CULTURE WATCH: Lesson Plans - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 16, 2002

The National Education Association is under fire for its advice to teachers on how to spend the anniversary of September 11. The critics say that the NEA's lesson plans are too relativistic and insufficiently patriotic. Students would hear a lot about "intolerance": the need to avoid it, America's shameful history of same. The critics would like students to learn more about America's virtues and about our enemies' deadly intolerance.

The critics both overstate and understate their indictment. The NEA compiled a list of lesson plans, many of them developed by others: the American Red Cross, the National Association of School Psychologists, PBS. There is not a lot of blame-America stuff in the plans. There are, indeed, links to America's founding documents. Overall, the mood is mildly adversarial toward Americans, who are assumed to be constantly on the verge of committing ethnic pogroms. But this assumption is now widespread among Americans who sincerely regard themselves as patriots. In any case, the focus of the lesson plans is less social than psychological. Students would be asked to talk a lot about feelings: their own feelings, their fellow students' feelings, and their feelings about their feelings. They would be told that it's okay to feel a variety of emotions and not to judge others. If they are in grades 6 through 12, they may be asked to perform a group exercise called "Remember to Laugh."

What the critics have uncovered, in other words, is not the NEA's lack of patriotism. It is modern liberal culture's shallowness. For that culture, September 11 cannot be understood as an historical event. History is consulted only to the extent that it teaches us that people in previous eras have had feelings of grief and anger after disasters, too, and that these feelings have been expressed in more and less healthy ways. The history of the Middle East is not mentioned anywhere. Islam is a source of "diversity," and the only thing students need know about Muslims is that they are not all alike.

These have been the culture's lesson plans for adults as well as schoolchildren. The media will, on September 11, talk more about heroes and losses than about terrorism. Our elected leaders have discouraged any deeper engagement with Islam than the NEA recommends.

In one of the NEA's links, the school psychologists warn that "[i]ntensive, detailed coverage of the attacks, the terrorists, and/or the threat of future attacks can raise children's anxiety levels." Understanding that we have enemies that mean to do us harm can raise adults' anxiety levels, too, and should. Tolerance, diversity, and psychological well-being are all fine things if they are rightly understood. But a country needs other things to defend itself: things like courage, confidence, endurance, manliness, intelligence. Neither our school curricula nor our public culture is designed to cultivate those qualities. We need better lessons, and not from the NEA.