My Sunday Feeling

 I don’t know about you.  But I’m glad that I don’t have a kid enrolled in the public school system in Texas.  Particularly in the Carroll Independent School District which is about 30 miles northwest of Dallas.  

First some background.  Texas recently passed a law that requires educators to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial issues.” Now, let me state that as a general proposition I have no problem with this concept.  Indeed, having actually taught before, I like to think that I did just that.  If there were legitimate opposing viewpoints on whatever issue was before the class.  In fact, being a lawyer I was in my glory at times like those because I could basically take any side of an issue and argue for it.  And if I couldn’t do that, then I would challenge the positions taken on either side.  There aren’t many 17 year olds that can stand up to cross-examination.

Indeed one of my proudest moments was when a kid that I had eviscerated earlier in the day came up to me in the hall and said, “You know, just when I think you’re a liberal then you sound like a conservative.  And then after sounding like a conservative, you say stuff that sounds like you’re a liberal. I can’t figure you out.”  I put my arm around him.  “That must mean I’m doing my job,” I said.

Education rarely consists of indoctrination.  At least not to my way of thinking. You need to let kids kick stuff around.  Come to their own conclusions.  But just because you encourage robust debate in a classroom does not mean that all positions/theories/what- have- you rise to a sufficient level of seriousness or credibility to be given equal dignity in the classroom.

Which brings me back to the Carroll ISD whose director of curriculum, during a trading on the new law got caught on tape saying “Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”

There have been Holocaust deniers since before I was a little kid.  And they have, at least up until now, been rightly regarded as a bunch of bigots and kooks.  And now in Texas their lunacy has to be taught if a teacher introduces a class to Elie Wiesel or Anne Franke?  

I assume we are talking denial of the most documented (Germans being Germans after all) act of genocide in the history of the world.  I confess that I am not widely read in “other perspectives” on the Holocaust.  Perhaps there is literature out there that suggests that while it may have happened “it wasn’t as bad as all that.” Or maybe that given what Hitler knew at the time he thought it was an expedient strategy.  I have actually heard of this one. As for me, I reject any theory that requires me to walk around in the head of Adolf Hitler to make it work.

But you get the point I was belaboring.  What other intellectually defensibile perspective on Shoah can there be?  There is none.

But arguing for “perspective” or “fairness” has long been the special provence of those on the wrong side of history.  When I was a kid I was told that the slaves were “better off” over here than in their native lands.  When it comes to the Civil War, one man’s act of treason is another man’s “Lost Cause.”  And most recently, there is about a hard core third of the country that believes that the 2020 election was stolen despite absolutely no evidence in that regard, that horse de-wormer works just as well as the COVID vaccine and that the insurrection of January 6 was an act of peaceful protest.  

And that Donald Trump will be “restored” to the Presidency despite there being absolutely no machinery for that action in the United States Constitution.

The inestimable Charles P. Pierce referred to the prevalence of this kind of thinking as “Idiot America” in a book by the same name he wrote some 10 years ago.  Boy, did Uncle Charlie see this coming.   

I hope the lady from the school district got crossed up or maybe just made an exceedingly invidious comparison. But rightly or wrongly she was the mouthpiece for the school district. Where they are required to teach idiocy as just another “perspective”in Idiot America.  

Can the Arkansas state legislature be far behind?