On the first day of class in Latin II our teacher, Gladys De Nio, told us how to open the new textbooks: Starting with the front and back covers, press down, a few pages at a time, finishing in the middle. This preserves the book’s spine, she said.
Books are treasures. Treat them that way, she said.
Mrs. Denio also taught English. She was a slight woman with a kind face, rigorous habits and a generous devotion to language. She spoke with authority and a forgiving lilt, a voice that invited us to show her that we liked learning. It was a delight to listen, whether she was explaining a phrase from Cicero or the glories of Walt Whitman. Her enthusiasm was contagious, and under the sting of her kindly lash I have been chasing the elusive elements of expression for a long time.
Other teachers also inspired us to absorb their lessons. Jim Mariner, young and lanky, was our guide through the bewildering maze of physics and formulae. His lectures were about solving problems but he emphasized that understanding them holds a secret, the route toward an answer.
John Buckner, the director of music, led a small seminar in the humanities. We explored the arts’ influence over the centuries ‒ how people live and think, the shape and color of their buildings, their landscapes, their clothing, and how they lay out their cities and their politics ‒ for starters.
Teachers helped us want to learn more. They opened doors, showed us how to expand the orbit of our curiosity.
This has not changed. In today’s schools the equipment is different, the curriculum is reformed and technology has muscled in. But teachers remain the students’ source of inspiration, hope, enlightenment. The dedication of De Nios, Buckners and Mariners lives in today’s teachers who offer the comfort of wisdom, the delight of humor, and the blessing of an attitude toward right and wrong.
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But in Topeka the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese and school libraries are awash in filthy ideas. The legislature, submitting to directives from distant, hardcore cause lobbies, has again turned sour on schools and teachers.
One measure creates a ‘parents bill of rights’ requiring teachers to post online every piece of material they use and to give parents more say (as if they don’t now) about what goes on in the classroom.
Another, Senate Bill 83, sluices more public funds to private schools by expanding “educational savings accounts” and private school vouchers ‒ and creating big tax write-offs for private school tuition.
This extends state control of local classrooms. In Kansas sharp-edged conservatives are reviving the dark Brownback years, when teacher pensions once were targeted in an attempt to backfill $400 million in deficit spending.
Model legislation, drafted today by out-state cause lobbies ‒ Florida’s Moms for Liberty, Washington’s ALEC and the Heritage Foundation among them ‒ continues to fester in the back channels at Topeka, smearing distrust on educators.
For example, teachers could be charged with a crime for using material viewed by others as “harmful” to minors. The legislation was vague, leaving such terms as “obscene” and “harmful” to the imagination. The state’s obscenity law was to be changed. Teachers using material which depicts “homosexuality” could be charged with a class B misdemeanor.
Legislators have also pressed to weaken student vaccination programs, denounce or fire teachers for using “offensive” materials, ban from libraries any materials considered obscene by a measure of “community standards.”
In 2015, lawmakers tried to forbid job-related paycheck deductions, a way to cancel payroll contributions for (teacher) union dues.
At one point, bills were introduced to require that school district employees be fingerprinted and submit to criminal background checks every five years.
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The attitudes that lead to classroom suppressions spring from the darkest days, returning schools to the standards that provoked the 1925 trial of John Stokes, a teacher in Dayton, Tenn. He was charged with bringing evolution to the classroom. It wasn’t that Stokes had asked his students to think about the science, but that he had asked them to think at all.
Imagine legislators now, out to get today’s De Nios, Mariners and Buckners, teachers who inspire students to think and to aspire. Schools are a community’s well spring, firm and immutable. They are not decoys for political swindlers. They are to perpetuate and extend the spirit of young generations.
