Teachers and Students Have the Right to Education, and the Right to Academic Freedom!

"The same people who control the school system control/The prison system, and the whole social system" --Dead Prez, "They Schools"

“Historically the schooling system has been used as a project of colonization to rob students of their identity.” --Karen Salazar

An English teacher in the LA school district, Karen Salazar, was fired recently for doing her job: teaching her students to think critically. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, she was fired for teaching "extremist" views and for reportedly not following LAUSD standards. The real issue? Salazar was teaching her students to ask questions, to question authority. The book they were reading? The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

And while this didn't happen in Riverside, we need to think about how easily this could happen here (and probably already has).

Karen Salazar: “This school system for too long has been not only denying [students] human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, in order to subjugate them in society, and this is a systematic problem.”

A student: “The fact that she is teaching us about our culture and things that are relevant to us—that’s what they’re afraid of! They’re scared of a teacher who does that because that involves critical thinking. They don’t like students who question or who think critically. They just want us to absorb everything and regurgitate back to them.”

Here are some links where you can find out more:

Save Salazar Website

KTLA News Report and Press Conference

Fire in Watts: Jordan Students Rise for Ms. Salazar

So, think about how bored you usually were in high school. How irrelevant you thought a lot of your classes were. Think about the effects of that ennui and dissatisfaction—how you just stopped caring about some of your classes, or stopped caring about school entirely.

Now I need you to understand that as an educator, I believe that the school system is set up this way on purpose: to distance youth from the ideas and knowledge that would give them the hope, inspiration, and cultural capital to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Students need to learn about the history of the culture in power in order to succeed, in order to speak the language of power. But students also need to be exposed to ideas, cultures, and histories that resonate with their ethics and values--which can include stories and knowledge that are intentionally left out of public discourse. Most minority students are purposefully blocked from access to what can empower them: their histories, their literatures, their cultures. I have personally seen students transformed by the empowerment they can experience in a classroom that gives them a voice and a way to express their values and desires. It is in these instances that I see that what I teach and how I teach it can make a powerful difference in my students’ lives. Students respond to being taken seriously and being treated with respect and dignity. They respond to the opportunity to learn and challenge themselves. They desire a voice and stake in the future of our country and our world. Students are not born apathetic: they are made that way by years of compulsory education that seeks to destroy their intellectual curiosity and strictly regulate their learning through testing and intimidation. At the least, the public educational system will always serve the interests of those in power unless concerted efforts are made to change the structure and curriculum of public schools. At its worst, the educational system has been used to brainwash students into mindlessly regurgitating propaganda.

So I must ask: do you want America to consist of educated constituencies who vote, participate in the creation and recreation of our country, and strive for equality and justice? This can happen only through education. And many people in power (the wealthy, politicians, those with privilege) don’t want for youth, women, people of color, queers, immigrants, or the working class to have this power, or to vote or participate in democracy. Because if we participated, then we might vote ourselves into office, or we might demand the power we have been alienated from. And that risk is too great. Because then we’d all have to share our wealth, share our prestige and power. It is this hierarchy that creates inequality everywhere, and why education is so important in ending slavery and human rights injustices. But change will not happen unless teachers, students and administrators all take a stand and transform the educational system into a place where real learning is nurtured. And real learning happens when all voices and perspectives are welcomed and encouraged.

After years of school and practical experience with teaching, educators work to develop curricula that engage their students in the process of learning—taking ideas and theories and synthesizing them in order to create practical lessons for students to engage in and learn from. Within this process of educating ourselves and developing our pedagogy, we wrestle and measure our lessons against "the standards": those requirements that we are forced to comply with within any given school system. Depending on your school, the standards you are required to adhere to may work to reinforce the status quo, or may radically transform students hearts and minds. This isn’t nor can ever be a denunciation of standards-we need standards in an institutionalized education system in order to guarantee some stability and equality in all students’ educations. But the problem is—who decides the standards? And whose interests do these standards serve? Why is it controversial to teach the Autobiography of Malcolm X (which, incidentally, is approved by the LAUSD as “acceptable literature”)? Why is our national public discourse set up in such a way that Malcolm X is an “extremist” but Jerry Falwell isn’t? Why do our school system standards indicate that some values, beliefs, and cultures are acceptable, while “others” (Black and Latino cultures, female and queer culture, working class culture) are “outside the norm” or unworthy of study and reflection? Because when schools teach multiple value systems, cultures, and beliefs, students must think critically about their own value systems; they begin to realize how much of their beliefs and values have been forced upon them through a lack of access to information, and the lack of access to differing and even contradictory value systems and ways of life. And that is why great writers like Malcolm X, Paolo Freire, Fredrick Douglas have spoken strongly of the feelings of spiritual and mental liberation that come with learning to read and think critically.

