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Teach your children well in age of misinformation
To the Editor:
On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 senior government officials of Nazi Germany met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee for the purpose of planning and implementing the "final solution to the Jewish question." The "final solution" was to deport most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe to Poland for extermination, a polite euphemism for murdering, killing, or gassing.
Eighty-one years later, it is still difficult for the civilized world to grasp the grisly horror of what happened at Wannsee: A group of highly civilized government officials deliberately planned the brutal murders of men, women, and children whose only crime was being born Jewish.
One of the most unsettling aspects of Wannsee was the participants themselves. As noted by David Patterson in his book, "When Learned Men Murder," these 15 men were highly cultured and educated. Most of them possessed advanced academic degrees. Yet despite their impressive academic credentials, they were either incapable of recognizing the barbarity of their plans or lacked the moral courage to question or oppose them. Either possibility is deeply disturbing.
Fortunately, modern civilized, progressive societies have moved far beyond the atrocities planned at Wannsee. Have they? It could never happen again. Really? Think again.
As Israel prepares to defend itself from a cold-blooded terrorist attack, anti-Israeli protests have erupted across the United States at many of our prestigious ivy-covered citadels of higher education where highly learned men and women indoctrinate highly impressionable twenty-somethings with highly questionable views on how the world works. Similar to the learned men of Wannsee, pompous professors with PhD, EdD, and various other impressive looking letters behind their names cannot seem to summon the moral clarity to condemn Hamas terrorists who ran across the border to murder dancing young people at a music festival and behead Jewish babies with shovels before bravely scurrying back across the border to hide behind their own women, children, schools, and hospitals.
Never mind that Israel has not occupied the Gaza strip for nearly 20 years and the Palestinian people themselves selected Hamas to govern it. Never mind that Hamas deprives the Palestinian people of sanitation services and water by digging up pipes to repurpose them in manufacturing rockets to hurl into Israel. Let us be clear-eyed, stand up straight, square our shoulders, and look evil directly in the face as we grasp the following hard truth: The overtly stated goal of Hamas and Hezbollah is not peaceful coexistence with Israel - it is the total evisceration of Israel. They pronounce the goal openly, and we should believe them. Well, that is, everyone but the most highly educated among us. They must find nuance and moral equivalence where none -- absolutely none -- exists.
I am not at all surprised by academia's moral equivocation. I am ashamed to admit that I spent nearly 40 years in academia as a professor and administrator, and I know that highly educated academics can behave as badly as anyone else -- if not worse. Being highly educated does not correlate with moral clarity. Trust me -- I've witnessed it first-hand. George Will put it aptly when he poignantly asked, "Higher education -- higher than what, pray tell?"
What was missing from the education of the Wannsee men - the best and brightest of Germany - that caused such a grotesque disconnect between their advanced knowledge and their own inhumane behavior? Eighty-one years later, we might ask, what is missing from the education of a generation of students that causes such stunning incongruity between the advanced knowledge of their chin-stroking professorial mentors and their willingness to grant moral parity between ghastly Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense? There are at least two compelling answers to this question.
First, the "trophy generation," whose members grew up being told they are special, unique, wonderful, trophy-worthy, and capable of thinking critically, lacks the fundamental intellectual tools to think logically about much of anything. Cognitive psychologists now know that the keys to productive logical thinking and problem solving are found in both the quantity and quality of domain-specific knowledge. In other words critical thinking is not some generalizable skill acquired in a knowledge-less vacuum. Productive critical thinking is accomplished by people who have a lot of well-organized knowledge on the matters about which they wish to think critically.
Witness the renowned "critical thinker," Greta Thunberg, who loudly rails against climate change when reading from a prepared script yet is rendered quite speechless when given the opportunity to expound on the topic (i.e., think critically) extemporaneously. I suspect that most of today's protesting students would be hard pressed to locate Israel or the Gaza Strip on a map, let alone describe the history of the present State of Israel and the geo-political challenges it faces in the region.
Think this is far-fetched? During my teaching days, I regularly asked large classes of college sophomores to name the third president of the United States. I heard everything from Benjamin Franklin (somewhat plausible) to FDR (utterly ridiculous). Maybe two or three students in a class knew it was Thomas Jefferson. I could understand not knowing the 13th or 33rd, but the third? The author of the Declaration of Independence? A major mover and shaker in the formation of our nation? Many college students today have scant knowledge of the past or present world around them yet are convinced they are critical thinkers whose personal feelings about every issue must be acknowledged and affirmed. Their schools, teachers, and parents have failed them miserably.
To our local youth who may be reading these words, a piece of advice. Are you, along with John Mayer, "waiting on the world to change?" Stop waiting and change it yourself. Read history for yourself. Read authors who provide varied perspectives on political philosophy and world events. Read the U.S. Constitution for yourself. Equip yourself to make informed decisions about the role you will play in making the world a better place. Don't wait to learn it in school. Do it yourself. Do it now, and make it a lifelong habit.
Second, and more importantly, knowledge and skill cannot --and should not -- be taught in an ethical vacuum. Educators (both teachers and parents) must move beyond simply helping others develop knowledge and skills to a pervasive concern for the ultimate purpose in knowledge acquisition. Education for what? Teaching for what? If teaching doesn't assist and challenge people to be better humans--to instill a desire to use knowledge to make the world a better place for others--then what good is it?
Since the 1970s values-infused public education has fallen into disrepute, I was told that values should not be taught explicitly to students when I was a young aspiring teacher. Rather, we should simply help them clarify what their own values are. Hogwash. A good and civil society is morally obligated to transmit the most basic social values to its young. And surely we can agree on basic core values such as honesty, integrity, personal responsibility, hard work, kindness, charity, civility, and respect for all human life.
When we teach, children learn from the totality of their experiences with us. They learn from what we say and what we don't say. They learn from how we react and respond to situations. They learn from our positive and negative attitudes--those stated explicitly and those modeled implicitly. They learn from our sincerity and from our sarcasm. They learn to value what we value. They learn to devalue what we devalue. Knowledge and skill simply cannot be taught in a value-less vacuum.
In a complex, dangerous world still full of people with evil intentions, it just isn't good enough to teach basic facts, concepts and equations without showing our youth how to use those intellectual tools for good and to challenge them to grapple with life's really big questions.
The recent terrorist atrocities we witnessed in the Middle East are difficult to watch and should concern every civilized society around our ever-shrinking globe. Of even greater concern, though, is the frightening inability of highly educated people and their proteges to speak out on those atrocities with moral clarity, for these are our present young citizens and future leaders.
Now more than ever, those who teach--at all levels--need to approach the task with a calling and commitment to cultivate both the in-depth knowledge and values we will desperately need to improve the human condition here and around the world. The effort required will be great. The cost of failure will be far greater. Wannsee. The Jewish Holocaust. Islamic terrorism. Never again? That depends on us. Teach your children well.
Kevin Zook
Lewistown