In 399 BCE, the Greek philosopher Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and impiety, in that he “failed to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.” He was tried, found guilty on both charges by a jury of male Athenians chosen by lot, and condemned to death.
Socrates real crime was in challenging his students to think critically. He asked political and philosophical questions and did not accept trite answers. Athenian leaders and other intellectuals resented his elenctic method of questioning, because it threatened their own credibility.
The trial of Socrates is an early example of a state restricting the knowledge its citizens can access and debate, and ever since then autocrats have done exactly that to get and maintain power.
In the 20th century, Adolph Hitler rose to power by building his own falsity factory and feeding the German people only a single version of “the truth.” And today, Vladimir Putin, a modern-day a devil disguised in a bespoke suit of skin, has imposed a crude and draconian crackdown on anyone who doesn’t toe the company line. I find it interesting that yesterday Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, defending Putin from nearly worldwide condemnation, called him a, “very wise, prescient, and cultured international figure.” That’s rich.
Here in America, we daily face similar attempts, some subtle, some not, to package lies and sell them as gospel truth. They pummel us from all sides. The tragedy is that so many of us open wide and swallow.
A case in point can be found in many states that are now restricting what teachers can teach and what books their students can read. Right now, in eleven states, teachers and librarians can be prosecuted for violating restrictions recently enshrined in law by their legislators and governors.
Reading these laws (I did), one gets the impression they were mostly written by the same person. Their focus is race and sex. They all contain the the following language taken from Texas that prohibits teachers from introducing a concept by which:
(vii) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex;
Right on page one, in South Dakota’s summary of its new law it says it aims to “protect students and employees at institutions of higher education from divisive concepts.” Whatever they are.
Similar versions of these restrictive laws have been passed in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, North Dakota, Oklahoma,. South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Mississippi.
FutureEd has done a good job of cataloguing both the enacted legislation and the bills currently under consideration devoted to racism and sex. You might want to visit. There are 96 of them, nearly all of them in red states.
Imagine yourself a history teacher in any of these states. How do you cover The Mud Sill speech of South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, delivered in the U.S. Senate on 4 March 1858, without causing some “discomfort”? That’s the speech in which Hammond said:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves.
Or, how do you discuss the Cornerstone speech of Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederacy, former U.S. Representative from Georgia, and future Governor of Georgia in 1882? In the Cornerstone speech, he said:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
It seems to me a violation of all that’s sacred to sugar-coat this stuff. In discussing it with intellectual honesty, a teacher is probably going to offend somebody somewhere, be it a student, a parent or a politician. The truth requires honest discussion of all of America’s history, both the good and the awful. An open discussion in the safety of a classroom where students are free to think critically, and are led by a teacher drawing out the best their brains have to give in the manner of Socrates is good for the students and for the future of America.
Painful though it may be, truth matters.