So says the Washington Post in the headline of a front page story in this morning’s paper edition. Naturally, the Post doesn’t consider it good news. The author< Hannah Natanson decries this “quiet censorship,” which she documents with six examples from different parts of the country.
But most of the examples serve only to show why the “quiet censorship” is good news — albeit diluted by the fact that the teachers didn’t quietly censor themselves sooner and, in some cases, have moved to different schools to avoid “censorship.”
Before looking at some of the Post’s case studies, let’s consider the merit, in general, of quiet — or self — censorship by teachers at the K-12 level. In my view, it’s not only a good thing, but often an imperative.
Teachers overstep their position when they present their personal opinions to a captive audience of pre-college students. This is true whether they state their opinion directly or present it by selecting books that advance their opinion, to the exclusion of books presenting a contrary view.
Suppose a high school teacher believes that whites are genetically superior to blacks. I’m confident the Post would agree that the teacher should not express this opinion in any pre-college classroom discussion of race (or of anything else). Neither should the teacher slant assigned reading to favor that view. In other words, he should self censor. If he doesn’t, the school should intervene. If it doesn’t, higher authorities should.
The same is true of less inflammatory opinions. A high school teacher with libertarian views should not try to advance that philosophy in an economics class, whether through expression of her opinion or through the reading she assigns. She should self censor. If she doesn’t, the school should intervene. If it doesn’t, higher authorities should.
The Post’s problem isn’t with “quiet censorship.” Rather, the Post is unhappy that some — even a few — left-wing teachers may be refraining from promoting views the Post agrees with.
The case studies the Post presents make this clear. The first one involves a history teacher from Iowa. He liked to have his eighth-grade students read “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is a leading critical race theorist.
Critical Race Theory isn’t history. It’s an interpretation — a theory — of history. Like Marxism, for example.
The Iowa teacher understood this, and understood that he was barred by Iowa law from teaching the CRT interpretation of history. But hoping to put the school superintendent in a box, he asked her:
Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say ‘“slavery was wrong” is not a fact but a stance, is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?
The superintendent didn’t say, but she did advise that teachers shouldn’t ask students “how does [slavery] make you feel?” or “does that make you feel bad?”
It’s clear, I think, that the teacher wouldn’t have been punished for saying “slavery is wrong,” nor should he have been punished for saying this. However, nothing was lost as a result of him not saying this because it goes without saying that slavery was wrong.
Thus, no educational purpose is served by such a statement, and I doubt the Iowa teacher ever made it to his students over the years. His question to the superintendent was nothing more than an attempted “gotcha.”
Furthermore, there is no valid educational purpose in asking students how slavery “makes them feel.” Feelings are a private matter. Students should be able to keep their feelings to themselves.
If there’s any purpose to asking about such “feelings” questions in this context, it’s probably to make students say they feel bad about America (over a practice that ended more than 150 years ago) and to elicit feelings of guilt. This is precisely what teachers should not be doing.
The second case study involves a teacher in North Carolina who had her students read Howard Zinn’s take on Christopher Columbus, which included excerpts from Columbus’ journal in which he said of the Indians he encountered, “they would make fine servants” and “with fifty men we could subjugate them all. . .” Zinn is the far left historian who wrote the badly slanted “A People’s History of the United States.”
What was the teacher’s reason for having students — “children” by her own account — read this material about Columbus? According to the Post, it was “to show how Columbus’ marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.”
Really? Does anyone believe that if Columbus had adopted a more tolerant and respectful approach to the Indians he encountered, our world would be different today?
The view this teacher wanted to inculcate in her students is absurd. But even if it were plausible — or solidly based — it would still be just an interpretation of history and thus something that shouldn’t be presented at the K-12 level — unless an opposing interpretation is also presented.
At the end of the school year, says the Post, the teacher moved to another school where she was “able to resume teaching the chapter by Zinn, including snatches of Columbus’s journal.” Unfortunately, then, this is not a case of quiet censorship.
In any event, the Post never explains why teachers should control the decision whether to teach children — their captive audience — American history according to Howard Zinn. In my view, this decision should be made higher up the chain and ultimately by the body politic.
In the third example, a Northern Virginia math teacher used her statistics class to present students with a data set on use of force by the police. The data, she told her students, show that “citizens of color” see higher rates of police use of force.
Of all the data sets the students could have analyzed, the teacher picked the one most directly associated with BLM themes. She used her class in statistics to provide information related to public policy from an anti-police perspective.
The teacher told the Post her goal was to show how math can be used “to reveal how society works.” If the teacher wanted to go down that road, she should have presented students with the analyses of someone like Heather Mac Donald which refute the suggestion that race explains when the police use force.
But what the teacher really should have done was resist the temptation to turn a high school statistics class into a study of American policing. In other words, she should quietly have censored herself.
One last example, and I’ll keep it brief. According to the Post:
A teacher at a North Carolina high school spent weeks developing a three-day unit on “identity power and subversion” for her semester-long social studies class. Students learned how racial, ethic, sexual and gender identities can be wielded to uphold or undermine those in power.
Faced with complaints from parents, the teacher decided not to keep teaching this unit.
That’s good news, for sure. Public school teachers should not be teaching students how to wield their “identities” — i.e. to indulge in identity politics — to undermine those in power — such as democratically elected officials. The bad news is that this sort of “action civics” is, I understand, fairly common in public schools.
Accordingly, we need more, not less, quiet censorship of K-12 teachers. If that doesn’t occur, we’ll need louder censorship.