What is the difference between an educator and an ideologue? Perhaps a look at Naperville North High School’s teacher Kermit Eby will help answer that question.
Kermit Eby, the Naperville North social studies teacher who last year invited unapologetic Weather Underground domestic terrorist and “critical social theory” proponent Bill Ayers to speak at Naperville North, has now invited history revisionist and America-hater Howard Zinn to speak at Naperville North on Saturday, Nov. 7 at 2:00 p.m.
This same teacher signed the Support Bill Ayers petition (For those interested, Eby is signatory number 1947 on the petition, and he identifies himself as a Naperville North High School teacher). And this is the same Kermit Eby who signed the Historians Against the War petition in 2003, again identifying himself as a Naperville North High School teacher. These historians opposed “the expansion of United States empire and the doctrine of pre-emptive war that have led to the occupation of Iraq. We deplore the secrecy, deception, and distortion of history involved in the administration’s conduct of a war that violates international law, intensifies attacks on civil liberties, and reaches toward domination of the Middle East and its resources.”
Of course, Mr. Eby has every right to sign any petition he wants, but his obvious political leanings and interests appear to be influencing his pedagogical activities. A parent who had multiple meetings with Eby as a result of two of her children having him as a teacher wrote on a Daily Herald blog that Eby makes his political views known through his classroom commentary as well as curricular resources:
Both my daughter and my son sat through Kermit Eby’s American history classes. My son also had him for American government. I know Mr. Eby. I sat through five parent conferences with him and I had several conversations with him and exchanged three years of email notes with him. Kermit Eby is the stereotype of the so-called-progressive teacher. When I called to complain about a gay-rights skit he put on in which two girls held hands and kissed during a mandatory attendance assembly he justified himself by claiming to be a “progressive missionary working for social justice in the underbelly of affluence.” And there is no balance of any kind. My kids sat through his classes and listened to daily rants about the evils of the Republican Party, conservatives, religion, America, capitalism and especially George Bush.
Since Eby sent out district emails this week encouraging Naperville North and Naperville Central social studies and communication arts teachers to attend and to invite their students to attend Zinn’s lecture, it’s clear that he’s using extracurricular activities to promote his political vision as well.
This is not the first time Zinn has been invited to speak at Naperville North. According to a Nov. 8, 2002 Naperville Sun article, Zinn spoke to Naperville North students on the topic of “The Uses of History and the Current War on Terrorism.” Who, I wonder, invited Zinn in 2002?
Howard Zinn is the author of the book A People’s History of the United States, which has been used in history classes across the country for many years. Thomas Sowell, African American scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a prestigious conservative think tank, has this to say about Zinn’s book:
It speaks volumes about our schools and colleges that far-left radical Howard Zinn’s pretentiously titled book, A People’s History of the United States, is widely used across the country. It is one indictment, complaint, and distortion after another. Anyone who relies on this twisted version of American history would have no idea why millions of people from around the world are trying, sometimes desperately, to move to this country. The one virtue of Zinn’s book is that it helps you identify unmistakably which teachers are using their classrooms as propaganda centers.
An article in The New Criterion describes Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as an “anti-American fantasy masquerading as history,” a “book whose message is that the New World, once a paradisal playground … when Columbus met the gentle Arawaks, was ruined when rapacious, war-mongering white men overran the continent.”
It goes on to say “Zinn’s story-noble savages oppressed by nasty capitalists–was calculated to appeal to the politically correct, anti-American spirit that has been regnant among the country’s elites since the late 1960s.”
In a commentary on The People’s History of the United States, author Daniel J. Flynn, describes Zinn as an “unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist” and Zinn’s book as a
cartoon anti-history of the United States. . . If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn. The first line of The Communist Manifesto provides the single-bullet theory of history that provides Zinn with his narrative thread– “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” . . . Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and you will find greed as the motivating factor behind every act of those who don’t qualify as “the people” in Zinn’s book. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both World Wars all were the result of base motives of the “ruling class” — rich men to get richer at the expense of others . . . This slanderous tome and its popular and academic success are monuments to human credulity and delusion, and to the disgraceful condition of American letters.
If an educator who personally holds left of center socio-political views invites primarily or exclusively left- of-center speakers, is he truly an educator or an indoctrinator? And how is critical thinking fostered or diversity honored through such obvious imbalance?
In the student online newspaper, NorthStar Online, Rachel Rodi writes about the prominent speakers Naperville North has hosted over the years: Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, anti-war protestor and perennial jailbird Kathy Kelly, and Howard Zinn. The only teacher quoted in this article was–you guessed it–Kermit Eby.
Kermit Eby should read Stanley Fish’s book Save the World on Your Own Time in which he argues that educators should not “advocate personal, political, moral, or any other kind of views except academic views.” Fish contends that some “faculty members . . . have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their student’s character or turn them into exemplary citizens.” He asserts that teachers are not hired to do things like “produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about social change.” In Fish’s view, “these are tasks properly left to preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, [and] inspirational speakers.”
Those who choose to teach in government schools, whose salaries are paid by the public, should be held publicly accountable when they violate sound pedagogical principles. When, year after year, they exploit the relative privacy and autonomy of the classroom and violate the trust of the public by using public resources to try to effect cultural change in the direction of their political vision, they must be publicly exposed and challenged. Unfortunately, Kermit Eby is not alone.
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