Out Of Jail But Not Free

History shows that under totalitarian regimes, teachers and artists are among the first to go. Ideas threaten ideologues. Even in the Roman republic, military leaders marched the teachers and students from conquered nations through the streets of Rome to signify that foreign ideas were not welcome in the Empire. The writings of Russian poet Anna Akhamatova were condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. Still, she continued to bear witness to Stalin's atrocities. Because Akhamatova was too popular among the Russian people to be imprisoned or executed, the state imprisoned members of her family who experienced deep suffering and even death.

The dictatorship in Nigeria pronounced a death sentence on Wole Soyinka for his activist writings denouncing oppression. He continued to write with his own blood after being imprisoned without a pen. Playwright Vaclav Havel spent four years in prison before becoming president of the Czech Republic. Throughout history, oppressors and apparatchiks have viewed artists and teachers as dangerous people. Not, however, in America.

In a series of lectures in the fifties, British scientist and writer C. P. Snow warned of the separation of what he called the Two Cultures. His academic friends in the sciences and humanities had stopped talking to one another. Snow said that this separation threatened to compromise life in the free world because the sciences were evolving without the wisdom of the arts and humanities.

Snow didn't oppose technology. He was concerned that while technology brought great advances in helping people, it also created a wider divide between the rich who could afford to benefit from the advances and the poor who could not. He also pointed out that while technological advancements offered great benefits, those same advancements also made a country more prepared for war. His concerns were prophetic, as we see now in our growing global crisis.

Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics once said, "The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the dopiness of people who study these things...." It's tempting for me as one of those arts and humanities people to be offended by this statement. But I think that while the word dopiness may be too glib, Feynman was right.

A good argument can me made that since the fifties, many scholars in the arts and humanities have not made their studies relevant to our rapidly changing technological world. Neither have public-school teachers who, for the last fifty years, have acquiesced to policies they know have not been in the best interests of children.

Teachers and artists in America are not dangerous to the political establishment. Artists don't challenge the injustices, inhumanity, and rampant ambition within our government. Instead, they apply for grants and residencies within the establishment. Teachers will fight for tenure, salaries, and benefits but continue to implement policies that we all know are damaging to children and have decimated our entire education system.

Now, I don't want to see artists and teachers going to prison. On the other hand, the real promise of America is that people shouldn't have to go to prison for speaking the truth on behalf of liberty and justice for all. The problem is that the artists and teachers who should be the bearers of truth have grown too insular and comfortable and therefore irrelevant.

Hitler burned books and replaced the challenging work of German Expressionists with sentimental pageantry. Too many of our nation's teachers and artists have allowed themselves to become part of the sentimental American pageantry. Art events are a great places for networking and catching up with friends over wine and cheese. When a creative teacher is stifled or driven from the system, people just shake their heads at what we have all come not just to expect but to accept.


For more on the history of education reform in America, please visit The Gulliver Initiative.