Educating For Freedom
By Margaret Snyder (04/22/04)
In 1961 the Berlin Wall went up and TIME ran a cover I will never forget. It was a painting of the wall at night, in shades of black and gray and a grayed red. There was barbed wire above the wall and from the other side a person was trying to get over it but all you could see was his hand clutching the barbed wire and the only spot of bright color in the picture was some orange-red blood dripping from the hand.
The picture stunned me. I was fourteen and had always been taught in school that we were fortunate to have been born in the land of the free, but in a sense, I had no idea what freedom was. Since I had never lived anywhere else, I had no point of comparison. It was the TIME cover that brought home to me that some places people had not such a basic freedom as to go where they would and live where they wished. I cut the cover off and hung it on the bulletin board in my room where it stayed as long as I lived at home, a reminder of how precious freedom is and how fragile.
Recently I have come to reflect on why it was that the picture moved me so. I think it was because in the 1950s families and schools educated us for freedom. Part of that was teaching us appreciation for our liberty and for the price others had paid that we might have and keep it. This picture showed me what price others were willing to pay to get what I had merely by having been born in the right place.
But there were other elements of our upbringing and education that educated us to live in freedom. The first prerequisite for a free people is discipline. Schools, families and churches taught self-control. If human beings are not to be controlled by the state, they must learn to control themselves. So we were taught that freedom was a good and we were taught how to live in a free society.
Do schools educate for freedom now? I don’t think so. Freedom is in constant tension with egalitarianism. There is no conflict between freedom and equality, when equality is understood to mean equality before God and before the law. In fact, there is no freedom without equality, which is why black Americans were not free under Jim Crow, when Americans were not equal before the law.
Egalitarianism is a different concept: it holds that we should strive to erase differences between individuals. Free people will never be equal in an egalitarian sense. Some will pursue more education or different kinds of education; people will pursue different lines of work; some will work harder; some will have greater talents and gifts than others or better parents. If everyone is free to develop himself and his gifts as his own inclinations direct, the results will be quite different.
Egalitarians cannot accept this. And egalitarians are largely in charge of our schools. So we find elementary schools discouraging playground games that have winners and losers. We find a high school in Tennessee that will no longer publish an honor roll because the people who aren’t on it might feel bad. Competition is discouraged. Group projects are favored and teachers pretend that everyone worked equally and deserves the same grade.
Egalitarians cannot stand to see differences between nations either. They don’t like for one nation to stand out over others as wealthier or more powerful or successful and so they tend to emphasize the flaws of the United States of America, in an effort to “bring it down to size”. It is not possible simultaneously to teach that the United States is bad and that freedom is good. So our children do not acquire the deep appreciation for freedom that other generations had.
Nor do families or schools teach much self-discipline nowadays. That stopped when mental health professionals convinced both parents and teachers that most effective forms of discipline were injurious to children’s psyches. As we have evolved into a society of individuals unable to curb their own behavior, we need ever more laws to try to control a self-centered, narcissistic citizenry.
So now we teach children neither the value of freedom nor how to live with it. I wonder what today’s children would think of that picture of the bloody hand trying to escape to freedom. And I wonder what their world will look like in forty years.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Margaret Snyder
