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March 10, 2006
Can we please leave Hitler out of it?
It happened that a student was recording the class. The student told daddy and daddy told school officials. Then daddy got copies of the recording to the raging right-wing repressors. These blowhards of talk radio delighted in filling airtime with outrage about this supposedly classic example of how our public schools don't teach, but engage in anti-American indoctrination. The teacher was put on suspension, then about 150 students staged a brief walkout in support of him. Let us analyze the chief controversies: 1. What was a world geography teacher doing talking about contemporary politics and contemporary economics in the first place? Actually, geography is about more than where a place is and what kind of land it has. It fits in the broad "social studies" field. The dictionary says geography is "a science that deals with the description, distribution and interaction of the diverse physical, biological and cultural features of the earth's surface." A place's politics and economics often grow out of geography. So, a discussion of contemporary politics and economics can be appropriate in world geography class, but only if particularly timely or relevant. That seems to be the case here. The teacher led a discussion based on President Bush's State of the Union address the night before. You wouldn't want the teacher talking about contemporary American politics instead of geography every day. If it comes out that he spends all his time talking politics, he'd deserve his trouble. 2. The teacher ridiculed America as a "democracy, quote unquote" and said capitalist societies value profit over human compassion. The teacher was absolutely right in the first and incomplete on the latter. The United States applies democracy only indirectly. It allows people to vote for their favorite presidential candidate, but it reserves the vote that really counts for a few specially selected electors. Actually, these electors are free to vote as they choose, regardless of how their states voted. The candidate getting the most popular votes does not necessarily win. See: Gore, Albert Jr., 2000. As for the other, it is true that capitalism values survival of the fittest and profit. But the United States is not exclusively capitalistic. We mix free enterprise with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance. We're capitalists with hearts, and safety nets. We allow ourselves a dash of quasi-socialist underpinning. 3. The teacher said America was the most violent state on earth, with the most weapons of mass destruction. We're pretty violent, though not so much from the government down, but from person to person. In my little Southern city, we've had 13 murders in two months, mostly drug-related. We have bigger and better weapons than anyone, and while we customarily fight only in retaliation or to defend the oppressed, we did, after all, haul off and start a war in Iraq, then abuse prisoners. Others are clearly more violent, and certainly crueler. But those tend not to be states. They're groups or tribes. 4. The teacher said that Bush's rhetoric extolling America's superiority and advocating the unilateral imposition of our will sounds ethnocentric, maybe even a little like Hitler, though he stressed that, of course, Bush is far different from Hitler. Here the teacher was altogether wrong-headed. Bush is chauvinistic about imposing the America ideal, not about imposing the dominance of a race or ethnic group. Bush is overly and frightfully simplistic, yes. But he's far from evil. He's moderately welcoming to immigrants, for example. So, to conclude: Based on what I know so far, I'd send this teacher back to the classroom. But I'd put him on probation and advise him to try to establish broader context. I'd also tell him to think hard three times, then think again, and harder, before invoking Hitler in the same breath with anybody. Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
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