A Thin Line in Education Separates Parental Rights and Child Abuse
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”
— Adrienne Rich
The United States Supreme Court has accepted to hear a case that could possibly continue the psychic disequilibrium that Adrienne Rich raises.
The case arose from conflicts between teaching LGBTQ topics and parents’ rights on religious grounds in the education of their children. The case stems from some parents’ concerns of a policy sanctioned by the Montgomery County Board of Education requiring new elementary school story books covering LGBTQ topics that could be read in class.
One of the contested books, for example, is titled “Pride Puppy!” about a puppy who got lost in the crowd during an LGBTQ Pride parade.
When the policy first passed, parents could opt their children out of the curriculum, but later, the Board reversed itself and made the policy mandatory. In this demographically diverse school district, some Christian and Muslims parents, in particular, objected, though I wonder whether parents can opt their children out of reading age-appropriate stories about Jewish or Asian people, for example.
Surplus Repression & Anti-Knowing
Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others, and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.
In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization), and to sustain the life of the individual.
We as a society, nonetheless, must set a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from oppression, minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society, and enters into the realm of domination, control, and oppression).
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.”
Paul Simon laments in his song “Kodachrome” about the neutralizing, the meaningless, the virtual whitewashing of educational value to the least common denominator in his schooling, about how “everything looks worse in black and white.”
Metaphorically, most schools teach only in black and white, whereas most students want what Paul Simon wanted to be given with “those nice bright colors: the greens of summers, makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.”
Unfortunately, Simon’s educational system took his Kodachrome away: the camera film that captured the full spectrum of the rainbow from the brightest reds, oranges, and yellows, to the darkest blues and browns, and deepest purples.
Schools across the nation are attempting to function amidst the increasing banning of books and the control of course content from state legislatures under the false flag of “parental rights” in the current tide of right-wing takeovers of educational systems.
The term “education” is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
Education in its original translation and intent includes the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge, rather than putting or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the students’ waiting and docile minds—what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Surrounding forces – religion, parenting, schooling, and other sources of socialization – often inhibit the maintenance of critical thinking facilities in young and old alike.
Let us take, for example, Biblical warning in Genesis, 2: 16-17, related to the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden:
“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’.”
The apples on that tree represent knowledge. When picked and eaten, the nutrients from this “forbidden fruit” unlock levels of knowing that can more than overturn the apple cart, but more importantly, can give the knower a full-color spectrum of the workings of the world and of the human character. We are encouraged, nonetheless, to think only in white and black as determined by those in power.
Figures like the biblical Eve and Greek Pandora, women, are blamed for the downfall of “man.” In fact, however, they were strong women who refused to fall under the symbolic and literal thumbs of the patriarchy.
Additionally, the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus casts a cautionary tale on the gifting of knowledge when the chief of the gods, Zeus, punished him for offering mortals the best of the sections (nutrients) from a slaughtered cow while giving the gods the remaining fat and bones.
After an infuriated Zeus takes back fire from humanity, Prometheus stole and returned it to mortals, thus turning the darkness from the spectrum of black and white to technicolor once again.
For Prometheus’ crime of returning light and knowledge to humankind, Zeus had Prometheus chained on the Caucasus Mountains and sent an eagle to eat his immortal liver every day, which grew back every night.
The first film in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise, released in 1968, can be understood as a recreation of the legend of Prometheus. A U.S.-based rocket crew crash land their space vehicle on a strange planet in the distant future equaling nearly 2000 years advancement on Earth as they traveled at the speed of light.
The crew led by Taylor (Charlton Heston) – the Prometheus character – discover that the planet is ruled by a species of apes who possess what to the Earthlings appear as human-like qualities, including speech, high reasoning, and cultural artifacts such as museums, medicine, constructed homes, a judicial system, and written religious and governing scrolls.
A community of humans on this planet, on the other hand, lacks the facility of speech and operates on a pre-human Earth-equivalent intellectual level. The apes hunt, enslave, and murder humans to keep them from invading their gardens and stealing food, and to use them in medical and psychological experiments.
Taylor rebels and protests his treatment by challenging the hierarchical ranking of apes over humans. Two apes listen to Taylor and befriend him, Zira and Cornelius, and they eventually come to believe that what they have been socialized to accept as factual, was somehow manipulated and falsified.
Blond furred Dr. Zaius (Zeus), Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith, knows the truth regarding the origins of his species and the rise and fall of humans through industrialization and the power of the atom, which terminated life as it had been once known. His primary objective has been to keep the fire of “knowledge” away from his ape community and from humans.
He attempts to destroy any artifacts and other remnants of pre-nuclear holocaust human society to keep alive the myth of perennial simian superiority, and human inferiority and enslavement. Knowledge, therefore, represents overturning the proverbial apple cart undermining origin myths and challenging hierarchal positionings.
This dominant group-controlled production of “knowledge” maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies options in understanding multiple perspectives from which to construct meaning.
In 1933, Nazi storm troopers invaded, ransacked, and closed The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish and homosexual sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Storm troopers carried away and torched over 10,000 volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German.”
The German Student Association, (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” On May 10, 1933, the students along with Nazi leaders set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, “fired” up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring:
“No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
[Not a] Conclusion
To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for Leaves of Grass, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not gay.
Then they came for Stone Butch Blues, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a transgender person.
Then they came for Critical Race Theory and Beloved, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not Black.
Then they came for Maus, and I did not speak out—Because I am a Christian and not a Jew.
Then they came for books representing my experiences and identities—and there was no one left to speak out for me.