Why I Left Teaching
After more than a decade working at a high expectation/high achievement school in suburban Boston, I decided to leave teaching. I loved my work teaching, coaching, and advising my students, but I have strong convictions, and I could no longer endorse what I view as the monolithic political indoctrination that I witnessed at our school. For at least 30 years, The Left has overwhelmed our schools, colleges, and universities. What follows describes some of what I witnessed.
In a faculty meeting right after the 2016 Presidential election, our administration asked our faculty how we could encourage our students to have “brave conversations.” I loved this topic because I believe that the heartbeat of education is a respectful debate. The exploration and consideration of different points of view make life interesting and vibrant and can distinguish any school.
As a faculty, we were broken into small discussion groups, and at the end of our meeting, I asked my colleagues, “Have you ever heard a faculty member stand before the school and say anything controversial? Have we modeled what we are encouraging in our students?” There was silence, and it occurred to me that if we weren’t going to embrace that challenge then why should our students? If I was going to play it safe, how could I ask them to set the example? I thought it important to try, so I wrote what follows and asked to speak to our school community. My request was denied by our administration. The common response was “It’s too dangerous” to which I replied, “Too dangerous or just different?” Below are my remarks.
We Are What We Teach
Good morning!
At my age, and this takes a long time, I’ve learned that whenever I’m inclined to say something controversial, it’s always good to preface my ideas with these words, “I could be completely wrong.” So, for emphasis I’ll repeat, “I could be completely wrong,” but I have strong convictions – So, here goes.
My background is a little different from most in education. I left schoolwork in the late ’70s and was a businessman for 21 years, eventually starting and running my own company that was successful enough to allow me to return to teaching and coaching. In those years, I learned about the world outside of academia, while also continuing to follow what was going on in schools. When I read promotional magazines created by schools like ours, it seemed there were certain sacred words that they all shared, and two of those words were and are diversity and tolerance. Here’s my thesis - On a wide range of important issues, there is almost no diversity of thought at these schools and little tolerance for different ideas, especially conservative ideas. This is a problem for our schools and our country.
The morning after the election, I saw groups of teachers sobbing in front of students, and I wondered what we were teaching all of you about disappointment and resilience. Later that I afternoon, I attended meetings on our campus for those who wanted to talk about the results, and I went home that afternoon, sad for our school and for our country. Most people in our community were stunned in part because the ideas that won the election aren’t allowed to exist in the academic world. Clearly, our school needs to do a better job exposing our students to a variety of different points of view. The shock and tears I saw in so many signaled our failure and an important problem that I hope we can address moving forward.
For years, I’d guess at least 25 years, the media and too many of our schools have regularly, routinely, and intentionally depicted America as the dark force in the universe, a country too often described as the great polluter, imperialistic force, and unequal partner in our global world, a country that is homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, misogynistic, nativist, and racist.
Over the past 15 years, you have routinely been required to listen to speakers who highlight America’s failures, inadequacies, and injustices. I’ve listened to all those speakers and never heard any speaker applaud anything American. Imagine, just Imagine if when your family gathered around the table for a meal all you talked about was how unfair and corrupt your family was. What would happen to your family? In large measure, today’s America is a product of our jaundiced, unbalanced, and monolithic educational ideology.
Our school, like many schools, has taught US History thematically, and those themes are Race, Class, and Gender. From the moment I heard those words, I wondered, “Is that it?” Is America no more than race, class, and gender? In my view, that is a narrow, negative, and intentionally political agenda. Words have meaning, so here’s a suggestion. What if for the next 15 years we change those words to Freedom, Opportunity, and Courage? Why not use those words to provide a different and positive view of our great country? We are what we teach.
I always try my best to put myself in your shoes. When we gather our whole community or in class, how would I respond to a repetitive litany of America’s failings? I think I would be bored and angry, but I would also probably remain silent, fearing that to challenge the political agenda of the faculty might undermine my college recommendations and my future.
Watching what was going on in our colleges and universities before, during, and after the presidential election was for me disconcerting, even embarrassing. These places of supposedly higher education have become hotbeds of competing victimization categories, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, cultural appropriations, rape cultures, and students and faculty melting down about everything and anything. It seems to me that we’ve become a nation addicted to indignation, a country whose schools and colleges have been tyrannized by the thought police and an agenda shaped by a level of political correctness that demands and dictates our language and therefore our ideas. We are what we teach.
Here a few examples of what was being taught on our college campuses right after the election results were in.
New York Post 11/12/16
The University of Michigan offered its traumatized students coloring books and Play-Doh to calm them. (Are its students in college or kindergarten?)
The University of Kansas reminded its stressed-out kids that therapy dogs, a regular campus feature, were available.
Cornell University, an Ivy League school, held a campus-wide “cry- in,” with officials handing out tissues and hot chocolate.
Tufts University offered its devastated students arts and crafts sessions.
At Yale, professors canceled classes and/or exams — either because students asked or because instructors were too distraught to teach.
To provide some perspective, my father was a lieutenant in the Navy during WW II and was only two years older than the students at Michigan, Kansas, Cornell, Tufts, and Yale. If any of you have seen Saving Private Ryan, he was part of the Normandy invasion, specifically Omaha beach. I can’t help wondering what his generation would have thought about the need for therapy dogs, hot chocolate, tissues, coloring books, and arts and crafts after a presidential election.
Our job as teachers is to encourage you to be curious and to have the courage to challenge accepted thought. We’re supposed to teach you how to think, not what to think, and education is not supposed to be indoctrination. We’re supposed to encourage you to explore a variety of views not adhere to a narrow political doctrine, and if we fail to be curious, we will remain just another boring echo chamber that fails to stimulate and inform. No healthy school can be an enclave of like-minded people. A History teacher surveyed our faculty about the Trump/Clinton election and discovered that the faculty voted 105 to 2 for Clinton. That is a closed intellectual universe. We are what we teach.
In the years ahead, you will need to leave your academic lives and be able to function in a world of fascinating and challenging diversity. You will need to navigate and successfully interact with all kinds of wonderful people, and some of those wonderful people will have some terrible ideas. In addition, you will run into some terrible people who have brilliant ideas. You will not be allowed to dictate the terms of those encounters or have a time-out. We want you to succeed in that next world, but we also need to teach you that you will find no empathy tents, therapy dogs or places offering play doh and crayon books if you’re upset or offended by different ideas. My worry is that if we teach you that the way to respond to difficulty, disagreement, and disappointment is to demand a safe space, we will have crippled you, rendering you unemployable. People who start businesses usually take out loans, sometimes massive loans, and they don’t have the time or inclination to listen to their employees’ every sensitivity. The truth that we’re failing to teach you is that life is messy, difficult and painful, and if we allow you to imagine that you can somehow remain innocent and isolated from adversity, you will wind up as weak and helpless as Holden Caulfield. Furthermore, by providing the phantom protection of “safe spaces” we are encouraging your weakness not your strength. You will be admired when you demonstrate your resilience in the face of adversity, challenge, and difficulty. These are moments that teach us what we are made of and what we are made for. These are the struggles that form us, not comfort and safety. We are what we teach.
The shock I saw the day after our election was an important invitation to change. We are a great school, and we will become a greater school when we are more expansively curious about a wide range of issues because we want you to succeed after college, and the world you will encounter will be dramatically different from college. When you’re trying to survive and thrive in your chosen careers, you won’t have the luxury of sitting around wondering how the world needs to accommodate their agenda or respond to a micro-aggression that you’ve suffered.
We need to teach you that the worst thing you can do is blame others for your problems and demand that they change. When faced with adversity, we need to teach you to consider the more important task of changing yourself, setting realistic goals, and then realizing the satisfaction of reaching those goals. These are the attributes that signal maturity, growth, and accomplishment.
If our school community encourages and embraces a much wider spectrum of ideas, we will become a more interesting, dynamic school, and we’ll begin to get out of an academic rut and narrow political agenda that does not distinguish us.
I’ll end with words that in my fifteen years at our school, I have never heard spoken in an all-school assembly.
I love America.