So, You’re Not Like Hitler, Then?

A couple of news items caught my attention today, and I have been going over the situation in my head. Frankly, I’m not sure that anyone involved in education can really stop thinking of this one story.

A high school geography teacher in Colorado has been suspended (with pay) pending investigations into his alleged infringement on his students’ rights to free thought and education. Urged by his conservative father, a student recorded his teacher without permission, and turned the tapes over to a local radio station. It seems that this dastardly Enemy Against the State had told his class that the American-supremacy rhetoric used by Bush made him sound Hitler, and that the U.S. was now one of the most violent and dangerous nations in the planet. To be fair, he was also recorded telling his class they were free to disagree with him.

My personal questions (such as “How is what he said not true?”) aside, I am in a state of anger and shock over this case. It is part of a growing movement in the States to root out the “leftists” who supposedly control secondary and post-secondary education today. In some cases, these folks are paying bounties on evidence of subversion in the classroom!

In short, because his views are in discord with those of the conservatives who support Bush, this man stands to lose his job!

One can say that he shouldn’t have been discussing his personal views in class. OK. However, I would point out, first, that nearly everything we teach in classrooms reflects someone’s personal beliefs in some way. Further, if students have parents like this, perhaps it is better that they hear different views in the classroom. Finally, if these groups who seek out and inform on “leftist radicals” claim to care about academic freedom, then they really need to sort out their values.

Our ability to teach is comprised completely of our individual personalities and beliefs. Ideally, each one of us has worked to obtain the qualifications needed to teach in whatever forum we stand in. If we do not insist upon cramming our beliefs down the throats of our students, recognize that they are impressionable and value our roles as educators instead of propaganda mongers, then we have every right to approach subjects like human beings, rather than automatons spouting the directives of our superiors and the political establishment.

The machine that had the greatest control over its educational system in history ended up churning out thousands of Hitler Youth and plunging the world into a darkness from which we still have not recovered. And we don’t even have to go that far to find an example of such organized witch-hunting. Has fifty years erased the memory of the McCarthy era and its destructive legacy? Or how about the universities and officials who opposed civil rights and those academics who supported equality for all citizens? These are not models to which today’s governments should aspire.

And we are, every one of us, obligated to be ever vigilant against this threat. That is the responsibility and the privilege of every free citizen.

There are correct modes of behaviour in the classroom, but the attempt to stomp down the healthy interrogation of a political mandate serves to kill democracy and the intellectual freedom upon which our schools and universities are ideally based. I do not intimately know all the particulars of this case, but there have been dozens of reports of pro-Bush interference into the rights of teachers and professors in the United States. We are on the brink of a catastrophe in our educational system, and it doesn’t stem from the leftist control over these institutions.

On the same day that this story came out, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the government’s insistence that any university not allowing the armed forces to recruit on their campus would lose their federal funding. These campuses protested Army recruitment, not because they hated Bush, but because they refused to allow an organization that maintains a prejudiced policy against Gays and Lesbians to advertise itself on their campuses. Freedom, like education, it seems, is a hostage in a battle over definitions and limitations over those freedoms.

The right to free thought and speech doesn't seem to swing both ways in America. (Not to mention the right to pursue happiness.)

The same government that hides behind the freedoms instituted by the framers of the Constitution twists these laws to their own advantage and to advance their own neo-conservative values, and they mean to haul this right into the classroom. And ban anyone who dares to stand in its way.

And then they have the gall to insist that leftists control the planet!

When a conservative mainstream disallows liberal views, including the questioning of the President’s office (an office paid for by all Americans of every political stripe), and pulls funding from universities who have legitimate concerns over allowing discriminatory bodies access to their campuses, while tolerating, I must add, clear hate-speech, such as the garbage found on some neo-con websites, something is amiss in the system.

It is not the fear that leftists will conquer the education system in the United States that haunts me. In many ways, it is quite the opposite.

And it chills me to the core.