In Colorado, as elsewhere in our nation, conservative activists are challenging what they view as “liberal indoctrination” of schoolchildren by the “woke” public education system. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in his bid to secure the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has called for banning that state’s public schools from offering any curriculum that can be deemed “divisive” or that might make any student uncomfortable.
Heaven forbid that today’s White primary or middle school students learn the truth that for hundreds of years, this nation treated black people as chattel – nonhuman personal possessions of their masters, with no rights under the law.
Today’s curriculum censors and book banners insist that parents have the fundamental right to choose what ideas their children will be exposed to, not merely in the home, but in public schools and libraries. How dare “government schools” force children to confront and wrestle with ideas that challenge or contradict their own parents’ beliefs?
Remarkably, this dogma has become the rallying cry of right-wing politicians. Remarkable because that seeming “conventional wisdom” is, in actual fact, 100% wrong.
This nation’s Founding Fathers – flawed as they were as White men, many of whom owned slaves – recognized the need for mandatory (aka compelled) public education of all children. Thomas Jefferson declared that the new country should “illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” Jefferson said, because “wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
And John Adams declared: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual but maintained at the expense of the people themselves. The people must be taught to reverence themselves instead of adoring their servants, their generals, admirals, bishops and statesmen.”
When they established a national government free from tyrannically-imposed orthodoxy of thought, these brave men understood that public education was necessary for our democracy to survive and flourish. Only by developing critical thinkers – those willing to confront challenging ideas and trained to question and test the validity of various theories, even those popularly embraced at the time (e.g. White supremacy) -- would We The People be capable of deciding who should represent us, and which laws should be enacted.
Publicly funded schools would be the collective means to prepare future citizens, workers, government leaders and voters. Universal taxes – not merely on parents whose children are attending public schools – are levied to cover the cost of that mandatory training for all. Public education exists for the good of our society as a whole, not merely for the students or their parents. Thus, all of us are the true “consumers” of our nation’s public education system.
So, who should properly decide what gets taught in our public schools? Elected school boards working with professional curriculum developers, administrators and teachers who have devoted their careers to preparing the next generations of citizens, workers, leaders and voters. Not the relatively small group of parents who are required by our laws to have their offspring be well-educated, critical thinking members of our society.
Ignoring this country’s complex history or presenting a distorted, one-sided version of it, is not the proper way to prepare tomorrow’s adults to forge “a more perfect union.”
Steve Zansberg is a First Amendment attorney in Denver and president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. Zansberg has represented The Durango Herald and The Journal.
