Robert Azzi: Who’s grooming whom?

By Robert Azzi
It was when, some months ago, I read a NH blog arguing, “Who needs libraries when we have the internet,” that I began to fully realize the depths to which support for public education and civic engagement had sunk.

For some time I had harbored the thought – or perhaps just hoped – that such people were just a small fraction of our community, fractious partisans acting out the delusions of a madding crowd.

I was wrong.

Today, I know better: I have come to realize that these partisans are the product of a deliberate manipulation – a grooming, if you will – by some Americans who believe that their vision of what this nation should look like should dominate the Public Square.

Groomers trying to undermine civic engagement and siphon off students, resources, parental and public support and divert them to serve the parochial investments of entrenched anti-democratic interests.

Groomers, led by craven politicians hungry for power and profit, who today threaten our democracy and include among them New Hampshire Commissioner of Education Frank Edelblut, who, it appears, doesn’t support public education as an aspirational and universal American priority.

Edulblut, who has home schooled his seven children, has no personal or professional education credentials. He is not only a supporter of New Hampshire’s “divisive concepts” law which forbids teaching about systemic racism in our public schools and state agencies, but who has recently written that some “activist educators” are intentionally trying to manipulate students when they teach about American history, racism, LGBTQIA+ peoples, gender diversity, pronouns, and social justice movements.

Teaching that such peoples and interests exist is not manipulation.

Alarmingly, Edelblut, wrote that teachers shouldn’t be teaching anything that conflicts with the family values of students in the classroom: “Fortunately, parents can choose to turn off Disney. They can’t, however, easily escape the efforts of activist educators who might be knowingly dismantling the foundations of a value system they are attempting to build.

He continues: “That means that families, when they send their children to school, entrust the educators to respect the value systems that the family is building. This is the sacred trust that educators have.”

Edelblut is wrong.

Understanding, as Horace Mann wrote, that “Public Education is the cornerstone of our community and our democracy” the true “sacred trust that educators have” is, contrary to Edelblut’s assertions, to help educate children into becoming literate, curious, engaged, empathetic, and productive citizens willing to participate in the civic life of however diverse and pluralistic a nation might be – or become.

Edelblut is wrong.

It is not education’s role to cater to the fanciful delusions that some parents have, for example, that systemic racism does not exist, that some religions are superior to others, that climate change is not real, that evolution did not occur, that whiteness is America’s normative value, that LGBTQIA+ peoples should be marginalized, and that people of color and minority communities be disenfranchised.

It’s not education’s role to cater to such ignorance or prejudice, just as it’s not America’s role to stand by and permit the intellectual looting of our libraries and the banning of books by Toni Morrison, Yaa Gyasi, Ibram X. Kendi, Maia Kobabe, Angie Thomas, and others.

It is education’s role to confront the challenge America faces today: By which narrative will it live?

Will it live by primitive tribal caste-based conflicts based on privilege – a sort-of 21st century survivalist mentality – or will America finally learn to live caste-free within a paradigm that embraces all peoples, including the refugee, the sojourner, the orphan, and the Other, all without prejudice, all without regard to gender and sexuality, all without fear or resentment?

“I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.”

We cannot afford to refuse to move.

While we cannot know when or how America’s final reckoning with its history of racism and white supremacism will be resolved, America cannot today – even in the face of those who attempt to groom Americans away from its democratic institutions – afford to abandon the aspirational values upon which the nation was created, and that among those values is equal access to education.

Equal! Not separate but equal. Equal!

“Whoever takes a path upon which to obtain knowledge,” the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said “God makes the path to Paradise easy for him.”

To paraphrase Isaiah, I wonder if on such paths will the eyes of the blind be opened, will the tongue of the speechless sing for joy?

Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].