But What About the Donner Party?:
What’s Important to Know?

(Page 5 of 5)

This year, for obvious reasons, has been different for all of us. We’ve all been compelled to connect to the larger world, to look outward and inward, as we never have before. Among the consequences of September 11th for a social studies teacher is mediating different attitudes and feelings about issues of patriotism, like the display of the American flag and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. In these issues, history, current events, and passions intersect. Our class is a natural place for the discussion of controversial ideas.

But while the magnitude of the events and their direct effect on all of us is incomparable to anything that’s happened before; it isn’t the first time our personal politics have made it into the classroom. The majority of Bank Street parents, traditionally, are politically liberal, and it’s natural that children come to school expressing support for the causes in which their parents believe. There is great benefit in challenging those assumptions: Children learn to identify the components of their opinions, and so they can more clearly reintegrate the intellectual, socio-emotional, and moral aspects of their ideas, and learn to make up their own minds.

Last year, in our mock Presidential election, Ali McKersie’s Republican Party candidate won in the Electoral College, although before the activity began, there wouldn’t have been more than a handful of students who would have admitted considering a Republican candidate. The year before, I asked a diehard 12-year-old feminist in my class to defend the Right to Life position in a debate. She was angry about it, but she did it, and when she graduated she said it was one of the most important experiences she’d had at the school. Both of these demonstrated to me that when you spend time looking, listening, reading, thinking, and feeling, you change and grow.

Recently, I’ve heard from Bank Street families who have expressed their views on both sides of the matter of the Pledge with equal passion. I think there are times adults need to show and tell children how they feel about important issues. Always discussing ideas clinically, as if we have no feelings or opinions about them, as if they are all equal, as if we are trying to find out who fired that first shot at Lexington, is inappropriate, or confusing, or wrong. As always, what happens outside, whether it is in the Middle East or in our front yard, the ideas get put on the table and examined, slowly and deliberately, and with great determination. As you may imagine, we have looked and listened, thought and felt a great deal this year. And there’s been a lot of growth and change.

The constant dialogue, the traffic jam of ideas that we consciously encourage around here, does result in frequent, sometimes emotional, fender benders, and this is true now, maybe more than ever before. I don’t always agree with what my students say. Sometimes I enter the conversation and other times I stay to the side. To me, attending that busy interaction of ideas, learning to negotiate it, learning when and how to speak, when to keep quiet, how to bring together the best of different points-of-view, to learn in a deep way to listen to other people, to help fashion creative resolutions to problems, this is the essence and art not only of what it means to teach in this school, but what it means to prepare to live well as an adult in this country. Many have observed that democracy is a messy business. Maybe that’s the most important lesson of all in American history. The invitation to contentiousness the Bill of Rights provided back in 1791, that blessing of liberty, is what enabled the addition of the 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments and all the rest, all of which were argued before becoming part of the Constitution. That ongoing conversation is the thing that most ensures that the journey toward "liberty and justice for all" in our school and in our country will continue into the future.

Continued

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5