Column:

Being anti-education is anti-American

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Sept. 11, 2009

I find it particularly fitting that this column will run Sept. 11, on the anniversary of one of the rare occasions during which our country set aside all points of disagreement to unite.

I was in the eighth grade the day of the attacks, which now seems like forever ago. I remember the announcement over the PA system. It was brief and vague. Then, the school went into lockdown. We were not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio. The school deliberately tried to keep us in the dark.

This approach to dealing with the attacks infuriated me. I felt cheated — to have our country be in the midst of a national emergency and have the school administrators decide ignorance and sheltering the children would be the best approach to dealing with the situation is completely antithetical to the American ideals of education and good citizenship.

So you can probably imagine my disdain when, approaching the eighth anniversary of the attacks, a new wave of parents and educators have expressed their aims to keep their kids out of the loop when it comes to national events.

Last week, news outlets all over the country were offering stories about parents pulling their kids out of school Sept. 8 because they didn't want them to hear President Barack Obama's address to America's schoolchildren. The Houston Chronicle interviewed one man who pulled his children out of school because he thought the speech "smacks of political indoctrination of the worst kind." School districts in Texas, Michigan, California and a number of other states also refused to show the speech to students.

Many detractors have accused Obama of "socialist indoctrination," though it seemed to me the thesis of his speech was that success is possible through persistence and hard work, which I always thought was the motivating tenet of capitalism. He even said in his speech that geographic or educational inequities were no excuse for a lack of effort in furthering one's education, and the whole idea of responsibility for oneself and one's own actions is a message straight out of an Ayn Rand novel.

But the problem has nothing to do with what the president said or didn't say, or the validity of the message of his virulent opponents. The problem is the idea of education has been taken out of the equation altogether. Fear and mass hysteria (and in some extreme cases, a touch of racism) have led parents and teachers to encourage ignorance and general intolerance for any opinion different from their own and this is frightening. If we don't give students an opportunity to hear multiple perspectives and formulate informed (and I emphasize informed) opinions, it will only perpetuate a cycle of fear and ignorance and weaken the educational experience.

And yeah, kids are impressionable. They might take things at face value and believe what they read on Wikipedia. But if we continue to reinforce and perpetuate that, it contributes to a vicious cycle, and quite frankly, it insults the intelligence of the generation who will one day be running this country.

And this isn't just true for the K-12 demographic or those with families. It's true for everyone (and I mean everyone). If you vehemently disagree with everything that comes out of Obama's mouth, then it's not only your right, but your duty to question it. Citizen dissent and criticism of the government are central to democracy — but for the love of all things good and pure, if you're going to sound off against the president's every move, at least take the time to educate yourself and those you might be responsible for educating. If education and intellectual pluralism are raised back up to the forefront as values, then no one — adult, teen or child — will get left behind.