Politics and Policy Archive

Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans living in the ever more interdependent global village of today. Every other week you will find a new article on this page.

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We're Not In Kansas Any More, Toto

David Nelson

As summer drew to an end, and my kids prepared for their return to the classroom, I came across two back-to-school items in the news. In Kansas, the State Board of Education ruled that Kansas public schools are not required to teach evolution in biology class. And in Israel, new high school history textbooks are being introduced this fall which reflect the "new history," an academic/political movement to explore (and sometimes explode) the myths of classical Zionist history (e.g., Israel as a peace-loving tiny nation, overwhelmed and surrounded by vast numbers of hostile Arabs) as a result of the study of recently declassified government and military records and documents.

With regard to the Kansas ruling, Mark Leroy of a creationist group called Answers in Genesis was quoted as saying that the teaching of evolution "…creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder and suicide" (M. Charen, "Dogma defeated…or Scopes redux?", The Washington Times, Aug. 16, 1999). And Israeli novelist Aharon Megged said of the new high school history textbooks, "This is an act of moral suicide that deprives our children of everything that makes people proud of Israel" (E. Bronner, "Rewriting Israeli History: Textbooks Focus on Facts," New York Times, Aug. 14, 1999).

The reactions in these two (seemingly unrelated) news stories disturb me greatly. They reflect an approach to education that places tremendous emphasis on the indoctrination function of education and is willing to exclude whole categories of discussion from the classroom because the offending topics may lead a student to question, or even reject, the values of the society in which the educational experience is framed. Apparently, educators in Kansas are afraid that merely by teaching Darwin's theories, students may reject the religious values of their (predominantly) conservative Christian society. Megged is afraid that exploring the possibility that some of Israel's past actions conflicted with the values taught its students might cause the students to leave Israel! (Megged voices this concern explicitly in his article, "The Jewish State: The Next 50 Years" in Azure, Issue #6, Winter 5759/1999 - you can read it at www.Azure.org.il.)

Such concerns remind me of a certain rabbi who, while reading Torah in services, would simply skip over any passages that were at all disturbing, troubling, or potentially offensive. Perhaps he thought that the public reading of disturbing passages would drive Jews away - from the synagogue or from Judaism!

In any society, the inculcation of core values is one of the most important tasks entrusted to educators. Without it, group identity quickly fades and withers. But any set of values important enough to pass on must be trusted to be resilient enough to survive open, frank discussion of competing values systems. No system of belief, including Torah, Zionism, and patriotism, should need a protectionist wall around it. Any system that does require such defense in the form of "questions that may not be asked" or "discussions that may not be held" is, I think, probably not worth defending.