Posted on 03/12/2006 4:13:25 AM PST by Born Conservative
The debate about Jay Bennish, the Colorado high school teacher who confused a diatribe against the Bush administration with a lesson in geography, is not about free speech, but about the meltdown of Western civilization.
Jay Bennish, the product of baby boomer teachers and parents, is not unlike other recent high school and college graduates. He was denied the opportunity for an education.
But come to think of it, baby boomers like me were denied educations.
I had a Jay Bennish teaching my tenth-grade "social studies" class in 1973 (note the subject name that already reveals the non-academic nature of the pursuit).
I had made my way intrepidly through junior high and then my first half of high school at Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School in Rochester, New York. I stood out, because I carried books. The school had instituted forced busing around 1969. But by 1973, instead of all-out riots, there were only rumblings of fights.
We were into the sexual revolution at full swing by 1973. Planned Parenthood had gotten its brochures into the school, and the female part of the most popular couple was rumored to be on the pill after having aborted the cutest boy's baby.
We had settled into the ennui that surrounds adolescents gathered under one roof to bide time and attract the opposite sex, with adult supervisors counting success as a day spent with no blood spilled. It was assumed that we had the attention span of gnats, and teachers entertained us with such feats as doing chin ups on the classroom doorway, while girls in the back applied cosmetics.
When we did have class discussion, teachers felt compelled to discuss such "relevant" topics as racism and sex.
It was a spring day. Boys with long hair and tight jeans and girls with long hair and tight jeans and tight shirts slumped languidly into desks (This posture and casual revealing dress was something I encountered again when I began teaching undergraduates in the 1990s).
The teacher, Mr. U, the ur-Bennish, opened up the discussion on "love."
No, we did not get into a philosophical discussion about the different forms of love - of agape, or Plato's ladder of love, or the notion of chivalry.
Instead, the cutest boy in the school blurted out "sex," and the entire class woke up. A Phil Donahue talk show-like discussion ensued.
We managed to fill up the rest of the class time with ignorant students blurting out word associations and provocative statements and the teacher responding in kind. As far as actual history goes, I have had to catch up on my own. Mr. U was typical; another social studies teacher simply had us write reports on the "atrocities" committed in Viet Nam as reported by the local newspaper.
When I entered graduate school in 1993, hoping for an opportunity finally to study the "higher" things, I learned that postmodernists had denounced philosophy, or the pursuit of truth, as a disguise for the ideology of the West that attempted to impose its values on the rest of the (more tolerant, peaceful) world.
Baby boomers, consumed with the issue of their children's "self-esteem," have obsessively nurtured their children to express their opinions and feelings, even on such issues as world politics. At the same time, exposure to systematic and rigorous thinkers has been deemed irrelevant or symptomatic of dominant Western thought.
Back in 1973, I shrank from black power buttons and had the experience of stepping over broken glass and blood in hallways after riots. Today, Malcolm X is on the reading lists of middle school children. Many of my college students have not heard of Plato.
But the difference between now and then is that back then, educators thought they were being "progressive." Back then, there was still something to rebel against, like the notions of fact in history, grammatical correctness, and logic in writing - the pursuit of truth through philosophy.
Jay Bennish is just a symptom of what is wrong. According to the values of our educational system that prepares teachers, he deserves admiration for originality, authenticity, and bravery. But teachers like my Mr. U have moved up in the educational chain and have taught the teachers of Bennish.
The one credited for true originality and radical actions these days is the boy who recorded the diatribe.
Mary Grabar teaches at Clayton State University located in Atlanta, Georgia.
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bump for later
Depends on where the writer lived, went to school, and how old she is. I'm 59, a "boomer", and I got the real education before everything went sour around 1964. I was in college in 1964, and the colleges hadn't really been infected at that time.
To me the category "boomers" ought to be reserved only for those born from around 1946 through around 1956. That was the real boom, that was when the actual explosion of births occurred after the war.
Good find!
I can't imagine a school like this and this writer is only about 12 years younger than myself. What a difference a decade makes.
Btw, does anyone know how old this writer really is??
nuther bump for later.
Amazing........ another reason to get the books from a library and learn all by yourself.
I had a Jay Bennish teaching my tenth-grade "social studies" class in 1973 (note the subject name that already reveals the non-academic nature of the pursuit).
[. . .]
Mary Grabar teaches at Clayton State University located in Atlanta, Georgia.
Teaches what? Mythology?
It should probably be noted that Franklin was a very tough city high school even back then. I visited for a day in the mid 1970's, and a guide stood outside the restroom while I was in there. I guess the school district made sure the children of Rochester's 60's rioters got to hear what they wanted to hear.
I'm glad this woman transcended her experience there.
No, but I'll venture a guess. She wrote: I had a Jay Bennish teaching my tenth-grade "social studies" class in 1973.
Since most people in the tenth grade are around 15 or 16 years old, she would now be 48 or 49.
(The dumpsters are even harder to get into.)
;-)
Great article............... ping
We studies moral development theories (a topic for eighth grade?). Dilemmas such as: your daughter is sick, you can't afford the medicine, is it OK to steal the medicine? When I found out that there were "no right answers" I was supremely disappointed. What was the point of studying something in school with no right answer??
Less than a decade! I was in college from 1966 - 1970 and the differences between the entering freshman clases from '66 to '70 was profound and, to me, shocking.
"Beach Music" rock-and-roll v acid rock
beer/liquor v pot
girls with traditional morals v girls with ah, "looser" standards
respect for authority v contempt for authority
"Affirmation Viet Nam" (remember that?) v anti-war protests
neat clothing (dry cleaned clothes, socks and shoes) v slobby-looking (torn clothing, barefoot)
I could go on and on about it, but, needless to say, I was damn glad to be out of there. But over the years, I've spent some time pondering what the hell happened to America.
Thank God I graduated out of the Rochester school system in 1965. I remember Ben Franklin High School. There was no Junior in it at that time. We used to kick their butts on the football field and basketball court each year. Amazing, that in less than 10 years, they managed to take a perfectly good curriculum and turn it to crap. About the only time I can remember a discussion in class being off topic was the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
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