Get your own soapbox

A music teacher in a Maine elementary school, Marissa McCue Armitage has decided to teach about controversial topics, she writes in Education Week. She knows some parents don't want their kids hearing about settlers stealing Indian land at Thanksgiving, the dangers of climate change, challenging gender norms or the horrors of slavery. But, after attending DEI workshops, she's decided to "cover the hard stuff."

Yes, she teaches music. Or that's what she's paid to teach.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" remains a favorite Thanksgiving song.

This is "a pitch-perfect illustration of what it means to be a culture warrior instead of an educator," writes Rick Hess in Education Next.

First, the teacher explains the issue as a conflict between people who think "teaching tolerance" and making sure students are "represented" could "literally save a life" and those who don't want to teachers to "discuss the uglier sides of American history." It's life-savers vs deniers.

"Truth is, the lion’s share of Americans are fine with teaching the bad stuff," writes Hess. "What they don’t want is teachers imposing ideology, preaching gender dogma, reducing identity to pigmentation, or pretending American history is one long parade of horribles."

If parents don't want her teaching climate change, it may not be that they're anti-science, he adds. They may worry about "manipulative efforts to stoke the anxieties of eight-year-olds or use the classroom as a forum for value-laden diatribes."

Whatever edu-consultants may say, teachers should do their jobs, Hess writes. Science teachers should address climate change and history teachers should discuss slavery, in age-appropriate ways. Music teachers should teach music.

My elementary school music teacher, Miss Ottesen, taught us some religious songs, but it wasn't controversial at the time. For Thanksgiving, the fifth-graders sang: "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing. He hastens and chastens his will to make known. The wicked oppressing cease them from distressing, sing praises to his name, he forgets not his own." I loved the internal rhymes. And we all came down hard on "his own."

Of course, our favorite was "Over the River and Through the Woods."