Uneducated Educators

Stories of bone-headed public school administrators are frequently in the news. Here's one at Captain's Quarters about an administrator in Maryland who will not permit any mention of the fundamental significance of Thanksgiving:

Young students across the state read stories about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, simulate Mayflower voyages, hold mock feasts and learn about the famous meal that temporarily allied two very different groups.

But what teachers don't mention when they describe the feast is that the Pilgrims not only thanked the Native Americans for their peaceful three-day indulgence, but repeatedly thanked God.

"We teach about Thanksgiving from a purely historical perspective, not from a religious perspective," said Charles Ridgell, St. Mary's County Public Schools curriculum and instruction director. School administrators statewide agree, saying religion never coincides with how they teach Thanksgiving to students.

Of course not. Why teach students that Thanksgiving was historically a religious observance? Why teach students that it began as an expression of thankfulness to God and was officially proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln to be a day of gratitude to God? We can't do this, these administrators are convinced, because that would be to graft a religious lesson onto a history lesson, and somehow, they intuit, that would be wrong.

Perhaps someone will inform these "educators" that by teaching about Thanksgiving "from a purely historical perspective" they are making nonsense of both the day and its history. Mr. Ridgell evidently thinks that one can isolate historical events from their context and still teach history, as if the events can be understood apart from the circumstances which cause them. Who or what does Mr. Ridgell think the pilgrims were thanking? How meaningful is any historical discussion of Thanksgiving apart from an accurate understanding of its purpose?

We wish we could say that Mr. Ridgell is in the minority among school administrators and bureaucrats, but we suspect he is not. There are, of course, many fine people in school administration, but too many of them, for all their degrees, are often among the least well-educated individuals on a school faculty. They are not infrequently people who originally went into education to coach, taught subjects which required minimal academic or scholarly preparation, found the demands of the classroom uncongenial, and when finished coaching settled upon a career in administration as an escape. They often read nothing of academic or intellectual merit beyond a few sterile education journals and many of them can scarcely write a coherent, grammatically correct paragraph. Their greatest concern is not to provide the best education possible for students but rather to keep their school boards and parents happy and to stay out of court.

It's little wonder, then, that administrators like Mr. Ridgell don't understand that the religious motivations and beliefs of the pilgrims are an essential aspect of the history of Thanksgiving and that ignoring these only distorts and corrupts history.