AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE NEA'S 'FEEL-GOODISM' ABOUT SEPT. 11

Saturday, August 31, 2002

Teachers concerned about how to mark the Sept. 11 anniversary in their classes would do will to skip the blather from the National Education Association and look for inspiration in a collection of essays solicited by the Fordham Foundation (www.edexcellence.net).

Oh, all right, if you really want to read the NEA's lesson plans, you can find them at neahin.org. As Chester Finn, president of Fordham, says, ``We don't recommend going there -- it's a mishmash of pop-psychotherapeutics, feel-goodism, relativism and overblown multiculturalism, even more noteworthy for what's not there: history, civics, patriotism, etc.''

He's got them pegged, all right.

The NEA has responded defensively to criticism of its site, saying in a press release, ``Using this national tragedy to attempt to score political points is a new low, and we urge visitors to make their own assessments of [the site's] value.''

A ``new low''? Lower than flying planes into buildings? These people have a greatly exaggerated sense of their own importance. They also fail to understand that criticism might be prompted not by a wish to score political points, but by indignation at educational bankruptcy.

Fordham took the alternative of asking several dozen ``educators, scholars and analysts'' for brief essays on the topic of what our children need to know about Sept. 11. The 23 essays they received are also varied, but they have in common that they don't neglect history, civics or patriotism.

The package also includes a list of resources -- books, articles and Web sites -- useful for teachers, but also for parents.

I can't do better than to excerpt a few things that particularly struck me, in the hopes that you will be encouraged to go read the whole thing.

John Agresto: The anniversary of Sept. 11 gives us the opportunity not to preach the usual pap about diversity that different cultures see the world in different but equally valid ways. Rather, we now have the opportunity to show that there are peoples and cultures with ideas radically and fundamentally different from our own. Different even on the most basic givens we take for granted as the basis of civilized life -- that, for example, the ends do not justify the means, that innocents are to be treated with respect, that people should not be exploited as means to ideological or religious ends, that the subjugation of women is an affront to human dignity, indeed that there is such a thing as human dignity . . . Have enough respect for diversity not to make believe that deep down, everyone really is peace-loving, good-willed and egalitarian, just like you.'' (Agresto is the former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M.)

William Bennett: For too long, so-called sophisticates have said that right and wrong are matters of opinion, or personal preference, of one's own taste . . . In the face of what happened, those who argue that there is no such thing as evil are revealed as what they were all along -- fools. (Bennett is a former U.S. Secretary of Education.)

William Galston: There is such a thing as civic virtue, and whether or not we possess it can be a matter of life and death . . . For all the (justified) talk of our diversity, Americans possess a civic identity that both includes and surmounts our differences. (Galston was a policy adviser to the Clinton White House.)

Katherine Kersten: Teaching young people to be patriots . . . requires what the ancient Greeks called a paragon, or character ideal. Many of today's students have difficulty distinguishing between a celebrity and a hero. We must acquaint them with America's great statesmen, lawgivers, military heroes and social crusaders, and lead them to say, 'I want to be like that.' '' (Kersten is a fellow at the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.)

Richard Rodriguez: Without a sense of the tragic in U.S. history books, we have never understood that America finally was formed against and despite the mistakes and reversals we committed against our own civilization. Now, our children glance up to wonder at the low-flying plane. They need, also, to look back in time, to see America ever-invented, forged through difficult decades into a civilization. That civilization was always at risk. Always vulnerable. Never inevitable. Not just because of threats from without. But from our own ignorance of all we possessed. (Rodriguez is the author of a trilogy on American life.)

What our children need more than anything else is an end to ignorance and cynicism.