Opening, not closing, young minds

You know that dawning sense of comprehension when the pieces finally fall into place about a subject that never seemed clear but felt too important to dismiss? The lights go on.

The brain gets a wordless all-clear to proceed with analyzing how the new grasp of facts fits with what one thought, believed or wanted. This kind of epiphany often happens in ninth or 10th grade, pivoting a young person from confusion to clarity just when most needed. It’s an experience no teen should miss and no adult, looking back, forgets. Teachers sometimes say that such moments are why they teach.

Here is my story of the moment when a great book opened my teenage mind. Think about yours, whether it happened 50 years ago or just this semester.

One Saturday night at the primo babysitting age of 13 I did my weekly stint of watching my younger cousins while my uncle and aunt went out.

They were readers of the latest books in that house and, anyway, cable had not yet come to Crescent Beach. TV was fuzz. After the little kids went to bed, I often read some big, new novel as far as I could get before the grownups got home and I had to leave the book for them to finish.

That night the book on the coffee table was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” If, like millions, you read it as an adolescent, I don’t have to explain why it rang the bells of my brain. How many of them read it in one evening I don’t know, but I raced through that book, worried that I would have to leave before I got to the end. It was that good a tale, but I could also tell it was that important. The storytelling drew me on, yet I sensed that the book was also making sense for me about my own country.

We should all want that moment for the future adults we are raising. Young people need to be encouraged to open their minds. They need exposure to serious thinking with the guidance of thoughtful adults, their teachers.

News reports of the last few years and especially the past few months have outlined more and more actions by states to curtail students’ access to certain books and curriculum materials that adults in charge object to. The American Library Association reported in 2022 that more biography and fiction than ever was being banned for students. The state of Florida has recently been in the news because the College Board retooled its Advanced Placement curriculum for African-American studies to focus on “success stories” and eliminate so-called Critical Race Theory. Whether this was a reaction to a challenge from Gov. Ron DeSantis or, as the College Board claimed, an earlier, internal decision, is unclear.

What should be in the curriculum is reading material that accurately and adequately explains the experience of so many Americans, past and present. Success stories such as that of Condoleeza Rice are both true and inspirational. They belong there. But a lot of what happens in real life cannot be called success. Life includes hardship and challenges that young people can see for themselves. Life has a lot of unhappy endings, sometimes balanced with good news but not always immediately. At 15 or 16 we need to be given context.

It will be up to the Florida education department to accept or reject the new AP version, which has expunged any mention of race theory and thus the implication that hard lives might have been caused or at least influenced by racism.

Students who take AP classes are apt to be serious-minded achievers. They have plans. For them to become the leaders they are capable of being, they need to know what moves this country, both the inspiring and the sobering facts. They need to have that epiphany.