A
Liberal Dose
August
4, 2022
Troy
D. Smith
“Leave
teachers alone and let them do their jobs”
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about public
education -in the U.S. overall, and Tennessee in particular. I addressed the
fact people have, for the last several years, been feeling free to treat
teachers like garbage, to control their every move while taking away more and
more of what they need to do their jobs, and generally using them as a political
punching bag -as evidenced by the Hillsdale College guy’s incredibly insulting
comments, and the fact our governor Bill Lee sat quietly by while they were
made and still has not said one word to condemn them.
Last week I talked about the Founding Fathers’ support
of public education -supported by taxes, NOT by charitable individuals, so that
everyone has a stake in educating our children. I pointed out that public
schools were well established in the North in the early 1800s, but did not
appear in the South until more than half-a-century later… and, ever since, the
South has had a dismal record of investing in education. Or in education for
everyone, anyhow.
Today, if you look at the numbers (money spent per
student) in all 50 states plus DC, the bottom ten are all “red” states.
Tennessee is #49 of #51. That is about where we have always been. And yet our
government blames everything on the teachers.
The Hillsdale fiasco MAY prevent Governor Lee from fulfilling
his dream of tax-supported charter schools, not answerable to state and federal
education laws, sucking all the funds out of our public schools and punishing working
class families… but that doesn’t change the fact our state legislature has
already passed laws designed to prevent public school teachers from talking
about uncomfortable “divisive concepts” like slavery, racism, the Trail of Tears,
the Holocaust, and so forth. Well, technically, you can talk about them -you just
can’t explain what they were, why they happened, or what the results were. Or
say anything about anything that might make a student feel uncomfortable. The
state legislature has even tried to extend that classroom control into our
public universities, and would have you believe they succeeded -but it was only
a partial victory. The recently passed “divisive concepts” bill is going to
have a huge impact on what college administrations can do so far as promoting diversity
or training non-teaching staff, but doesn’t reach as far as they wanted (or
claimed).
The original bill had a long list of things professors
were not allowed to talk about, and requirements for them to be written up on a
first offense and fired on a second if they did so. When it seemed this was
almost surely going to pass, I looked into what was being done in other states
and started making plans. I lined up support from multiple education and civil
rights organizations around the state, and from professors all across
Tennessee, to coordinate with the ACLU and sue the state the minute that law
passed. It didn’t come to that, because literally a day or two before the final
vote some of the university lawyers were finally able to explain to the legislature
that the courts guarantee academic freedom in higher education, that governments
are not allowed to tell professors what topics they can discuss or how they do
it when it is within that professor’s area of expertise and relevant to the
class subject matter, and that they would successfully be sued if they tried
(which is what is happening in other states). Right before the bill passed, all
the language about restricting classroom activity and discussion was dropped
from it. They are still counting, though, on college teachers being too scared
to broach those topics now.
Well, I’m not scared to do my job, and neither is any
other teacher in White County or Tennessee that I know, liberal or
conservative.
Why are politicians so scared to LET us?
--Troy D. Smith, a
White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech.
His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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