An article appeared in The New York Times
("Students Told to Take Viewpoint of the Nazis," by Jesse McKinley,
April 12, 2013) that provides a focus and a context for these continuing
concerns. McKinley reports that students at Albany High School were
given what he described as " an alarming thought puzzle": A Tenth Grade
English teacher assigned about 75 students a "persuasive writing"
exercise. The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was
a Nazi and they were told to construct an argument that Jews were "the
source of our problems." In support of their argument, they were told to
use historical propaganda and the traditional essay format: "Your essay
must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body
paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion," the
assignment read. "You do not have a choice in your position: you must
argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government
propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"
The assignment - which was first reported by The Times Union of Albany
- elicited a tsunami of criticism from school district administrators,
rabbis and "concerned" parents.
"Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity," Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, the superintendent of Albany schools, observed, "That's not the assignment that any school district, and certainly not mine, is going to tolerate." Dr. Wyngaard later met with Jewish leaders in Albany and was reported to have offered a public apology on Friday. She opined that the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. Although Dr. Wyngaard insisted that,"No one here believes that malice was the intent," the teacher has been suspended and faces disciplinary action that the superintendent said could include termination.
Rabbi David M. Eligberg of Temple Israel, a Conservative
synagogue in Albany, told McKinley that the lesson was "incendiary,
inappropriate and academically unsound." "The assignment is flawed in
its essence," Rabbi Eligberg was also quoted as saying. "It asks
students to take the product for a propaganda machine and treat it as
legitimate fodder for a rational argument. And that's just wrong." Rabbi
Eligberg even criticized a part of the assignment which instructed
students to use one of three classic Greek ideals -ethos, pathos or
logos - to support their anti-Semitic argument. ("Choose which argument
style will be most effective in making your point. Please remember that
your life here in Nazi Germany in the '30s may depend on it!" the
assignment read.)
Rabbi Donald P. Cashman of the B'nai Sholom
Reform Congregation, whom McKinley's article identified as the father
of three Albany High School graduates, was described as more forgiving.
"Hypothetical situations are often effective teaching tools," he
stated, and debating positions one may not believe in can also be
valuable. "We know it's important for kids to get out of their comfort
zones," Rabbi Cashman remarked and added that the assignment seemed to
correspond with Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom Hashoah, which
was commemorated on April 7th and 8th of last week.
Nick
Brino, a 10th grade student, heard about the assignment secondhand from a
classmate. "I thought it was wrong," he said, "But she was flipping
out, saying if anyone was going to do it, she wasn't going to be their
friend."
A ninth-grader, Jyasi Nagel, stated that he thought
the teacher was not anti-Semitic, but was just trying to teach
different points of view. His father, Moses Nagel, did not advocate a
harsh punishment for the teacher, but still said that he thought
another topic might have provided a more suitable lesson. "It just
seems like there's a million other examples to use rather than going
there," he noted.
In the United Kingdom, for generations,
universities and secondary schools have sponsored and endowed debating
societies. Perhaps Oxford University's is the most famous. A primary
goal of these debating societies has always been to train young men -
and now women - to stand for public office and to prepare them to become
Members of Parliament. As a consequence, the ability to think quickly
on one's feet, to rapidly dispose of hostile questions from the
audience, and to argue from different perspectives (even if not
believed) and to debate seemingly inane or vile topics have become the
standard repertoire of successful debaters.
In the U.S.,
since the late 19th century, colleges and universities - and
increasingly now many high schools - have also sponsored debating clubs
and societies, albeit for more prosaic purposes. Unlike their British
counterparts who explicitly acknowledge a nexus between reasoned
discussion and the kind of informed civic discourse that is the
lifeblood of democracy, many American debaters would also suggest that
the art of debating is good preparation for entering into the rough and
tumble of the world of commerce. In the U.S., too, while university
debating topics are more formal, and the debate format more restrained
(audience participation is prohibited), it is not unusual in special,
non-competition tournaments for the debate judges to ring a bell in the
middle of an argument and require the debater, without prior notice, to
immediately begin to argue against the very proposition that the debater
had only moments before been advancing.
