Back to the future

 Back to the Future

 

About a hundred years ago, John Scopes, a young high school science teacher was accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law.  Scopes was defended by the star attorney of the day, Clarence Darrow.  The law made it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals”.  Williams Jennings Bryan, a fundamentalist hero volunteered to assist in the prosecution.   Within days the courtroom was surrounded by spectators and reporters.  The judge worked to destroy the defense by insisting that Scopes was on trial not the theory he was teaching.  In the end, Scopes pleaded guilty and the case was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court that overturned the verdict.   In 1968, the U.S Supreme Court overturned  a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the free speech requirement of the First Amendment.

Fast forward about 100 years.   Now we are engaged in another fight over the right to teach and free speech.   Tennessee and Arkansas are at it again.  They are among the currently nine states that have forbidden the teaching of critical race theory (CRT).   Of course, CRT is neither a curriculum nor an identifiable set of topics or facts.   But it is being banned none-the-less.  CRT asks us to teach American history in a 360 mode.  The good news, the bad news and the in between news.  It asks that we do not deny the ugly; it does not ask that we ignore the good.  

Let’s suppose good old Jack Social Studies is teaching in Tennessee. Might not be the best idea since Tennessee seems to have a habit of restricting what is taught in schools.   In the course of teaching US history, he teaches about the terrible legacies of slavery, Jim Crow laws, immigration restrictions, and real estate red lining.  Under current Tennessee law, Good Old Jack could lose his job.  The laws in some states forbid teachers from teaching about historical instances that would make students feel bad.  Does that mean we don’t teach about WWII because students of German ethnicity might feel bad?  What will happen if Jack Social Studies gets punished for teaching what informants think is CRT?   Will these state laws be overturned as a violation of Mr. Social Studies First Amendment rights?   Or will the Supreme Court, which seems to be suffering from memory loss, also forget its 1968 decision.  Everything old is new again.