LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY fannyfae)

This is from my client. Dow Jones, in the Weekend Version of the Wall Street Journal. I found it very interesting and thought others here might find it interesting as well.

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(From the Wall Street Journal, Saturday, April 1, 2001)

Who Are The Real Philistines?

In this battle of the culture wars, the answer may surprise you

by Terry Teachout

A Colorado teacher was put on leave by her superintendent last month after showing a video of excerpts from "Faust"to one of her classes. Some parents, it seems, didn't want their kids to see an opera about a devil. Around the same time a principal in Fulton, Mo. cancelled a student production of "The Crucible"when he learned that the play was about witches.

You probably read these stories then forgot about them. Such skirmishes, after all, are commonplace in postmodern America, where long-simmering cultural resentments can boil over without warning. But what happened to Tresa Waggoner ho got in red-hot water over introducing her students to an opera she calls "a great part of our civilization and Western culture," is more than just another black and white tale of blue-nosed intolerance in Red America. It's an object lesson in the ways that well-meaning folks on both sides of the cultural fence too often talk past one another instead of looking for common ground.

School boards put the kibosh on books and plays for a variety of reason, not all of which are politically incorrect. If it isn't "The Crucible, which continues to be widely taught in spite of or because of its liberal politics, then it's Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"shouldn't be taught in the public schools, even though it's both a classic and profoundly anti-racist.

A different kind of perceived insensitivity, however, is at the root of a growing number of curriculum-related squabbles. Mor and more Christians feel that the public schools have become reflexively hostile to traditional religious belief, and they're fighting back. Many fundamentalists, for instance, believe that the portrayals of witchcraft found in fairy tales and fantasy literature can encourage devil worship among the young, which was one of the objections to one of Ms. Waggoner's showing "Faust" to her students. The "Harry Potter
books have run into similar opposition (to which J.K. Rowling, their author responds, "I believe in God, not magic".

All politics is local, so it's no surprise that there's more to Miss Waggoner's plight than meets the out-of-town eye. Though she's a professional singer who has recorded two albums of Christian music, she chose to omit Christmas carols from her school's annual holiday pageant. The wife of a board member warned her to expect trouble as a result. "I told her we couldn't sing them,"Ms. Waggoner later explained to a Rocky Mountain News Reporter, "because public schools didn't want to offend people of other religions, including Jewish people, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses." Not long afterward the teacher played excerpts from "Whose Afraid of Opera"video of "Faust"for her students at Bennett Elementary School, and (to quote from another classic no long er in factor in the public schools) trouble followed as the sparks fly upward.

Ironies abound in this tale of mutual misunderstanding. The central one, of course, is that "Faust"isn't about a devil, but the devil; Charles Goudnod, the Opera's composer, turned Goethe's complex allegory of man's fate into a specifically Christian narrative of damnation and redemption, one in which it is perfectly easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. To objects to Goudnod's version of "Faust" on the ground that it might encourage devil worship is like objecting that "To Kill a Mockingbird"for fear that it might inspire lynchings.

On the other hand, whose fault is it that certain citizens of Bennett, Colo., don't know what "Faust"is about? Bill Bennett and E.D. Hirsch Jr., the author of "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,"warned us back in the 80's that American educators, having come to the conclusion that it was wrong to "privilege"the works of "dead white European males," were turning their backs on the classics. Now the students of those cultural relativists have children of their own - and teachers like Ms. Waggoner are reaping the bitter fruits of two generations’ worth of cultural illiteracy. This story, I'm sorry to say, has neither a clear-cut moral nor a happy ending. Yes, I wish that the conservative Christians who participate in the public-school system would try to remember that it doesn't exist to inculcate their beliefs- but I also know that their complaints about its outright antagonism to religion are far from mere paranoia. And while I sympathize with teachers and administrators who find themselves forced to defend the merits of something so innocuous as a popular opera, I'd feel a lot more sympathetic if the American educational establishment as a whole showed any interest in defending Western culture against its sworn enemies, much less a willingness to frankly acknowledge its deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As for Ms. Waggoner, who got caught in the crossfire of the culture wars, she's still on paid leave from Bennett Elementary School and is looking for a new job. "Maybe I'll become a church choir director","she said.

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Mr. Teachout, the Wall Street Journal's drama critic, writes, "Sightings"every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com