Many communities have a very limited or even distorted view of their local high schools, and many people in those communities want the school to carry out functions that high schools weren’t primarily designed to accomplish. Further, as we know, there are bitter disputes surrounding such issues as sex education and drug education. In short, high schools are subjected to enormous pressures from a variety of directions on a variety of issues. New teachers frequently find themselves involved in such controversies, and find that they are in the frustrating position of being able to do little about them. I’d like to focus one some of the more common forms of outside pressure you might encounter.
The pressure to win in sports at all costs
Parents, often very vocal and insistent ones, frequently demand that a high school’s sports teams be of the highest caliber. Friday night football in Texas, as most people know, is practically a religion, so sacred has it become. The pressures you may feel as a coach can be overwhelming, as my coaching friends are quick to remind me. There has been something of a trend in the past 15 or 20 years toward “professionalizing” high school sports: top rate facilities, year-round conditioning programs, full-time trainers, the works. The pressure to succeed can be so enormous that coaches, especially younger and more vulnerable ones, often go overboard in scheduling practice times, drawing their young charges to school at 5 a.m. and having practices after school as well. This exhausting schedule can wreak havoc with a kid’s attitude and energy for schoolwork. We must constantly remember our primary purpose: the academic and vocational preparation of young people.
My friends in coaching have, over the years, frequently regaled me with stories of angry parents who have called them at all hours with complaints about every aspect of the coaching staff’s performance. Parents often have an enormous emotional investment in their kid’s athletic performance. Some parents were star athletes themselves and they want to see their son or daughter recreate the “Glory Days”. Some parents were failures as athletes and are looking to their kids to “redeem the family honor”. There is also the phenomenon of the vicarious experience, whereby parents can imagine themselves doing what their kids are doing. And naturally, many parents are simply their kid’s biggest cheerleaders. While commendable, parental love and support can distort a person’s objectivity pretty badly. A kid may just not be a very good athlete. For the sake of the team’s success, he doesn’t belong on the field. But a lot of parents can’t see that. They only see their kid—the most valuable human being, in their eyes, in the entire world—being denied a chance to participate. If you are a young coach, you’ll have to rely on the more senior members of the coaching staff to protect you from the brunt of parental attacks. From everything I hear, it will take all your self-control to put up with this often infuriating criticism. You’ll find that parents often have ludicrously inflated conceptions of their kid’s athletic talent. Some of them are even dreaming of seeing their kids go pro, or at least score big in college.
To be brutally honest about it, most high school athletes aren’t good enough to play in college. Some kids who do go to college because of their athletic talent don’t in any way belong there academically. (The scandals of college recruiting and preferential treatment are outside the scope of this post, but they’re very real.) To be even more brutally honest, a tiny percentage of high school athletes will ever turn pro. This makes the excessive emphasis on sports in our secondary schools even more unreal. All of this is part of what you need to know. The pressures we put on so many of these kids to perform like pros are wildly disproportionate to the challenges for which they must actually prepare.
I realize that participation in sports can have a strong positive influence on kids. It can make them budget their time efficiently, be more self-disciplined, learn to work in a team, and build both body and character. I am in no way calling for the removal of sports from high school. But I am asking that we keep the proper perspective on sports.
The pressure to impose religious and/or political agendas on the high school
This is an issue about which I have very strong opinions, and I do not offer them to be confrontational or in a spirit of arrogance: We should not give in to the community’s wishes concerning our curriculum when the community is just flat out wrong. The school must not simply follow the public’s wishes; sometimes, it has to lead. The laypeople in the local towns do not always have a good command of the facts concerning various issues. They are often misled and misinformed. They frequently have no background in crucial areas. So sometimes the school just has to dig its heels in and say no—no, we’re not going to do it your way, and this is why. If we dissent from a position the community demands we take, we must be prepared to make our case as clearly and convincingly as possible. We owe the people of our district an explanation. We do not owe them unquestioning obedience on every issue.
