This op-ed by Monte F. Bourjaily IV was shared on October 13, 2023, on Colorado Newsline. The commentary originally appeared in the Virginia Mercury.
Fights over public education in Virginia and other states that propose to divert resources from public schools or limit the ideas students can explore threaten democracy at its roots.
I am a Fairfax County, Virginia, public school teacher and a parent. I teach courses on government, American history and law in society. As such, I am a civics teacher and I take seriously my job to teach young people how to engage effectively as citizens in our democracy.
Attacks on public education that seek to defund and muzzle it divert our attention away from the civic ideas on which the United States was founded: equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, within the rule of law. Public school is the forum for teaching young people how to engage with the contentious ideas that sustain our democracy. That training is necessary for democratic self-rule and public school ensures the access promised by the Declaration of Independence.
Parental voice and local decision making are essential elements of American education. Parents don’t just want an adequate education for their children; most want one that is excellent and prepares their children to thrive as adults. They want teachers who care about their children, make the classroom a safe place and who nourish their children intellectually and emotionally. This is a challenge that we teachers accept every day. We teach content, but we also monitor and mentor our students. The content we teach is based on standards and curriculum set by the state, local school boards and other entities like the College Board.
As teachers, our responsibility is to develop lessons that engage students and encourage them to learn. Each day, I reflect as I teach, asking myself if my students are learning what I am teaching. The materials I use are calculated to meet curricular expectations and what I judge to be my students’ abilities, skills, needs and interests. My goal is to ensure learning through engagement.
What I seek to cultivate is a habit of learning that will last a lifetime. My content is a perfect tool for teaching students skills of rigorous inquiry using methods like close reading and the Socratic Method to refine their capacity to think critically. As a teacher of American history and government, I am charged with teaching students how to evaluate and understand for themselves what it means to be American, including how our democracy developed from its colonial roots to the constitutional system Americans have refined over the last 250 years.
I take seriously the question Alexander Hamilton posed in Federalist 1 when he asked, whether Americans, as a model to the world, “are really capable or not of establishing good government by reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” I embrace James Madison’s assertion in Federalist 10 that suppressing disagreeable ideas is worse than the discord of contention from the competition of ideas. The solution Hamilton, Madison and the Antifederalists pointed to, is the rule of law framework of the Constitution and Bill of Rights that “we the people” ratified and live within today.
Public school social studies and literature classrooms are constructed and controlled spaces for developing students’ capacities of “reflection and choice” through the study and examination of human nature, the actual behaviors of real people, the interpretations of those telling stories to make sense of the world and the systems and structures that emerge as a consequence of human action. What all of the Founders understood was that human behavior was messy and self-interested. They had the wisdom to see self-interest as a virtue, not a vice, and harness it as energy to drive forward the American experiment.
This is what I teach my students; or rather, it is what I hope they will discover and appreciate as a result of our study. To understand why the contentiousness of America’s politics is generally healthy but repellent to authoritarian regimes that claim to be democracies, students must study the very issues that cause Americans to disagree with one another and learn healthy methods of civic engagement. Banning materials and the study of concepts, because they make some uncomfortable or are labeled “divisive,” undermines the very purpose of education for democracy. For our government to impose these restrictions is to do what the Chinese Communist Party did as part of the crackdown in Hong Kong when it eliminated Liberal Studies classes.
Restricting materials and ideas chills teachers and effective teaching. Worse, it denies students the access to ideas and their First Amendment right to know. This is an insidious form of government control called a memory law and is reminiscent of George Orwell’s “1984.”
This is not just a constitutional issue — it is practical. It is reasonable and expected to ask, “what is developmentally appropriate for students?” I ask myself this question when I choose readings and set expectations as I plan lessons. If government, however, bans students’ access to developmentally appropriate ideas or materials out of fear of what students will think or learn, it disarms young learners, leaving them vulnerable in the future to an adult with a competing interest and willingness to exploit your son or daughter’s ignorance.
See the public school classroom for what it is: the academic equivalent of the athletic field, auditorium stage, or wrestling room. Rather than reduce our support for public schools and the teachers who work to nurture our children, we should work together — teachers, parents, administrators and politicians — to ensure that public school classrooms are and remain intentionally constructed spaces equipped as the training ground for contentious, democratic self-rule.
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