You Can't Say That: Teaching about Controversial Issues in American Schools, from Horace Mann to Donald TrumpJonathan Zimmerman
March 02, 2017. Duration: 70m 17s
In 2003, during a fifth-grade current-events lesson about the United States' newly begun war in Iraq, a student asked Indiana teacher Deborah Mayer if she had ever attended an anti-war protest. Mayer told the class that she had driven by such a protest a few days earlier, and had honked her horn in support. Her school board declined to renew Mayer's contract, noting that she had deviated from the board's approved curriculum. And four years later, a federal appeals court upheld the board's decision on similar grounds.
Across the country, Mayer's defenders decried the apparent assault on her "academic freedom." But K-12 teachers in America have never enjoyed such freedom, in a manner that university academicians would recognize. During wartime, especially, school boards and courts have discouraged or blocked teachers from engaging their students in an open, critical dialogue about controversial ethical and political issues. Jonathan Zimmerman's talk will explore these restrictions, the fate of teachers who broached them, and the implications of this history for the fate of our democracy.
Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of History of Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books including Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education, Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, and Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. A former president of the History of Education Society, his academic articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly. Zimmerman is also a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other popular newspapers and magazines.