What could possibly be wrong with sharing the materials and objectives of a school curriculum with the parents of school children? Shouldn’t schools strive to be transparent, so that parents can collaborate in the education of their children? Isn’t public education a community pursuit, rather than a study behind closed doors?
The problem with transparency is the intent. Will a shared curriculum become a dialog between parents and educators of history and English or will it become an expression of outrage to make sure someone’s values are reinforced more than the values of others? Will we be collaborators or a police force for political correctness and their victims?
The name of the State Portal legislation tips us off to the intent: “Missouri Education Transparency and Accountability Portal.” Schools would be “accountable,” not centers for community education. The Portal would provide access “to every school district’s curriculum, source materials and professional development materials,” a comprehensive, investigatory tool to expose sources and professional development materials that generate curriculum, as well as the curriculum itself. Does this sound like an innocent, information resource?
A fascinating memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule, shows how prejudice can infest the school curriculum. In this memoir, a Professor Emeritus of History at West Point tells how his education controlled his thinking about “The Lost Cause,” beliefs about the Civil War that romanticize the plight of slaves and the purposes and outcomes of the War.
The significant take-away from this memoir of disillusionment is that how we memorialize heroes and frame curricula about the events of the Civil War (or any historical events), can distort or illuminate history for generations of students and teachers to come. “The Lost Cause” was Seidule’s curriculum as a student and a serviceman and a military officer. It was not until he became a professor of military history at West Point and probed beneath the myths about General Lee that he learned a more factual history. He made a new definitive judgment of Lee based on the narratives of witnesses and the primary documents from Lee’s own hand. Writing to the Confederate secretary of war, Lee described the Emancipation Proclamation as
savage and brutal policy . . . which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction. (231)
In a border state like Missouri the “Lost Cause” may still be considered factual in some communities and attempts, to revise the record of the Civil War with a new perspective, would meet opposition. Seidule’s own public education, even his college education, reinforced myths of the Civil War that have been echoed in movies like Gone with the Wind and by statues that memorialize soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. How many sentimental descendants of the Confederacy realize that Robert E. Lee criticized the Emancipation Proclamation as “savage and brutal policy”? What would they say about the attempts to place their heroes in the light of contemporary history?
This is one of the challenges of a “Portal” to public education. Parents and grandparents who wish to keep the “Lost Cause” alive might fight to preserve their Confederacy-correct version of the Civil War. Curricula that undermine the “Lost Cause” would come under attack, because certain people want to remember the Civil War as it was remembered by the grandparents and great-grandparents of school children. Certain myths will be perpetuated, as they were in Ty Seidule’s own education in his upbringing in North Carolina.
How to reconcile the facts of the Civil War with the memories we wanted to preserve? Not by attacking curricula we dislike, but by constructive conversations about what modern historians have to say today. What if teachers and the parents of their students met in book clubs to discuss the reading of Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me? They would have to look at disagreements together and understand that history is not all about facts and dates. Sometimes it is of a story told by the winners of history. Seidule’s book offers that perspective.
The innocent proposal of a Portal to public education is fraught with the dangers of division. If parents want to prevent the “divisiveness” of curriculum, they need to participate in the public discussion of history and literature, instead of attempting to enforce opinions that might be founded on myth. Dialogue should be our method, not anger and investigation. The Portal reform legislation would not be a platform for discussion, but a weapon to exposure new history for attack.