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| David - Michelangelo |
This morning’s (April 1, 2023) Global News app is
reporting the resignation of the UCP’s
election candidate in Lethbridge West, Alberta. Apparently, the United
Conservative Party determined a video she posted online—including a claim that
teachers were showing pornography to their students and influencing them toward
gender ambiguity—was harmful to their party’s chances in the next election. She
is said to have resigned her candidacy without apologizing for the
unsubstantiated claims in the video.
I recall another story of a principal,
I think, who was fired over a question of whether one of his teachers should be
disciplined for showing a picture of the full-frontally-nude David
statue by Michelangelo.
Both stories lack a great deal of what’s called context, but that won’t prevent us from dividing into camps on the subject matter, which is typical of the great culture wars plaguing our politics these days. For one, the telling evidence of what lesson plan included the displaying of the David photo, or what pornographic imagery and teaching happened in which classroom and by which teachers, none of that seems necessary enough to be entered into the question which could—and here’s an important consideration—be real concerns.
Teachers (not unlike police, businesspersons, doctors, airline pilots, etc., etc.) are drawn from a diverse population and sooner or later, a pedophile, a misogynist, a sociopath or a poorly- informed-and-so-incompetent practitioner will creep into the mix of the profession. At the same time, the child-guiding prerogatives of biological parents versus schools and teachers provides a greenhouse for the growing of conflict: it always has.
Good public schools educate for citizenship in the country in which
they exist; they teach about ideologies but don’t indoctrinate their students
in any but the one under which teachers, students and administrators are governed
at the time.
Based on the content of a single news story,
do I have the right to an opinion on its meaning, let alone to repeat my
interpretation online or to people I meet? If I spread a biased interpretation
of an event, a person or an idea, am I doing the same thing as the people who
fired that principal, or who made a video about teachers teaching pornography and
gender fluidity? Rushing to judgment, that is, while either neglecting or
discarding context?
What would have happened if the UCP
candidate for Lethbridge West had gone to the local school principal and said, “I
have a concern about how sexuality and gender are being taught in this school.
Can we talk about that?” What if she’d done that before making the accusatory
video, and if the principal had called the involved teachers to a meeting with
this person to explain their curriculum choices on gender-related subjects,
thereby giving both positions a context?
Agnes and I were in Belfast for a few days during the “troubles” period in the 1980s. Our MCC colleague there told us that the teenaged boys particularly were addicted to conflict. If a week should go by with no smashing, burning, fighting, etc., they would invariably fill the gap with some act of violence; the previous week, a group of them had tossed a transit driver out of his bus, driven the bus out to an open area and set it on fire.
Addiction to conflict can be as real as a dependence on cocaine.
There’s much in our era in the West urging
us toward a combat of wills, undoubtedly fed by a tendency to seek out
incidents—unsupported by evidence, if need be—that act as bullets in the
culture war: woke against not-woke and vice versa, for instance.
I have acres of sympathy for the people
whom we’ve mandated to educate our children in such a time. I imagine myself a
music teacher in a smalltown elementary school. A faction of the population
listens to classical music and considers country music beneath them. Another
group maintains that this is a country-music kind of town, and the music
curriculum should reflect that in its choices. Most parents are indifferent to either faction.
As the music teacher, I’ve felt the
pressure both ways, and having my own tastes and my unique training and
history, I can’t for the life of me think of a way to satisfy both sides.
Banjos or flutes? Violins or guitars? Surely teaching kids to understand and
appreciate music doesn’t boil down to this kind of choice, does it?
The principal calls me into his office and
relays the concerns—primarily those expressed by the loudest faction—and proposes
some 50/50 arran…
… but I’ve stopped listening, daydreaming
about how I might live a relaxed life by giving private instrument lessons and playing in the
city orchestra….
“... what do you think?” he says.
“I think I quit,” I reply.
And I do.
