Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol

Author:Jonathan Kozol
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307405708
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

It Is Evil to Tell Lies to Children

Dear Francesca,

Thank you for sending me the Yevtushenko poem. “Telling lies to the young is wrong. Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.” I liked especially the final words: “Forgive no error you recognize. It will repeat itself, increase, and afterwards our pupils will not forgive in us what we forgave.”

It naturally reminds me of our talks about “diversity” instruction and the injury it does to children when we either tell them things we know to be untrue or simply offer them materials we know to be misleading and then stand back and allow the lies to sink in quietly.

About ten years ago, an author named James Loewen wrote a book entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’m told that an updated version of this book is in the works. If so, it is badly needed now, because the same deceptions, many of them in social studies textbooks, are purveyed to children still, while a newer body of deceptions, many far more subtle and insidious, have proliferated since.

One of the standard themes in social studies lessons, for example, that has remained pretty much unaltered since I was a boy is the reassuring notion that, if great injustices exist, our nation’s mode of governance provides an avenue of redress through the legal process. An individual or, in the instance I am going to describe, a group of individuals who believe they are unfairly treated may, according to this notion, place their faith in legal action which, if it’s victorious, will lead to transformation of conditions they believe to be intolerable.

It is not this notion in itself so much as the simplistic way that it’s presented, with no parallel reference to the frequency with which a legal judgment is obstructed and invalidated by political maneuvers on the part of legislators and executives, that leaves our students, when they later understand the way the system really works, with a crushing sense of their own impotence as citizens.

This issue is directly relevant to children in our inner-city schools because at this moment, as you know, there are legal actions challenging the inequalities in funding for our public schools in the courts of several states, some of which began as long as 30 years ago. In repeated instances, after years of litigation, these suits have been successful and the local media have heralded the imminence of “a whole new order” of equality and justice for the children of the poor. But, with very few exceptions, the students who are plaintiffs in these cases never see the benefits that legal victories have led them to expect, because political forces in their states brazenly defy court orders and, moreover, do so with impunity.

In Ohio, for example, more than a decade after a suit was filed in the early 1990s on behalf of children in low-income districts, the state’s supreme court had determined three times that the system of school finance was in violation of the constitution of

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