Teach the Children Well ... or else.

 

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.