I’ll illustrate this point in several ways, ranging from not very likely situations to much more common ones. Let’s start out easy. Suppose the community in which a high school was located had a group of people who demanded that we teach that the earth was flat and that the sun rotated around it. (This isn’t as far-fetched a scenario as you may believe; my home town actually had a flat earth society for many years, and there are still advocates of geocentricism in some parts of the United States.) Suppose our flat earth, sun goes around the earth group was a majority of the district. Should we alter the high school’s science curriculum to conform to the majority’s bizarre, surrealistic ideas? Should we grant “equal time” to the flat earth/geocentric position? Or should we teach science in science classes, even if it goes against the grain of our community’s people? The answer here probably seems pretty obvious to you. If we don’t want the graduates of our high school to be laughed out of their college science classes, we need to do what’s right, and not what’s popular.
Now, you may contend this is a “straw man” argument. After all, no one is advocating anything as crazy as teaching flat earth advocacy in schools. Well, we’ll see shortly if in fact that’s the case.
Let’s try another example. Let’s say that there’s a group in the community that denies the reality of the Holocaust. (Holocaust denial is an ugly but very real phenomenon; fortunately, there are relatively few Holocaust deniers in the United States.) Suppose that this group of “revisionists”, as they call themselves, insists that in our history units covering the Second World War we give “equal time” to the proposition that the Holocaust never occurred. They may argue very fiercely that they’re taxpayers, and as such, they deserve to have their views heard in the schools. Should we simply cave into these people? What if by some odd chance they represented the majority of the school district’s population? It’s “their school”, right? Shouldn’t they have everything the way they want it? The short answer is: no. They are paying us to teach their kids history based on the best historical research and the consensus of historians’ opinions. Our obligation is to do so, not yield to their prejudices. (Many years ago, I did in fact run into a couple of community people who accused me of being “anti-German” because I taught a short course on the history of Nazi Germany!)
Special Note: Holocaust denial has one objective: to make Nazism look respectable. It is also often a cover for vicious anti-Semitism. The evidence for the reality of the Holocaust is overwhelming in scope. If you are a history or social science person, don’t back down from your obligation to teach the historical truth—even if you’re a newbie.
Again, you may say “How likely is it that any school district would be faced with such a dilemma?” All right—let’s look at a situation where many in the community do assert that their personal beliefs should be taught and that they are entitled to “equal time” in our school system. (And no, I’m certainly not equating such community members with Holocaust deniers.) You and I both know what I’m talking about. It’s a little dispute Charles Darwin started in 1859.
The most persistent arguments surrounding science education in this country revolve around the teaching of organic evolution. Yesterday, I stated my view that evolution is an established scientific fact. But such a view has not been accepted by significant segments of the American people. It is probable that no issue in education has generated more controversy. We need only to look back to the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee to see that this is a pretty long-running battle. Various community groups, often associated with religious fundamentalists, have put pressure on local schools and state boards of education to either eliminate instruction in evolution or, failing that, to demand “equal time” for various creationist doctrines. Most recently the Kansas State Board of Education was embroiled in controversy, as advocates of what is called “Intelligent Design” theory sought to weaken the state’s science guidelines in regard to the teaching of evolution.1 In other states, most notably Texas, there have been major battles about the inclusion of organic evolution in textbooks. (Two self-appointed textbook censors, the late Mel Gabler and his wife Norma, were notorious in that state for crusading to have evolution downplayed in or removed from Texas’s schoolbooks.) Many federal and state laws have been proposed to weaken the teaching of evolution. This is a fight that just isn’t going away. Why does it matter so much, and how does it affect you?
•It affects the future quality of science education and scientific research in the United States.
•It affects the right of teachers and administrators to uphold high standards of scholarship.
•It affects the fundamental issue of academic freedom.
•It affects our standing in the world scientific community.
•It has implications not only for every area of the sciences, but every area of history and the social sciences. (Young Earth Creationists, for example, argue that no such thing as prehistory even exists, and that history books that mention this era are “mistaken”.)
•It involves basic issues related to the establishment of religion and the separation of church and state.
In the teaching of science, it simply doesn’t matter what I want to be true, what you want to be true, or what anybody wants to be true. There is simply that which is true (although a scientist might substitute the phrase “experimentally or observationally verifiable” for the word true). Similarly, in determining the truth or falsehood of a proposition, it does not matter if the majority of laypeople believe something or not. In 1632, the vast majority of humans believed the earth stood still and was at the center of the Universe. Galileo thought, on the basis of his observations, that the earth moved and orbited the Sun. He was right. The great masses of people who thought otherwise were wrong. The fact that those who thought the earth was stationary were in the majority was completely irrelevant.