If students are not granted the dignity of a real education, given encouragement in their abilities to think critically and engage in their own educations, then what is education for? To indoctrinate us into the values and beliefs of the dominant culture by forcing us all to learn white european history and white european literature and present it as “REAL” or VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE. To convince us that slavery was in the past and it is somehow all over now…? Many can tell that what they are being taught is bullshit but have not been presented any alternatives. Students tend to view education and indoctrination--a regurgitation of "facts" in order to earn their way to the next tier in the social structure.

I know that I am able to teach about the oppression and subjugation of all peoples in my college classroom because I have the right to academic freedom. In fact, I am able to teach in the way I do because the English Department I work for supports me and believes in my right to academic freedom. But why is teaching high school students about their ancestors’ history, literature, and epistemologies so threatening? Why is it that the greater your ability to influence youth, the more surveillance you must endure? Because the next generation has the power to change injustice, and has a greater ability to perceive the injustices of the world beyond the belief that this is “just how the real world is!” The youth will challenge your beliefs, your authority, and your ability to subjugate them. Young people are led to believe that they have no power, but they are in fact powerful. We fear the power that they have to question and to change things.

Is this why don’t we allow young people the vote?

This blog may be dismissed as the rant of a chronically overworked and underpaid educator, but there is more at stake here--the future of democracy and the freedom of information is at stake here. In order to educate our citizenry, FREE public education is necessary. If education costs money to access, then only the privileged elite with have access to it (look at how the university system is set up for proof of this). And while we are constantly assaulted with the idea that there’s something “wrong” with public schools, that they aren’t “working,” no real transformative change can happen. These justifications are used to further cut funding and increase regulation of schools. This cutting of funding and increasing in regulation and testing is not helping to improve education, but is making it a place where indoctrination and regurgitation of propaganda is the norm. Politicians then use the “failure” of public schools to justify privatizing education (think it can’t happen? It already has in New Orleans, Louisiana and other places). And what will happen when a basic education is only available to the privileged few? And what will happen when our participatory democracy is constituted by undereducated, compliant, and apathetic citizens?

Just what the power structure wants: a greater ability to control and manipulate us without a fight.

It is for these reasons and more that it is imperative that you do something to let the LAUSD know that what has happened to Ms. Salazar is an injustice on an institutional level. This is not just about one individual: this issue is more about how educators are systematically coerced into being the kinds of teachers we all hated.

Please use your voice to speak up for Karen Salazar! She is one of many teachers who are engaged in changing an entire system of injustice and oppression within education. Teaching ourselves and our students to think critically and ask questions is the basis of a strong and vibrant democracy. Although this is happening in Los Angeles to Ms. Salazar, this has larger implications for education EVERYWHERE. We need to start thinking about the ways that the Riverside Unified School District can promote education as a practice of freedom: how can we educate students of the Inland Empire to become critically engaged citizens?

In fact, I heard last fall that the Riverside Unified School District has decided that they will not require reading novels in public schools because students were not testing well:

Susan Ohanian's Education Blog

Testing is how public schools are determining educational success, not critical thinking: ever wonder why?



Resources and Links about Educational Justice and Injustice:

*Paolo Freire, Educator and theorist, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed about the “Banking System of Education”

*bell hooks, author of Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Teaching Community, and Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
bell hooks on Voices from the Gaps

*Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children in American Schools and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Racial Apartheid in Schools
“Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” by Kozol

*Luis J. Rodriguez, noted educator and author, blogs on the Salazar injustice

*On the Stoop Blog about Salzar

*LAUSD Standards

*California Dept of Education Standards

*Privatizing Education in New Orleans