Wordplaygrounds

Wordplaygrounds

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Teachable Moments -- A new monthly series on this blog



How do we weigh teacher autonomy against the wishes of the community?  I raised this question last month at a meeting attended by parents, teachers, and students.  

The words were barely out of my mouth when a parent calmly said there was no possible tension because teachers are employed to carry out the wishes of the community.  Her certainty took all the air out of the topic, and a new topic took the group in a new direction.  Inwardly, though, I wondered if she’d ever heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial or the less sensational but widely hated initiatives such as No Child Left Behind?    
          I must confess that as a parent I’d find abhorrent a teacher who propagandized on behalf of a political candidate, say, or who espoused views that are way beyond community norms.  Think, for example, of a well known Holocaust denier who served as a tenured professor at Northwestern University.  Or a teacher who dismissed evolution as mere speculation.  But the issues are rarely so black and white.  (Another parent at the meeting wryly observed that her community’s only undisputed value was to get kids into college without raising property taxes!)  With many issues I’d be hard pressed to know exactly what the community norms were.  More complicating still are issues in which the community is divided.  Is the teacher to shy away from such issues altogether or adopt a neutral stance? 
         As a teacher I’d find it impossible to live within such guidelines.  Yes, I am employed by my local community and hired by my school in part to carry out their wishes.  But communities are making a big mistake if they wish to hire only automatons who parrot mindless scripts and who never think outside the ideological boundaries of their communities.  The issue, it seems to me, is akin to that of the elected official.  Is the public servant to poll his or her constituents and vote accordingly,  or to act in accord with his or her own set of morals and intelligence.
         This issue was tackled in 1774 by the eminent British statesman Edmund Burke, whose political writings greatly influenced our own founding fathers.  In considering the proper role of public servants, Burke distinguished between mere delegates “who are not supposed to hew against the grain of public opinion.”  Such delegates must always vote in line with will of the people he or she represents.  In contrast, Burke advocates for the establishment of “trustees” of the public interest.  A trustee owes his or her constituents “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience.” He continues, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
         As a parent and a teacher, this is my fondest wish:  that teachers are allowed to exercise their best judgment for their students bound of course by the laws of reason.  Surely this is one of the most appealing qualities of our profession in recruiting new talent into our ranks.   I am not arguing for teacher infallibility – only that by silencing the independent judgments and opinions of teachers we are likely also to jeopardize the life of the classroom.

2 comments:

  1. Finally! But worth the wait. Teachers akin to elected officials? Brilliant. Now if only people venerated politicians!

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  2. Love this post Doc OC! When I read it, I was reminded of the issue of free speech being shot down in The Crucible- really, how different is a teacher who cannot speak freely to his/her students than a villager like John Proctor who cannot voice his own opinions without it costing his life. In both cases, (one being on the more extreme side), free speech is a right being unjustly taken away.

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