The same is true for evolution and natural selection. A majority of Americans, overall, may reject these explanations, but that tells us nothing about the truth or falsehood of these explanations. The scientific community, despite misleading propaganda you may have heard, is overwhelmingly convinced that life on this planet has evolved over an inconceivably long period of time. Not only does the major evidence in biology and chemistry support this contention, but evidence from geology, astrophysics, cosmology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and every other field of the sciences does as well. Scientific truth is not determined by majority vote, and if America ever gets to the point where it is, our leadership in the scientific world is sunk. Period.
In my opinion, demands for “equal time” for the presentation of creationist views in science class are deeply mistaken. Should religious stories be taught in public schools? Most definitely—in philosophy class, literature class, and history class, where they can be discussed in their proper context. But when we give equal status to both science and non-science (even anti-science) in our science classes, our science education is on the road to ruin. (There is an excellent website where you can explore all kinds of questions related to this subject. It’s called The Talk.Origins Archive, and I think you’d find it interesting.)
In a less harmful fashion, there are those who argue that science is essentially “elitism”, a form of class warfare, “ideological” in nature and hostile to “other truths”, “other truths” usually being a euphemism for New Age or paranormal nonsense. (There is an enormous amount of superstition and pseudo-scientific flim-flammery in American society, ranging from astrology to astral projection to pet psychics to listening to dead people. P.T. Barnum was right—there really is a sucker born every minute.) Schools have to resist these pressures and influences, too. The argument that science is “elitist” is particularly annoying to me. Outside pressure groups throw that term around loosely, as an accusation. Well, if being an elitist means being educated, committed to free inquiry, supportive of the scientific method, and committed to the principles of rationalism and reason, then count me in. If being an elitist means rejecting ideas for which there is absolutely no empirical support, then slap that label on me. I’ll wear it proudly. (Heck, I’ll even make up a sandwich board saying “I’m an elitist and I’m proud” and I’ll wear it in public.)
There is no such thing as “creation science” or “secular humanist science” or “elitist science”. There is simply science, and the job of the high school is to teach it without bowing to political and religious pressures to do otherwise. At times a school has to stand up for what’s real, even if it angers some people. It cannot compromise on some things by trying to split the difference on issues. The truth is “not in the middle”; the truth is wherever it is.
Pressures Related to Censorship
This is a perennial issue in American education, and it tends to be the bane of English/Language Arts teachers. The number of books that have come under attack over the years is truly startling. Titles that keep popping up include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, the books of the Harry Potter series, and in a delicious irony, Fahrenheit 451, which is about book burning. (The American Library Association maintains an excellent list of books which are banned in the United States.) I also personally once heard someone call for the banning of the book 1984 because it contained “bad language”. (If you haven’t read 1984, it’s a novel that attacks totalitarian government.)
On the one hand, I understand that parents have a right to have a say in what their kids read. We are obligated to provide alternative reading assignments if a parent objects to a book on the school’s required reading list. I personally think such objections are narrow and ill-advised, but parents do have such rights. What I object to is the parent who not only doesn’t want his kid to read a book; he doesn’t want anybody’s kid to. And we should fight that kind of censorship tooth and nail. Parents have a right to have a say in their own kid’s reading, and that’s the extent of this right. Some of them don’t seem to understand that.
In all honesty, you, as a new teacher, won’t have the clout or influence to object if someone challenges your reading list. Your defense will have to be taken up by more senior instructors and by the administration.
External pressures will take many, many forms. There will be groups in the community who demand that certain subjects in history classes not be taught, or taught in such a way as to reflect their views and emphasis. (A particularly awful historical example of this is the way schools in the deep South taught, for many decades, that the Reconstruction Era was one of deep injustice toward the South, rectified only when white rule was restored.) There are, as we have noted, groups that will demand that health and human reproduction be taught in highly circumscribed ways. There will be groups of athletic or band boosters who will demand the devotion of major resources to their cherished areas. You will be amazed at the range and number of objections and complaints a school receives about its instructional content and institutional objectives. Since schools are heavily dependent on local tax money, the temptation to yield to such pressures can be enormous. There is a political balancing act that a good school’s administration and teachers have to perform regularly—the maintenance of the both the school’s integrity and its support by the community. And the longer you stay in this game, the more you’ll find yourself on that particularly treacherous high wire.