By Edwin Cooney
A friend recently sent me an internet article about a Little Rock, Arkansas social studies teacher named Martha Cothren. In September 2005, with permission from the Little Rock Superintendent of Schools, her school principal at Robinson High School and the cooperation of the building supervisor, Ms. Cothren removed all twenty-seven desks from her classroom for the first day of school.
When students arrived for class and discovered that there were no desks in Ms. Cothren’s classroom, they naturally wondered why. Her response was to ask the question: what have you done to earn the right to a desk? Only if they could give a satisfactory answer to that question, she told them, would she have desks installed in the classroom.
This apparently went on all day. Rather than answering her question, students seemed convinced that their behavior, was the real object of Ms. Cothren’s motive for beginning the school year without desks in her classroom.
Students guessed that perhaps they hadn’t behaved well enough. That wasn’t it, she assured them. Perhaps their grades weren’t sufficient, they guessed. No, that wasn’t it, either.
Finally, during the last period of the day, Ms. Cothren gave in. She would demonstrate to the students why they hadn’t earned the right to sit at their desks.
Opening the door—with local news cameras on hand—Ms. Cothren beckoned in twenty-seven soldiers with the required twenty-seven desks. Each soldier marched in, placed a desk in the proper spot, and marched to the wall where he or she stood at attention.
Once this risky mission was completed (after all, everyone knows how dangerous it is to enter a classroom in an American public school these days!), Ms. Cothren explained to the students the purpose of her lesson that day.
These veterans are the ones who have earned the right to occupy these desks, she told the students. They have sacrificed so that you have the freedom to be here. She urged them to let that knowledge be the force to compel them to listen, learn, and be good students and citizens. Thus, end of lesson.
As is routine with this and many other “internet lessons,” the recipient is urged to send this message around to educate others. The idea is that others will understand that those who have served in the military -- or perhaps more to the point, those who have served our nation during a time of war -- earned their liberties for them.
Because I resist the tendency to use the plight of our veterans to justify and even glorify war, something too many of our national leaders (both past and present) have done, my first reaction to this message was disgust. Even if I was prone to automatically distribute many of the messages of humor and inspiration the internet offers, this one I would withhold.
Aside from my own personal prejudices, it seems to me that Ms. Cothren has confused right with obligation. As far back as I can remember (and the time period I can recall is much too long for the preservation of either youth or beauty), most students were and are obligated to go to school. They don’t instinctively elect to go. Even those who excitedly attend their first day of kindergarten, respond to a parental or societal obligation.
Of course, regardless of my own discomfort, war veterans are legitimate heroes. With the exception of the terminally ill, few know what the battlefield soldier experiences when faced with the minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day intimacy of the presence of pain and perhaps death.
However, it must be remembered that even in these days of volunteer military service, most men and women in uniform join the service for the same reason that surely most of Ms. Cothren’s students originally entered school -- out of obligation.
It’s obvious that Ms. Cothren’s ultimate objective, since she and the local school system agreed to media coverage, was to demonstrate to the public that our rights and freedoms have been effectively protected by brave men and women who often do sacrifice their safety and even their lives in freedom’s name. Sadly, there is little doubt that her students aren’t likely to forget that she saw their obligation to get an education as a “right”.
In my view, therein lies the fault in Ms. Cothren’s lesson plan. Even in totalitarian societies such as Red China, Cuba, and, surely in those areas where the Taliban reigns, children must attend school. Nor are soldiers the sole purchasers of our children’s opportunity for an education. My social studies teachers taught me that taxi drivers, truck drivers, and even parents earn the money that paid my way at school.
It has become popular in recent years to chide minorities and welfare recipients for not understanding the difference between individual rights and obligations. From what I’ve seen of Martha Cothren’s lesson plan, she has demonstrated that perhaps even social studies teachers may suffer from the same malady.
Sadder still is the possibility that the value and meaning of these two words—right and obligation—have become casualties of our adventure in Iraq.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment