Freshman year, first day of school, first period. The door swings open, and lo and behold: a mosaic of anti-Bush political cartoons hangs from the inner door, most prominently a monkey-fied picture of President Bush’s head. Now on guard, I step through the doorway, and find yet more welcoming signs, most notably a Gore 2000 flag and corresponding bumper stickers on the wall.
I was shy back then. As I moved from another city, my parents had told me that Monta Vista High was a top-notch school, and the transition would be easy. The teacher would go on her usual “you know how things are” political rant. And I’d roll my eyes and swallow my outrage. I bit my lip and said nothing. Little had I known that I was entering Brainwashing 101.
Political cartoons, video clips from TV commercials and excerpts from political books have taken the route of squatters and found homes on school property. This lack of teacher inhibition is transmogrifying houses of learning into vessels for indoctrination, of the likes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia.
Effective learning is based on mutual respect. I accept the authority of my teacher, because the teacher respects my willingness to learn. But when teachers abuse this respect and use students as part of an agenda, they lose their credibility and ruin the learning potential of the classroom environment.
If politics are integrated into the curriculum, it should be through a forum-style format that provides all students with a safe, comfortable way to speak their minds. The antics of an ideologically impassioned teacher can intimidate youth and make them feel threatened, as I had felt, detracting from any learning that should be going on.
Arvind Shrihari, a Monta Vista High School junior, has been in that situation before. “It’s a teacher and he has the authority in the classroom, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to undermine that. Students do have rights, to give their own opinion, and I felt like those rights were being completely ignored. I felt like I was being looked down upon.”
It’s easy to say that students should speak up if they feel like they’re being victimized. Try being new in school, never having seen so many kids in one place at one time, and your teacher in control of your future. When you can see the anger in a teacher’s body language when he talks about his beliefs, what student in their right mind would challenge him?
“Teachers need tobe careful,” said Esther Wojcicki, an English and journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School. “In my classes, students always speak up, because I encourage diversity of opinion. I’m sure there are situations where students feel completely intimidated and refuse to speak up.”
The classroom is not designed to be some kind of therapy for the politically frustrated instructor. Currently, teachers are allowed to express political opinions, so long as they are “within the curriculum,” according to several educators. As California Teachers Association spokesman Mike Myslinski said, “We believe that teachers must be free to teach, and students free to learn. And this means that teachers and students must be free to explore and discuss many issues and different points of views.” But the alarming number of my peers who have fallen victim to political tirades in Spanish and literature classes, where they have no relevance, demands that swift corrective action be taken.
At such an academically oriented school as my Cupertino campus, grades come first, and students are willing to stomach their political grievances in the interest of getting an A. But high school is about more than grades; students should be discovering and developing their beliefs.
That’s why I founded a chapter of the Young Republicans during my sophomore year, and the club has since grown into a solid network of about 20 teens. The club serves as something of a support group for our common experience, where we can share our stories of ideological conflicts.
But for an administration to tolerate teacher demagoguery and expect students to defend themselves because they don’t complain is plainly irresponsible. As Wojcicki said, there is “very little oversight, so it’s easy for a teacher to get away with all kinds of things.”
Not to say that teachers should repress their beliefs. Like everyone else, teachers are entitled to their opinions. All I ask is that they indulge in them on their own time and off campus. Taxpayers pay teachers to educate, not to indoctrinate. Educators ought to recognize that.