Education Through Insubordination

Nearly every parent faces it. Usually it first occurs when children are quite young. My wife and I are facing it now with our four-year-old son.

Swear words.

Those words that sound especially awful and strange when spontaneously shouted from a child at full resonance without any external cause prompting them within, as in my case, a supermarket aisle while four old ladies were picking pasta and other items off the shelf.

"He picks it up at school," I was tempted to say. A subtler lie, also resisted, occurred to me as well. Rebuke my son and act shocked as if he hadn't evidenced knowledge of the phrase before.

Pretending that kids don't know "bad language" moves into the ridiculous when the children are in high school. For enlightened souls their knowledge becomes a teachable moment:

Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. "If you read the whole book you will see how these inner-city students grow and change and become articulate, compassionate, educated young people who want to do something good in their lives despite the environment in which they were raised," she told the Guardian. "I thought my students would very much relate to those kids."

Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision.

But

Teachers' union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book. It remains available in school libraries.

Heermann and the union say there was no explicit ban on the book when she handed it out to pupils on November 15. But later that day she received an email from the board advising her not to teach the book. "That was the pivotal moment of my life, when I saw how my students were taken with the book, how they loved it, and then I am told not to let them read it? I said no," she said.

After being threatened with dismissal, Heermann was eventually suspended. The union is deciding whether to take the case to court.

Heerman as been suspended for insubordination. I say that she was suspended for effective, realistic education. It's the prudish, illiberal school board that needs to be suspended and permanently. Their "values" don't include realism and what works.
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