I am a teacher and parent who lives, works and has children attend public school in the Salt Lake Valley. This valley and our state is a flourishing, diverse community, and I am privileged to work and live here. I would like to give voice to reason, to logic, and to collaboration. Other voices of anger and fear are trying to drive into education by wanting to severely restrict the crucial conversations, materials and resources educators can bring to the table in teaching the standards outlined by the Utah State Board of Education.
Educators do not have an agenda. We want to help students learn of the complexities of life and the current thoughts and arguments from multiple angles as it fits in the standards. This helps students to be well informed and to back their own thoughts up with logic, reasoning, and to have constructive dialogue with those of other viewpoints and backgrounds. Restrictive policies on what can be taught or what materials can be used won’t give students those skills. This regresses not renovates education.
Various forces are trying to pit parents against educators by offering slanderous, false or isolated incidents to prove the system is poisoned to the core. This obviously makes teachers defensive. A profession that is underpaid, overworked and seeing rising incidents of defamation and character assassination makes us feel more like lowly servants than professionals.
I reject the premise of this dichotomy. It is not parent vs. educators. Teachers and parents are allies of each other, not enemies. We need to stop screaming at the doors of our own echo chambers. Open the doors. Let’s work together to give our students the best education. Reject the rhetoric of fear.
As a history teacher I draw on history. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a man of faith, I draw on words that are sacred to me. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” (1st John 4:18). Let love, collaboration, and freedom win; not fear.
Jacob Rollins, Herriman