Gatekeepers of Knowledge

Reported in The New York Times today (Thursday, March 8, 2007) are a series of situations reflecting the narrow-mindedness of school officials.

Three John Jay High School students in Cross River, New York, have been suspended one day for using the word ‘vagina’ during a literary reading from The Vagina Monologues at the school forum. The segment honor students Hannah Levinson, Megan Reback and Elan Stahl read was ‘The Short Skirt’:

My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.

Apparently, the school administration say they are punishing the sixteen year olds for insubordination, not free expression. The principal, Rich Leprine, claims that the girls had agreed not to use the word as there were young children in the audience, but the girls deny this claim. The girls believe that the word used in context was empowering, and the word was not used in any sexual way.

On a different note, a teacher at Hampton Bays Elementary School in Central Islip, New York, was accused of practising withcraft and teaching it to children. Ms Lauren Berrios, 37, had taught fifth graders about the Salem witch trials and exposed them to witches, wizards, and especially the weird sisters of Macbeth. According to Berrios, the school administration at this school was run by born-again fundamentalists who are intent on converting students to the Christian faith. Her lawyer jumped to her defense by stating:

The Hampton Bays School District is not the State of Massachussetts. This is about the denial of tenure to a teacher. The plaintiff is a storyteller.

Why educators limit potentialities, capabilities and creativities is a question I constantly ask myself. Isn’t education a process to liberate the mind, a call to free the spirit and a need to explore possibilities?

Sure, there are issues of censorship, of appropriateness, and of sensitivity, but I do have my concerns with the so-called higher management of education who constantly decide what should be and should not be taught in schools. I had run into a similar conflict in Singapore with a Principal – and one whom I respect a lot – who had decided that the accompanying song to a hip hop dance was unwholesome and should be scrapped even though it was part of a performance. Principals and teachers who act as arbiters of good and evil, I think, should re-examine their educational philosophies and pedagogies. If they see themselves as proselytes and ambassadors of a certain religious truth, they would do well to exercise caution and act outside the boundaries of their professional status as educators. A school governed by the state (and not a missionary school or private school governed by religious principles) should remain as neutral a space as possible. Just as in politics, religion must stay separate. If not, we run the risk of producing uncritical thinkers, slaves to an oppressive system.