Column: The more serious question we face regarding education
Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost.
– In my last column, I argued that the elimination of the federal Department of Education is a justifiable reform as long as the savings are shifted to local districts to offset the huge costs of Special Education.
Isn’t the more serious, and potentially existential, question the fact that we have no nationally agreed-upon curriculum for any subject, not even math, let alone history?
I mentioned World War 2 in my last column. What if a state decides the Holocaust didn’t happen or at least should not be in the history curriculum? Will the courts become involved if falsehoods are presented as fact? Then General Eisenhower in visiting the newly liberated Nazi concentration camp at Dachau (just outside Munich) feared just that and told the press to take lots of pictures so no one could ever pretend the genocide hadn’t happened or otherwise deny the absolute horror of the Holocaust. It’s also true that the American soldiers who found the camp summarily executed many of the SS guards.
I recall the story of a German squad in Poland, all of whom had been policemen from Hamburg. Their daily assignment was to transport Jewish women and children to trenches in the countryside and shoot them. Late in the war, they had the women hold their children to their chest so that one bullet would dispatch both mother and child.
Contrary to common belief, they didn’t just follow orders and did not have to accept their assignment, yet something like thirty of thirty-five did as requested. After the war, they were not prosecuted and returned to their previous law enforcement duties in Hamburg. When asked how they could commit such atrocities, especially those who were Christians, they all said their schools throughout the last decade had all taught them that Jews were subhuman and needed to be eliminated.
What our schools teach our children matters.
My wife was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and attended schools there in the late 1950s to 1960s from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree at Oklahoma State. Never were the Tulsa race riots mentioned in the school curriculum, and she, until recent nationwide publicity, didn’t even know about the 1921 two-day massacre of the city’s highly educated and successful black population and obliteration of the prosperous black business district. No charges were ever filed, nor anyone held accountable.
In the US History curriculum, will Columbus be presented solely as a brave explorer after whom we’ve named numerous states and cities, but conveniently ignore the fact he found the natives to be easily enslaved for enormous profit?
Let me emphasize I don’t want those states and cities’ names changed. I still can’t fathom the depth of the idiocy of those who in 2021 voted to have San Francisco Schools rename 44 public schools because their namesakes were “no longer worthy.”
Grant? You must be kidding. He won the Civil War and during his administration enforced largely enlightened enforcement of Reconstruction of the defeated states. Washington? Yes, he refused to let runaway slaves join the Continental Army. He owned slaves. He also knew that to allow their enlistment would undeniably lose the support of the Revolution in all the southern slave states, and there then would be no chance at all of beating the British Empire (which was already a real long shot).
It was in the South as you may recall that the Revolutionary War was won, and only because the British atrocities united the Americans who otherwise were fighting each other. We also know Jefferson, the author of “All men are created equal…” owned slaves and fathered same.
The Constitution included pragmatic deals unthinkable in our times such as the Three Fifths Compromise, which for allocation of House seats per state counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the census. Let’s hope our nation’s current leaders will be wiser than our forefathers, but I do understand pragmatic decisions may be required given the reality and accepted culture of the times.
Perhaps most importantly, they compromised on our beloved Constitution, which was intended to be a working document with a process in place to make changes as needed and limited in authority by a system of Checks and Balances, with the Judicial Branch having authority over the Executive. It also included fundamental rights going back 800 years to the Magna Carta such as the absolute guarantee of Due Process for all persons in our nation. It included Freedom of Speech and the Press, perhaps most importantly, even if that speech is critical of the government and/or its leader.
Will we tell the whole unvarnished history of our country, in context of course, without editing? Who will decide what to include and how honestly to present it?
My specific question for our schools in the not-too-distant future is this:
What if one state’s history curriculum depicts January 6, 2021, as a treasonous attempt to overthrow the government and another as a Boston Tea Party-like act of patriotism? If it’s one story in a Red state and another in a Blue state it seems certain we’re headed for more division and potentially dire consequences.
Who will decide what is true?
Yes, I support a massive reduction of the federal role in Education and want the finances and much of the responsibility transferred to the local level as close to the classroom as possible, with appropriate checks and balances.
There are some fundamental facts about science, math, and history, though, about which we’d better find consensus.
Can we please come together and find common-sense solutions that, at the very least, objectively and truthfully tell both sides of the story?
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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Or maybe reduce your administrative staff jobs by half and cut the SPECIAL education programs to half as well. Too much wasted money Dubost.
Or maybe reduce your administrative staff jobs by half and cut the SPECIAL education programs to half as well. Too much wasted money Dubost.