What's at stake

Last weekend, our granddaughters were in the Oneonta, New York, High School production of Beauty and the Beast. We were there to see them and to celebrate their latest accomplishments. It is thrilling to watch them maturing, a sometimes rocky journey that benefits from appreciative and appropriate adult guidance along their way.

      To me, student plays have a layer that may not be so apparent in professional productions. In acting, a young person takes on a role that may or may not bear any resemblance to who they are. It can be a guided experiment into alternatives that may confirm their personalities and priorities, or that may suggest options to consider as they continue toward adulthood.

What student actors do during hours of rehearsals and for a couple of hours on stage is, I suspect, parallel to what many more do daily in the school’s halls and classrooms. They seem to try on various roles or personas to see what they feel like in what may be conscious or unconscious real-life play acting. If I dress like this, talk like that, dye my hair blue, express an opinion I know many will not understand…if I do these kinds of things somewhere outside my comfort zone, what will happen? What will I learn about me, and about other people? How will I feel?

Many characters or characteristics young people try in seeking to discover who they are obviously don’t fit, and get discarded pretty fast. Others immediately fit perfectly. And some may take years to settle into their lives.

During intermission, I looked at some art work on display in the school’s hallway. Here again young people seemed to be trying on ways of seeing the world, particularly its human inhabitants. I saw experimentation, guided by experienced adults who knew how to help a young person express themselves artistically, just as experienced adults had helped Beauty and the Beast come to life. In looking at another person in a some particular way, perhaps some of those budding artists saw glimpses of themselves that might otherwise never have surfaced, or perhaps surfaced in ways harmful to themselves or to others. A self-portrait can be particularly telling.

Suddenly, I felt I was seeing the kinds of self-discovery experiences that the heavy hands of some politicians and legislators are trying to squash. Guided by particular conceptions of what “ought to be,” some who would lead our country into the future seek to limit what students can see and do in order to make sure they come to the same understandings of themselves and this world that people with power have come to. They do not trust teachers or counselors or medical professionals to be capable of appropriate guidance as young people go through these formative years of their lives. Some who know little about how people happily grow and develop take it upon themselves to make laws to assure outcomes they believe should fit everyone, no matter how much they pinch.

What’s at stake here is students’ futures as individuals and ours as a people. Are they and are we truly free if someone who doesn’t know us at all is telling us what we can read, what we can learn, and who we can be? Of course not.

Education is not indoctrination. Indoctrination is what extremists from left and right seek to lay upon others. Education is what good teachers, counselors, and medical professionals offer to those in their charge. Let them do their jobs. The overwhelming majority of them have no interest other than what will best allow and prepare young people to live fulfilling lives as citizens in our United States.