Diary of a pre-certified teacher, Vol. III: Sex-ed

I had been a substitute teacher for about two months in the fall of 2008 when I found out I had cancer. I had been feeling tired for months—if not a couple years—but all blood tests had proved negative for Lyme disease, Epstein Barr, and anything else that could cause fatigue. Then I woke up one morning with a pain in my lower left abdomen. I went to the emergency room, and a found out I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I had decided to try teaching because I thought I would be good at it—and perhaps because before being diagnosed I had a sense that something was seriously wrong with me and wanted to do something useful before checking out. It was also something of a crusade, or at least a nice ironic turn in my life. I had been a Holden Caulfield—or maybe Bart Simpson is more accurate—as a student, and here was a chance to attempt some karmic balance. Further, I had seen the damage that liberal schools could cause. I thought maybe I could prevent the same thing from happening, at least to a few kids. I had gone to private Catholic schools my entire life, but they were no bulwark against what had happened in America in the 1960s. The Left had marched through the religious institutions as well as the secular ones. I had had some brilliant teachers, whom I will discuss in a future installment, but also far too many communists, weirdoes and daft libertines.

Most of them were propagandists. As Joseph Goebbels knew, propaganda isn’t not only about what you say, but what you leave out—it is the art of the incomplete truth. There is nothing wrong, and in fact everything right, with schoolchildren learning about slavery, the labor movement, Vietnam, Watergate and the environment. There is something incomplete, if not sinister, in teaching these things while ignoring the role of Christianity in abolition, the life of Whittaker Chambers, the theory of natural law, and the Founding Fathers.

As it stands now, American education is like cable news. The liberals stick to their catechism, and the conservatives to theirs. In fact, it was this divide that drove me into teaching in the first place. Before becoming a sub I had been a journalist for 20 years. But increasingly, I found myself in a no-man’s land. I was a fan of the conservative journal The New Criterion, but also Rolling Stone. I believe in the natural law—that the conscience is, as St. Ambrose put it, “God’s herald and messenger,” and that because of this every human being in every culture knows that certain things are wrong. These things can be large and obvious like abortion, but also less diabolical and more liberal—like underpaying a worker or littering. I believe in the Great Books, and that rock and roll is great modernist art. I think John F. Kennedy was a great man, and that Sarah Palin is a dingbat.