Actually, I agree with the NEA on this one. I disagree with the conclusion that teaching children to make informed judgments, and to withhold judgment until they are informed, means, ipso facto, blaming America. That would not be an informed judgment. It is no more rational than blaming all Muslims for 9/11.
Presenting the choice of blaming no one, or blaming all Muslims, is a false dichotomy. The operative word here is "informed", CB. Is the NEA really encouraging an "informed" opinion? Given that Al Qaeda has claimed credit for 9/11, avoiding blaming them now strikes me as a willfully "uniformed" judgement.
Mark Steyn never calls the teacher's union of anti-American. He just accuses them of being in thrall to this weird cult of tolerance,
they’re in thrall to something far craftier than straightforward anti-Americanism — a kind of enervating cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own.
Preachers of the cult of tolerance often find themselves in a difficult situation, because sometimes being really "informed" of the facts -- such as the fact Al Qaeda decided to kill thousands of Americans in an act of war, or a dramatic piece of performance art, however you describe it -- would cause most Americans to become rather judgemental. And being judgemental is what the cult of tolerance cannot abide.
So either you must balance the bad from other cultures with the bad from your own, eg the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans (however strained the comparison), or in a pinch, you must simply self-censor the bad from other cultures, eg by not describing the usual treatment of women in Arab societies. This is because information that would lead to being judgemental is bad. In this scheme of things, tolerance is the chief virtue; indeed, it is almost the only virtue. Since only a certain outcome is acceptable, censoring the inputs to produce this outcome becomes an easy way out. This is the very opposite of "informed judgement". |
