“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said, “but I don’t agree with you.”
I smiled at her.
“That’s OK, sweetie,” I said. “You’re my daughter, not my clone. You’ve got a good mind. You’re supposed to use it to think for yourself.”
I can’t remember what we disagreed about that day.
It could have been any number of things, because she was and remains a curious and perceptive young woman, one who pays close attention to the world, its events and its tumults. Whatever her opinion was, she didn’t arrive at it casually.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot lately in the aftermath of Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s caterwauling that schools are “woke” and educators ought to be punished because some parents and some children don’t agree with him. He argues that any opposition to his thought is proof that schools are indoctrinating children to believe in the “woke” ideology, whatever that might be.
I doubt our loquacious lieutenant governor realizes what he’s confessing when he starts yapping about how schools are “woke” factories and teachers are “grooming” students.
What Beckwith implicitly acknowledges with these trumped-up assaults on schools and education is that, were he in charge of a classroom, he would use that position to impose his views on his students. He thinks teachers abuse their authority because that’s what he would do if he were in their position.
He operates from an assumption that isn’t grounded in reality.
I’m both the grandson and the son of teachers.
My grandfather, a lifelong Republican, began teaching before he even graduated from college. The first in his family to go to college, he worked to help his younger siblings go, too. He spent his entire career as a classroom teacher and, eventually, a high-school principal.
Even though he’s been dead for close to 50 years, I still can recall the talks with him that, at the time, I thought were casual.
Really, though, they were designed to prompt me to think, to challenge assumptions. He posed questions for me to answer and then asked me to consider the implications of the answer I provided.
His goal wasn’t to tell me what to think but to push me to make sure that, whatever my beliefs might be, they were examined convictions.
My mother was a daddy’s girl. Like her father, she, too, became a teacher.
Mom wasn’t a Republican, which could have been a source of tension between father and daughter.
But it wasn’t.
One of my grandfather’s convictions as an educator—a conviction that his daughter, my mother, shared—was that it wasn’t a teacher’s job to tell students what to think. It was a teacher’s job to help students learn to think for themselves.
So they could make up their own minds about what they believed.
For some reason, that always has scared folks such as Micah Beckwith. The notion that someone somewhere might have a different opinion or arrive at a different conclusion shakes them right down to their socks.
They don’t believe in a marketplace of ideas.
They believe in a monopoly of ideas.
Particularly if they hold the monopoly.
I know it seems as though I’m picking on our lieutenant governor, but that’s only because he’s the most vocal proponent here in Indiana of this particular form of insecure authoritarianism. In his ideal world and that of people who think like him, both teachers and students would have the freedom to do what he tells them to do and think what he tells them to think.
I could refute Beckwith by summoning Thomas Jefferson—“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” the author of our Declaration of Independence once vowed—but instead I’ll rely on a source closer to home.
When I was young, my grandfather delivered unto me a home truth.
“When two people are of the same mind,” he said, “it generally means only one of them is thinking.”
Precisely.
Grandpa was a smart man.
And a good teacher.
