Let teachers share their worldviews — and students decide the value
You’re a liberal. You’re up in arms about the Tennessee teacher who was fired for telling his class that “white privilege is a fact.” But when an Indiana school administrator was dismissed for denying that idea, you sat on your hands.
You’re a conservative. You’re outraged by the sacking of the Indiana educator, who was simply saying what he believed. But you won’t speak up for the Tennessee teacher, who was doing the same.
Welcome to America, where everyone talks a good game about teachers and free speech. At the end of the day, though, we want teachers to echo our own view of the world. And if they don’t, we’re perfectly happy to discard them.
Start with Kingsport, Tennessee, social studies teacher Matt Hawn, who compared Jacob Blake — the Black man shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin — with Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who killed two men during demonstrations triggered by Mr. Blake’s shooting. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges under the state’s self-defense law.
“My question to you, and this going to be a tough one,” Mr. Hawn asked his class in August 2020, “is how is that not a definition of white privilege?”
Parents complained, and a school official warned Mr. Hawn about foisting his own views on students. “Going forward, I would ask that you provide space in your discussions for students to objectively express their views,” the official urged.
Mr. Hawn apologized to the offended parents and decided to put the matter aside. But after a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he assigned Ta-Nehesi Coates’ essay “The First White President,” which claimed that racism powered
Donald Trump’s election in 2016. That generated another parental complaint and a second reprimand of Mr. Hawn.
The final straw came the following April, after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd. A student asked Mr. Hawn what would have happened if Mr. Chauvin had been acquitted. In response, Mr. Hawn showed a video of a profanity-laden poem — called, yes, “White Privilege” — performed by African American activist and writer Kyla Jenee Lacey.
“I will probably get fired for showing this,” Mr. Hawn reportedly joked, before he hit the play button. A few weeks later, he was.
Was Mr. Hawn seeking to indoctrinate his own ideas about white privilege? In interviews with reporters, his students said no. Mr. Hawn was a popular teacher, precisely because he welcomed challenges to what he believed. School officials never showed that he required anyone to agree with him. They simply didn’t like what he had to say.
Ditto for the Indianapolis School District, which placed science coordinator Tony Kinnett on leave for posting a video on Twitter claiming that critical race theory had infected local schools. Conceived by legal scholars in the late 1970s, CRT contends that racism is baked into America’s legal, educational and cultural institutions.
Although CRT isn’t explicitly invoked in his district’s standards or policies, Mr. Kinnett admitted, its spirit suffuses the curriculum. “We tell our students that every problem is a result of white men. And that everything western civilization built is racist,” he claimed. “This is in math, history, science, the arts and it’s not slowing down.”
In professional development sessions, Mr. Kinnett charged, math teachers are asked if they discussed the “racist history” of the subject. Music teachers are instructed to use “culturally relevant music” and to reject “white-centric music theory.” And science teachers are told to examine environmental racism.
According to Mr. Kinnett, that substitutes tribalism for individualism. It teaches students that they are products of their racial identities. White students are indicted on a charge of their “privilege,” while everyone else is portrayed as a victim of them.
The district fired Mr. Kinnett a few weeks later, ostensibly for “sharing public files” — including one of an administrator discussing systemic racism — with news outlets. But if he had praised the administrator rather than criticizing her, it’s hard to imagine the district dismissing him.
“It’s embarrassing that I work for a district … that fires teachers for holding different political views,” Mr. Kinnett said.
That should embarrass all of us, no matter our views of white privilege. The real privilege of democracy is that each of us gets to decide what we think. If you believe in that ideal, you should want students to hear from both Tony Kinnett and Matt Hawn.
My question to you, and this is going to be a tough one, is: Do we have enough faith in our teachers — and in our democracy — to let that happen?