By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-512839.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Public school teachers have always felt more or less unsafe engaging in the exchange of controversial ideas in class, ideas that run counter to the prevailing norm. My dream for an educated America is that a brave and learned president will convince the legislature to pass a Learning Rights Act. This law would guarantee public school teachers the right to engage in the exchange of all ideas, no matter how unpopular they might be in the community.
Today we hear a good deal about "spreading freedom." A graduate of my fantasy school in my fantasy era of my fantasy Learning Rights Act would understand that any concept of freedom that can be spread is a trapdoor. Freedom may be taken (War of the American Revolution, 1775-1783) but it can't be given or spread.
Learning, though, can be spread. It can be spread, not by military power, but by brain power and by the uncensored flow of ideas. Freedom is the independence gained from learning. Graduates from my dream school would easily understand that Cervantes writing Don Quixote in prison had freedom but his ignorant jail-keepers did not. This explains why those who wish you to think that freedom can be spread via military power view real learning as public enemy number one.
Aldous Huxley called it "education for freedom," believing as he did that "pernicious propaganda" was freedom's greatest threat. His own dream was a system of education that provided students with the learning utensils to recognize propaganda. In Brave New World Revisited he compares propagandized people to the extinct dodo bird. When food was too plentiful it did not use its wings and they disappeared from lack of use. When the food supply expired, so did the earthbound dodo.
Again, "freedom" is a word politicians use to excite the will of voters, and it is a word others use for a myriad of self-serving reasons. Often it carries the implication that one's country is the only country in which freedom exists. Many of my college students, especially those who had never traveled outside this country, believed that freedom was unique to the United States. When I questioned them they often could not define freedom other than to say it is what we have here in America.
Education had let them down.
Politicians who use this word without defining it are propagandizing and can get away with it because the skill to recognize it is seldom taught in school. The cave-bound people in Plato's Allegory of the Cave wore blinders and thought they were free because their perspective was limited to no more than their blinders allowed them to see.
The technique of inquiring into the rhetoric and sophistry of governance, and its self-serving manipulation of emotion, is mainly omitted from our school curricula and teachers may feel as I did that they are courting the unemployment line if they bring it up. In 1968 I taught my high school history students how to recognize propaganda and I read President Johnson's Vietnam speeches to them in class. Together, we rated them according to their propaganda content. All of these speeches failed.
Many teachers felt they didn't have the freedom (there's that word again) to do that. I didn't have it either. I just took it. The concept of voicing ideas counter to the accepted norm, like the dodo's wings, doesn't even exist in Huxley's Brave New World. This is a novel about a society that traded its freedom of thought and the free exchange of ideas for security and pleasure.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian
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