Public education is rife with problems, but perhaps none quite as prevalent as pro-homosexual advocacy which infects schools from elementary through high schools, from small schools to large, and from poorly performing urban schools to affluent, prestigious suburban schools.

What may provide one of the links between all these seemingly diverse educational contexts are the departments of education through which all public school teachers must pass. An article published in December 2009 in the Music Educators Journal provides a glimpse into the troubling and presumptuous goals of just one of our nation’s educator-ideologues: Professor Louis Bergonzi, Chair of the Music Education Division at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His article is entitled “Sexual Orientation and Music Education: Continuing a Tradition,” and his thesis is that music education can be improved by “acknowledging other sexual orientations, specifically, homosexuality.” He believes that it’s time to “Consider the beneficial presence of…musicians, colleagues, and students…whose emotional, romantic, and physical attractions are to…the same sex.” He explains that his article focuses on “high school students and teachers” but is relevant to all educational levels.

He asks “Isn’t it time…to examine how homophobia and heterocentrism bias our curricular content and the lives and work of LGBT teachers? Isn’t it time we eliminate heterosexuality’s privileged place in our profession?”

Professor Bergonzi writes on his faculty bio page that “the beliefs that guide my music education actions-as-teaching include viewing schools as agencies of social progress.” This activist professor seeks to use public money and the minds and hearts of other people’s children to engage in the radical, subversive activity of eliminating heterosexuality’s privileged place.

Professor Bergonzi took umbrage at the criticism of his pedagogical philosophy that appeared in a very short article for OneNewsNow in which I made three brief comments. On the website Buzzflash, Bergonzi indignantly huffed to writer Bill Berkowitz, “‘Linking me to Ayers seems as an attempt at guilt by association…It’s a bit ironic that groups attempting to link me to terrorism are themselves on the watch list of the highly respected Southern Poverty Law Center.'” There’s a lot to contend with in that brief quote:

• First, I did not link Professor Bergonzi to Ayer’s terrorist activity. Rather, I clearly linked Professor Bergonzi’s pedagogical position to Ayer’s educational malfeasance that manifests through Ayer’s promotion of critical pedagogy which views teachers as agents of social change.
• Second, Illinois Family Institute is not on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate groups list.
• Third, the Southern Poverty Law Center is respected only among political liberals–those who ironically call themselves “progressives.” To read more about Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, click here, here, here, here, and here.

In responding to my challenge to his belief that teachers should think of themselves as agents of social change, Bergonzi offers this remarkable defense: “‘What’s contemptuous about my story as an example of school as agencies of social progress?…A first-generation immigrant child goes to college because they [sic] attended a great school district and earned scholarships based on talents s/he worked to develop with the help of their school teachers? So, what’s wrong with schools as agents of social progress?'” Apparently, Bergonzi sees no distinction between immigrants earning scholarships based on talents and public school teachers promoting a-historical, divisive, and unproven theories on the nature and morality of homosexuality.

Bergonzi goes on to ask “‘Would there be so many mission-driven or religious-based private schools if it were not, in part, because parents want their children and their society to progress in a certain way?'” Here, Bergonzi starts to make sense: private schools have every right to promote whatever theories on whatever issues they deem appropriate. But public schools that use public funds have no such right. Public school employees have no right to use public money to undermine the philosophical, political, or moral beliefs of other people’s children.

Bergonzi futilely claimed that “‘[T]he approach I took of my article was not to sermonize about what music teachers should do.'” Oh, really.
Bergonzi has a section in his article entitled “Privileges for Heterosexual Music Teachers” in which he identifies sixteen privileges. Here are just a few:

• Heterosexual teachers may speak freely about their personal life and activities in response to a student’s innocent question.
• Heterosexual teachers may use stories from their personal life in their teaching, without editing.
• Heterosexual teachers do not have to worry that parents will be upset that they talked about their life partner.
• Heterosexual teachers may put pictures of their spouse/family on their office wall or desk.
• Heterosexual teachers may kiss their boyfriends/girlfriends/wives/husbands good-bye in front of the school building.
• Heterosexual teachers may invite their partners to go along on school trips and tours.
• Heterosexual teachers can have their spouse leave a message on the music office answering machine that ends with “Love you” without worrying that a student may hear it.
• Heterosexual teachers can give out their home phone numbers and not worry about people’s reactions when their spouses answer the phone.

Although this list does not constitute a “how to” on achieving these goals, it does seem to constitute a mini-sermon on the goals Professor Bergonzi would like to pursue. It seems clear that Bergonzi would like those teachers who volitionally embrace homosexuality and its philosophical underpinnings to have all the “privileges” he lists, and he sees music education as a means to achieving these goals.

When Bergonzi claims that “the music education profession should contribute to societal development by affirming..future generations,” is he claiming that music teachers should affirm all desires, attractions, and impulses that students experience? Should music teachers affirm polyamory in order that polyamorous students feel affirmed? Should music teachers use curricula to undermine the privilege that monogamy enjoys?

When he claims that music educators “should consider how [they] might improve the work they do by acknowledging homosexuality,” it’s clear that he really means “affirming homosexuality.” He does not mean that teachers should merely “acknowledge” homosexuality. He points to the “internalized self-hatred and emotional pain” that students who identify as homosexual experience as a result of bullying. But Bergonzi fails to acknowledge that there is an ocean of difference between ending bullying and affirming homosexuality. In his conflation of ending bullying and affirming homosexuality, he exposes the truth that homosexual activists successfully conceal, which is that the means they use to end bullying is to try to eradicate the moral conviction that volitional homosexual acts are immoral.

Bill Ayers has this to say about education:

[T]he fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life-whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly…: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large…education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom?

Does this not sound just a wee bit like the ideas embodied in Professor Begonzi’s article?

And Professor Bergonzi is just getting started with his revolution: In May, 2010, he is the co-sponsor of a symposium held at the University of IL (Urbana-Champaign)on Establishing Identity: LGBT Studies and Music Education. Here are a few of the sample topics for which they are seeking paper proposals: Queer Representation in Music Education Curricula; Coming Out: Role and Power of the Institution; Queer Politics Inside and Outside of the Academy; Legal Issues of Being a LGBT Music Educator; and What Do I Know and Teach About Homosexuality.

I would like to submit the radical proposal that society suffers when it comes to believe that positive self-regard trumps virtue. And I would like to submit the radical proposal that if we wish to preserve a stable, healthy society, our government institutions should “privilege” heterosexuality.