my fifth grade teacher. I received the hardest whipping I ever got in school that year.

However, I credit her, along with my family, for instilling in me the want-to-learn attitude instead of the need-to-conform attitude that today's children are being bombarded with.

Public schools, caught in the tug of war between the Christian right and the politically correct left, are programming children instead of educating them so that they can think and continue to learn throughout their lifetimes.

James Nall is a Marble Hill, Mo., resident.