Do you
always hear what you heard? I don’t.
More than once, someone has said that I didn’t hear what I heard. Hearing isn’t just sound, it’s understanding.
There is a lot going on at the legislative level in a lot of states. The message of the month seems to be that parents don’t have enough control over the content of their kids’ education and that some textbooks need to be rooted out of the system. I’ve heard it on the news and read about it in newspaper blogs, but I simply scoffed, as one would if they hadn’t heard.
Sometimes, more often than I like, someone has to hit me upside the head and chisel my brain open, before I hear what I heard.
Charles Blow, a highly respected opinion writer for the NYT, opened my eyes, opened my head, the other night on one of the talk shows. I read his opinion piece in the paper the day before and moved on. When I heard him talk, it bothered me that what he had written hadn’t sunk in. Hearing him was a better way to hear him than reading him.
Much of the brouhaha at fractious school board meetings around the country is much ado about nothing, except the coming elections. It’s a full-on attempt to scare voters and create a further divide in the country.
Parents, governors, and legislators are concerned that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is taught in public schools. It isn’t. They are concerned that if anything but white history is taught in the schools it will make children uncomfortable. But, which children?
Most of the bills introduced in state legislatures around the country are designed to prevent white children from discomfort with the racial history of our country. Isn’t that a form of racism? What about the Black and brown kids, the Asians, the Native Americans, don’t they deserve to hear about the history of their country and about the way their ancestors were treated? Charles Blow suggested that most, if not all of these new laws are just Trojan horses. I agree.
I taught junior and senior high school U.S. history and other social studies courses for several years many years ago. Hindsight shows that I taught a white euro-centric version of our history. That is what the textbooks contained at the time. Winners write history. Large influential groups write history. School is where we teach culture, where it is practiced, and where it is inculcated. The content of the history books is the country of the future. Mao taught us that if you want to change a country, first take over the schools.
Our early history was replete with immigrants from northern Europe. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, formed our experiment at the intersection of what was and what was dreamed of. Jefferson believed all men are created equal while he owned hundreds of slaves. White history didn’t teach that. Grant owned a slave while he commanded the Union forces in their effort to stamp out the original sin of our nation. But, White history didn’t teach that, either. If one lives in a culture that is predominantly white and believes that we are a country for white people or only a certain type of Christian, then the true history of our country can be scary to those who don’t know it. What if we aren’t what we always said we were?
The mantra of the month is parental rights to control what is taught in the schools. Forget that it has always been that way. We elect school boards that hire teachers that are professionals and whose suggestions we should trust. No, this isn’t about the content of math books.
This is about scaring white suburban housewives and getting them to the polls in November. I wonder what the mantra will be next month.
I am waiting to hear it when I hear it.