The purpose of
debating is to develop the intellectual agility that will enable future
citizens and public office holders to quickly understand opposing
arguments and the evidence upon which they rest in order to be able
dissect the strengths and weaknesses of each asserted proposition.
Most serious debaters, as part of their formal training, have also
studied Aristotle's Rhetoric and can immediately recognize and challenge
faulty logic - non-sequiturs ( it does not follow), non causa pro
causa ( noncause for the cause), reductio ad absurdum, post hoc ergo
propter hoc, (after this, because of this) and the classic fallacies -
argumentum ad populum, ad baculum, ad verecundiam, ad hominem,
etc.
The Times' article raises profoundly
disturbing issues, especially in view of the fact that so few young
American adolescents will ever be exposed to a formal course in logic or
join a debating team. It also raises serious questions about academic
freedom and the extent to which the First Amendment's guarantee of fee
speech protects the rights of teachers, the extent to which school
districts are truly committed to development of critical thinking skills
among pupils, and the extent to which teachers should be invested with
autonomy and wide latitude - as licensed and qualified professionals and
consistent with the curriculum - to raise controversial issues and to
utilize controversial strategies without censorship by non-teachers,
whether superintendents, school administrators, clergy or parents.
The suspension of this tenth grade English teacher is inimical to the
open exchange of ideas between teachers and learners in a democratic
society. If disturbing, unseemly, and unsettling questions are the
Rubicon beyond which teachers in U.S. school districts may not cross,
the moral development model of inquiry, for example, that was created by
Lawrence Kohlberg will also become another outlier: Kohlberg's work,
based upon Piaget's developmental psychology and Kant's ethical
precepts, could never again never be used in a classroom because debate
and the open discussion of each moral dilemma presented are essential
and indispensable parts of the process by which the quality of empathy
and a broader understanding of one's obligations as a moral agent are
cultivated.
How can young people learn to apply the lessons
of logic and develop the ability to distinguish between propaganda and
good evidence, truth and falsity, if they have never been required to
try to defend the indefensible?
Isn't this teacher being
punished because, in our politically correct culture, we would rather
not think about unsettling ideas, but simply declare them to be out of
bounds?
Didn't the Germans in the 1930s think that they, too, were ordinary people?
Weren't the Western democracies, including the United States, morally
complicit when they refused to allow safe-havens for Jewish emigres who
were attempting to escape the Nazi genocide?
Didn't Pope Pius XII remain silent and decline to excommunicate
Adolph Hitler, despite his crimes against humanity and violations of
fundamental Catholic teaching?
Didn't most Southern
whites before the Civil War believe that they, too, not unlike the
Germans of the 1930s, were virtuous, misunderstood and support slavery
as that "peculiar institution?"
Didn't most Southern whites,
with the acquiescence and tacit acceptance of the rest of the American
population, support Jim Crow and the persistent violence and degradation
of Southern blacks until the 1960s?
Although not of the
same magnitude of evil as the pogroms against European Jews, didn't most
"decent" white Southerners abandon the Democratic Party because the
party of their historic allegiance finally divorced itself from Jim Crow
and became the party of civil rights?
Weren't the appeals
to the "silent majority" and the "Southern strategy" of Nixon and
Reagan, the latter's criticisms of "welfare queens," the elder Bush's
Willie Horton ads, and the GOP's continued blatant appeals to the
resentments and grievances of hard-scrabble working-class white citizens
akin to the Nazi's strategy of blaming the Jews for most of that
country's ills?
Isn't the ability to analogize and to draw parallels and deduce inferences an essential part of the learning process?
Doesn't the very survival of democracy depend upon the ability of
citizens to make informed decisions based upon actual evidence and the
reasoned analysis of that evidence, no matter how disconcerting it may
be to our own cherished worldviews?
