Countering William J. Bennett

By Ron Briley

In testimony before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee in January, former National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William J. Bennett insulted the intelligence of teachers in the schools and especially participants in such neh programs as the Summer Seminar for School Teachers. Mr. Bennett testified that works studied in the program were being "Marxized, feminized, deconstructed, and politicized."

"High school teachers, far from being exposed to 'the best which has been thought and said in the world' (in Matthew Arnold's phrase)" were being, according to the former U.S. Secretary of Education, "indoctrinated in the prevailing dogmas of academia."

As a four-time participant in the Summer Seminars program and a 20-year veteran of teaching in the schools, let me say simply that William J. Bennett has no understanding of what he is condemning. While I, as well as many of my colleagues, share his concern about the state of values in American society, how insulting it is to assume that teachers are so unable to think for themselves that they will become duped or indoctrinated in a four- to six-week summer seminar. If Mr. Bennett is correct in this assumption, then our entire educational system needs to be dismantled,...