I thought about Ann Patchett this week as I watched the Virginia governor’s race devolve into a culture war over Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece about the horrors of slavery .
Laura Murphy, who led a years-long fight to grant Virginia parents the power to opt their children out of certain reading assignments, shows up in a new campaign ad for Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, who’s running against Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Murphy’s fight began in 2013 after her son — then a high school senior, now a lawyer at the National Republican Congressional Committee — said “Beloved” gave him nightmares. McAuliffe, in 2017, vetoed the so-called “Beloved bill” Murphy championed, which would have made Virginia the first state to give parents the right to have their children skip “instructional material that includes sexually explicit content.” (“Beloved” contains sexual assault. So did the experience for enslaved people in America.)
The reemergence of the “Beloved” fight feels at once irrelevant — we’re arguing about a novel during a pandemic/climate crisis/budget showdown? — and utterly on brand for this particular moment, punctuated as it is by parent tantrums.
The disruptions to school board meetings by parents upset about, oh, you name it — accurate portrayals of American history, LGBTQ rights, basic public health measures — have gotten so prevalent and so abusive that the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Joe Biden recently asking for help.
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“America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” the body representing 90,000 school board members wrote in a Sept. 29 letter. “The National School Boards Association respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation. Local school board members want to hear from their communities on important issues and that must be at the forefront of good school board governance and promotion of free speech. However, there also must be safeguards in place to protect public schools and dedicated education leaders as they do their jobs.”
We should be getting better at this — “this” being our willingness to learn and better understand the full range of human experiences that shaped our past and inform our present and impact our communities and, in many instances, leave a moral stain and, in other instances, bind us in a collective drive to do better, be better, leave this place better.
Instead, I fear, we’re getting worse at it.
Which brings me to Ann Patchett.
In 2006, Clemson University assigned "Truth and Beauty," Patchett’s gorgeous 2004 autobiographical novel, to the incoming freshman class. A group of South Carolinians decided the book was “not in harmony with the values of South Carolina or the Clemson community,” given its inclusion of a love story between two women. They staged protests. They took out full-page ads in the local newspapers. They called on Clemson to cancel the reading assignment and rescind their invitation to Patchett to speak on campus.
Ultimately, the university did not cave, and Patchett came to campus and delivered a lovely address, which is reprinted in her 2013 collection of essays, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.”
"Regardless of whether or not you're a student, it is never enough to rely on other people's ideas," Patchett told the crowd. "You have to look at the thing itself and make up your own mind. That's what it means to study and learn. There can be a fine line between obedience and laziness, and if you go through life dutifully taking other people's word about what's right, you are putting yourself in the position to be led down some very dark roads.”
It’s hard to imagine a brighter North Star toward which to point our kids right now.
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As TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube executives scramble to explain what they’re doing to keep kids safe on their platforms — platforms rife with bullying and drug sales — and Facebook and Instagram remain under fire for negatively affecting young people’s mental health, it strikes me that our best, most critical hope is to arm our kids with critical thinking skills.
Our role as parents shouldn’t be to shield kids from history and narratives that challenge and expand their worldview. Our reaction to educators who introduce different viewpoints and experiences, who invite kids to interrogate our past, who present them with uncomfortable truths, shouldn’t be to silence those educators. Comfort is rarely the point of education.
We ought to be looking around at the world our kids are inheriting — filled as it is with toxic disinformation and dangerous temptations and enormous, centuries-in-the-making conflicts — and recognizing that their best chance at surviving and solving any of it is through the ability to sit with uncomfortable topics, sniff out lazy propaganda, consider multiple viewpoints and the history that formed them. Again, critical thinking.
Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children, wrote a wonderful Medium essay recently on the importance of protecting public education. In it, he quoted Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, authors of “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.”
“In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight,” Schneider and Berkshire write. “That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of ‘rights’ only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.”
Leaving our kids to clean up the mess.
Heidi Stevens is a Tribune News Service columnist. You can reach her at heidikstevens@gmail.com or find her on Twitter @heidistevens13.
©2021 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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