My husband – a teacher – read me an article today that I found so disturbing, and yet, if I think about it, so predictable.
Except I manage always to be shocked.
The article named a bill being proposed in the state of Florida that would require teachers to wear microphones so they could be heard over video cameras installed at multiple angles of a classroom so as to be able to view any and all interactions and materials and displays in the classroom.
I know the system has failed many people. It – and many people in it – absolutely need to change.
The problem here is that the quest is one to prevent teachings of critical race theory, and any other objectionable content. It is also – allegedly – to capture any interactions that might qualify as bullying so as to serve as footage for investigations.
It is beyond time for educators and the public who have been failed by the system to rise up to protect it, as the very people who will refuse Big Brother and walk, or be fired and forced out, are the very ones we need to dig their heels in, address these topics, and stay.
Among other reactions, here is one response that is reverberating in my head:
If you do not want your children to think anything you haven’t presented to them, learn anything you do not want them to learn, be anything other than what you desire them to be, imagine a world beyond the one you have curated for them, then you should not send your children out into the world to go to school.
This legislative effort stems from a cruelly intentional effort to suppress and oppress. Education is – intentionally – intended to serve the exact opposite.
It is sad that the very thing that children want most from school – to learn about things that are true and that matter in the world beyond the classroom walls – is precisely what some parents and politicians are trying to deny them.
I hear my grandfather’s words from long ago in my head, and hold them as hope: “You can’t stop progress.”
May the very printers – a progressive development the parents of these politicians could not have imagined when they sent them to school to learn about the world and be more than they were – balk at the intentional regression, exclusion, and audacity of the request.