“Just a Few Thousand”—the Moral Questions Facing New Teachers
Mark Pearcy
I taught for nineteen years in public schools before joining higher education, and I can honestly say that I was never more shocked than I was in my second year, during a class in U.S. history. That year, I had a student named Chris. Likable, athletic (a pitcher on the baseball team), Chris wasn’t particularly gifted or hardworking, content with regular C’s and the occasional B. He didn’t talk much in class, except to girls; rarely participating in class discussions. This changed when we started our unit on the Holocaust.
All the students knew the basic history of the topic, some more informed than others—but all students were thoroughly engaged when we talked about the death camps, the experiments, and the usual round of questions: “Why didn’t more fight back?” “Did they ever catch the ones who did it?” “How many died?”
It was the last question that brought Chris into the discussion. A student had called out the question, and another had spontaneously answered: “Millions.” Chris raised his hand; surprised, I called on him.
“Actually, I heard it was different than that,” he said.
“Well, that’s true,” I responded. Privately, I was delighted he was taking part—while the Holocaust is a grim subject, it usually serves the pedagogical purpose of getting quiet students off the sideline and into the argument. “The total number killed in the Holocaust was around eleven million. Jewish victims made up six million of those.”
“No, actually I heard it was less.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I heard it was just a few thousand.” He nodded in response to my surprised look. “I heard they got the number ‘six million’ by adding up all the generations of kids that would have been born to the actual victims.”
I was stunned. This was not only patently, demonstrably absurd—it was also directly from the rhetoric of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. Trying hard to maintain composure, I asked him: “Where did you hear that?”
He shrugged again. “My father.”
The question facing a new teacher like me was difficult—should I have corrected Chris? Should I have told him his father was flatly wrong? Or worse, should I have told him that his father was repeating nauseating rhetoric that had been zoned off for the worst, vilest purveyors of bigotry? Incidentally, to make matters more complicated, I knew Chris’ father—like his son, an amiable, likeable man, who certainly didn’t seem to me the type of person who would repeat wildly inaccurate beliefs about the Holocaust. But what should be done?
I corrected Chris. Quickly, and bluntly, in front of the class. “That’s wrong,” I told him, and proceeded to drill him with the facts and evidence in my corner. I’m certain there are many teachers that would dispute my decision, and say that dealing with Chris’ error in that manner was too direct; or, even more likely, that dealing with it at all, especially in the second year of my career, was skirting the possibility of professional suicide, especially today, when the pressure and scrutiny aimed at teachers is worse than ever before.
All this would be reasonable criticism. Certainly, I make no grand claims to courage, seeing as I how I was teaching in an era of educator independence which, nowadays, we can seemingly only remember through the misty lens of nostalgia. My reaction was instantaneous precisely because I didn’t think about professional consequences. In fact, I had only one thought about Chris at the moment—“I can’t let him go on believing that.”
The lesson of Chris, and “just a few thousand,” is one of which new teachers are aware. There is a moral component to what we do in the classroom, one that applies to all subject areas. When we teach, we not only want to foster academic skills and achievement, we want to help children develop into good people. This is a concept of which many teachers are leery, and it’s hard to blame them—since for many, both in the classroom and out, it can sound quite a lot like indoctrination. But when we, through our schools, produce adults who are incapable of critically analyzing the issues of the world and their own lives—that would be the product of indoctrination. Instead, our goal, as Nel Noddings puts it, is invested in “a commitment to building a world in which it is both possible and desirable for children to be good—a world in which children are happy” (Noddings, 2003, p. 2).
Certainly, helping students find a worthwhile and lucrative career is important, as is helping them to acquire the habits of mind that accompany any field of study. But all teachers, in all disciplines, will sooner or later face situations where students believe an idea, or adopt a behavior, which endangers the successful achievement of the goal we seek, a world in which children can be “good.”
But how do we know what that means, to be “good?” Isn’t this is a matter of debate, and isn’t it dangerous for teachers to put themselves in the midst of such debate?
Of course. But that’s part of the job, as much as helping students learn to multiply and divide, or write clear sentences, or construct a logical argument. As teachers, we are representatives of a broader culture, one committed to a series of values that, as a community, we’ve deemed worth promoting and defending. Yes, there are gray areas, but far more often, the answers we have are clearer than we might want to accept.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, offered a succinct definition of obscenity—“I know it when I see it.” When confronting with morally impermissible views, teachers are a bulwark of civilization and morality—and though very often there may be debate about whether or not we should intervene, often (perhaps too often) there is no debate at all. We know it when we see it, and we should have the courage of our own convictions, and faith in the goals of our profession, to act.
References
Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness and education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. United States Supreme Court. (1964). Jacobellis v. Ohio. Retrieved from http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0378_0184_ZC1.html
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