Educational rigor
Don’t hide truth from students
When a child asks the hard questions of life, that child is ready for a truthful fact-based answer. A child is not being protected when these answers are hidden or eliminated from the child’s environment. This brings me to the noise concerning banning books and removing educational content from the nation’s school systems.
Some legislatures, federal and local, are pushing for policies that forbid schools and colleges from answering these questions or offering coarse content based on these subjects. Some of these bodies are going so far as to criminalize those who would answer or teach to these questions.
Our nation has risen to its present position at home and in the world by striving to understand and accept our multiple cultures, races and spiritual beliefs. This understanding can only be based on what is known to be factual. Telling a lie with every breath does not transform it into a truth. It is still a lie.
Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union post-WW II, and the present day, along with China have or do practice this kind of censorship. Our youth do not need that protection. They do need truth and fact. Armed with truth and fact, intelligent questions and better decisions can be made.
As a lifelong educator and 30-year teacher in our public schools a day never went by when I didn’t encourage my students to question, research, and discuss those moments in their lives that presented them with conflict. When information comes into opposition with what is stored as a personal belief it is time to question both.
With book banning and restricting educational courses trending it should cause all of us to take a pause. There may be two sides to every story, but in the end, there is only one truth. A belief may be a truth, but not necessarily. After all, how did the world being flat work out?
Mel Eaton
Snohomish
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