With school back in session, it’s time again for that annoyingly uncomfortable but occasionally useful question: What’s the point?
Hundreds upon hundreds are the enduringly salient quotes on the nature and purpose of education, my favorite being the one from Will Durant, who in the middle of the last century somehow found time to sit down with his wife and write “The Story of Civilization,” all 11 volumes.
“Education,” Durant said, “is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
Our teachers, doggedly at the helm of this voyage of progressive discovery, will again start the school year under attack. Legislatures in 35 states have introduced more than 130 bills that would prevent students from learning about race and gender issues, politics and American history. Florida passed something called the Stop WOKE Act (Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees), which puts state-mandated controls on how schools can present instruction on racial history and gender discrimination.
Again, wake me when you think you know what woke means.
“In Pennsylvania we have certain protections for teacher autonomy,” said Amy Palo, a history teacher and the local union president at Cornell School District in Coraopolis. “That helps with a little bit of those external pressures, I would say, but to say that we don’t feel any of that pressure would be incorrect. There’s certainly pressure to think about how what you are teaching about would be perceived. Some states have made that harder than others, states like Florida, states like Ohio, states like Tennessee and Texas.”
This would be a good spot to point out that Amy Palo is not just the union rep at a small Western Pennsylvania high school; she’s the Pennsylvania History Teacher of the Year and she’s coming off a typically frantic summer of expanding her resume and refining her craft. She just returned from Harrisburg where she joined Teach Plus PA, a group that trains teachers on policy and advocacy. She took a two-week course on genocide at Seton Hill University. She did a three-day virtual seminar through the U.S. Holocaust Museum, all in the months after completing her masters in political science. She hopes to get a second masters in history.
Any spare minute before the resumption of classes was likely spent on her twin 3-year-old boys. Twin. 3-year-old. Boys.
That all left her mostly unavailable for the public squawking about what should be taught, what should be censored, what books are acceptable, what curricula are making people uncomfortable, and what makes German schoolchildren perfectly capable of absorbing the Holocaust but American children emotionally allergic to slavery. Still, some of the absurdity leaked through.
“When this kind of public discourse is happening and you know that you’ve put so much time and effort into developing yourself as an expert in the field, it can certainly be frustrating,” she said. “Depending on the political makeup of some of these school districts, I mean my reality is that the pressure is there but maybe not so much comparatively, but there are teachers across Pennsylvania who are feeling these kinds of pressures from their parents or boards.”
Yeah, well, that’s our system. We encourage teachers to become leaders in their disciplines, masters of their material, then allow political hacks, school boards and well-meaning but often uninformed parents to trump their knowledge and methods. If that’s not enough, we pay them about 25% less than other college graduates and fund their schools with taxes so illogically distributed that some schools spend more on lawn care for the football field than others can scrape up for, you know, learning materials.
Even if all of those meta-problems were instantly magic-wanded into something resembling coherence, they’ve still got to go in there and teach, and there are few harder things on God’s earth.
“My concern on a day-to-day basis is, ‘Am I providing my students with what they need — are their needs being met — physical needs, are they comfortable? Can I engage them?’” Amy said. “I don’t know how many people deal with a number of teenagers on a daily basis, but I’m competing with Tik Tok and phones and very super-interesting things that they have in their pocket.
“So my day-to-day struggle is how do I engage them and grow them as critical thinkers who can think for themselves? How do I make sure I’m giving them the content that the state standards say I need to provide them. Are they having a good day? Are they OK? Can I keep them awake?”
I’m going to guess here that Amy Palo can keep them awake. She’s probably not the Pennsylvania History Teacher of the Year for nothin’. Like the great majority of teachers, she’s passionate about what she does in ways that remain unappreciated and often even uncomprehended.
“I’m not the only one, not the only one in this building or across the Commonwealth and across the country,” she said. “I’m really trying to be the best I can be in this classroom for my students, and it does get frustrating when somebody thinks you have some kind of ulterior motive.
“My sons’ names are Theodore and Lincoln. I’m a history person. I love what I do, and I am not pretending at it.”
Gene Collier is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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