Classroom no place for parent intervention

Editorial Board

This editorial is a compilation from a discussion held by the editorial board.

Last week a Conway Springs teacher, Tom Leahy, was asked to resign after showing students an anti-bullying film that depicts a fictional world in which heterosexual children are bullied by homosexual classmates. The resignation was in response to a slew of complaints coming from angry parents. This brings about the question: is it really the parent’s role to dictate their child’s curriculum?

The Mentor editorial board thinks not.

Leahy showed the video after his students, in creating a utopian society for an assignment, started calling for the eradication of gays. So, he found a video that depicted the problem with hating someone, bullying them, because of their sexuality.

Such hate should not be tolerated and we commend Leahy for attempting to teach his students that. Sadly, we must instead mourn the lost educational opportunities caused by small-minded parents who didn’t want their kids to learn anything “controversial.”

Education is just as much centered around the idea of life lessons and helping students be functioning adults as it is around memorizing dates and formulas.

Likewise, the role of the teacher shouldn’t simply be to spew facts at half-asleep children, it should be about engaging students and teaching them about life, about how to think critically, and the only way to do that is to introduce them to other viewpoints, ideologies, etc.

Teachers hold a large amount of power in regards to the development of their students and have the opportunity to mold them into great, independent thinkers. Parents should not be allowed to stifle this based on their own bigotry.

Sure, when kids are in elementary school it might be a good idea to send home a permission slip before they watch “the video,” but parents shouldn’t be at the helm of a teacher’s curriculum, steering it towards their own beliefs and censoring anything that makes them uncomfortable.

Education is supposed to be about introducing students to as many differing experiences and viewpoints as possible so as to allow the student to discern right and wrong for themselves.

If a student is simply spoon-fed whatever doctrine their parents had spoon-fed to them, then there is no opportunity for personal growth or understanding and, thus, no opportunity for the whole of society to be bettered.

More specifically to this specific incident, it must be recognized that no matter what your individual views are, no one has the right to belittle and dehumanize an entire group of people and such bigotry certainly shouldn’t be tolerated within an educational environment.

There is no capacity for positive change if there is no capability to freely think.