School Board Elections: May 17, 2022
On May 17 across the county and state are important elections for school board members and school budgets. It would take a blind eye to not know that across the county, the state, and the nation that the divide between ideologies is growing. What is obvious to one who is not blind is that the name calling and the plastering of one another into certain camps is damaging to our society. This needs to stop at the federal level in the Supreme Court and in Congress because it must stop in Wayne County. Terms are thrashed around which do no good except to denigrate one another. For example, woke culture, defined by whatever side you are on or Critical Race Theory, defined by whether you have felt the history of racism or if you choose to deny its effects.
Ideas bounce around defining who we are. Conservatives fight to end conservative ideals as they become neoliberals, just as the Supreme Court claims that Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and their peers foresaw AR15s,butt stocks, synthetic estrogens, and surgical procedures; they then claim to be originalists as they protect our religious beliefs and codifying them into law. In fact, our brilliant founders thought the opposite as Thomas Jefferson declared that laws must change as a man must change his clothes and Alexander Hamilton declared that religious beliefs should not control our government.
Our school boards are in a dilemma. Do they support the Constitutional idea that free speech and free actions are protected except when they harm others, just as our founding fathers and previous Supreme Courts had claimed? Or do they choose to block ideas that teach history and the foibles of life which are necessary for our children to come to grips with the world around them? Do they choose to deny that minority children do have a history that cannot be whitewashed away to protect the “innocent” white children from truth? Do they choose to educate our children to be free thinkers?
Germany learned this lesson well to teach the holocaust not out of guilt or retribution, rather to accept the consequences of the mass slaughter of 7.7 million Jews and others.
So, ask your school board candidates what they feel about a pedagogy taught by educators with many years of training and experience that truthfully teaches about the good and the bad of history and the good and the bad of relations between others. Do we really want school systems that hide the ongoing effects of racism, of sexual orientation and experiences, of personal freedoms, and the history that needs to be told. Ask them if they want our children to feel marginalized because they are not white, Christian, or straight. We cannot let people who may threaten school board members and school Superintendents scapegoat the fact that these hateful people are not fixing any of the problems that affect all of us. This hate must stop because it does not fix the real issues in this country, from our local school boards to Congress.