Sometimes professionals must set aside personal views to effectively do their job. Members of the military do it. Lawyers do it. Journalists do it.
Even Ari Fleischer does it.
So why should public schoolteachers, responsible for disseminating information to children in an unbiased manner, be allowed to use their position (and considerable authority) in the classroom as a bully pulpit?
Recently, an Evanston political organization, Neighbors for Peace, lobbied Evanston Township High School to allow teachers to present their own political views in the classroom. The group said an Evanston School District 202 policy from 1984, which prohibits teachers from wearing political buttons, infringes on the teachers’ right to free speech.
According to ETHS official policy: “School employees will not use the classroom as a forum to present only one side of a political issue.”
I never realized how much power teachers wielded until I taught seventh-grade English one summer.
At a parent-teacher conference, one parent said she didn’t understand some grammatical corrections I made to her daughter’s essay, and she asked me to explain them. Never once did she question anything I said about grammar, politics or anything else. I was just a 20-year-old kid with a summer job, with only two years of college under my belt. Yet this woman — still struggling to earn her GED equivalent — was prepared to accept anything I told her. And I’m talking about an adult woman, not the impressionable 12-year-olds I taught.
Should teachers’ right to free expression be limited? After all, some teachers could use this power to unfairly influence their students’ thoughts.
For example, in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, all education served to indoctrinate students into Baath Party ideology. History texts, English lessons — even the notebook covers and murals on the wall — were used as propaganda. Without critical-thinking skills, how will these children be able to function in an Iraqi democracy, where they will have to choose between different political candidates and philosophies? The world will soon see.
I had a history teacher in high school who made her students debate current issues. Mrs. Fitzgerald never took sides, but when necessary she challenged us with information that contradicted our views and taught us to refute opposing arguments.
We often asked her for her opinion. But she always answered that we should learn to decide for ourselves.
But coming to terms with your own views also requires challenging yourself. David Weigel, publisher of the Northwestern Chronicle, makes it a point to take one class each quarter with a professor who disagrees with his conservative philosophy.
“I’m part of this network of conservative college journalists who correspond with each other, and I noticed that some are more brain-washed than others,” Weigel said. “Some of them don’t bother reading Noam Chomsky or Karl Marx because they assume that they will disagree with it.”
Knowing opposing arguments only helps a student learn to defend his or her own views. How can we expect future Evanston social movements to accomplish anything if their fledgling members at ETHS never learn to defend their beliefs?
