Book Learnin'

 Horace Mann believed that political stability and social harmony depended on education. "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one."

That's the Father of Public Education talking there. I should know, since I've spent most of my adult life within walls and halls named for him. When I first got my job at Horace Mann Elementary, my mother sent me a slim volume entitled On The Art of Teaching. After skimming through it briefly, I did what every child does with notes related to school: I shoved it in my backpack where it stayed for a dozen years without much thought. 

I am thinking about that book a lot these days. I am thinking a lot about being a teacher in a public school. I am thinking a lot more about it than the tiny brains that would like to see public education go away. 

At the end of January of this year, the convicted felon currently taking up space in the White House issued an Executive Order entitled, Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling. Our public schools have been accused of "Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children." This comes as some news to me, since I struggle along with my colleagues each and every day to try and find time to teach them how to read, write, add and subtract. If those are "harmful and false ideologies," then we are guilty as charged. 

But we all know what the former game show host is getting at. He's pointing a finger at public schools for shining a light on the historical shortcomings of our democratic ideal. It's the alphabet soup of CRT and DEI that terrifies him and his fear-mongering rich white neo-conservatives. Suggesting that, at times, the United States wasn't so great is the bedrock of the Make America Great Again campaign, right? This suggests that at some point America wasn't so great. 

But let's not leave that kind of distinction left in the hands of professional educators. Instead, let's have the wife of the former head wrestler of the World Wildlife Fund decide how things should roll. Like heads. She recently offered twenty-five thousand dollar buyouts to three hundred employees of the Department of Education. The message is pretty clear: Jump before you're pushed. 

I looked and I looked in Horace Mann's book for wisdom on this matter, and there were quite a few from which to choose. But the one I will leave you with is this one: "The best teachers teach from the heart, not the book. The most ignorant are the most conceited."