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With education under attack, we should pause from time to time to consider its purpose. Is it to boost economic productivity and national competitiveness, ensure that citizens learn to toe a party-approved line, or something else entirely? Might it be, for example, to foster a deep loyalty to the truth?
My friend Bruce, recently retired from an executive position in the high-tech medical device industry, had been volunteering as a monthly reader at a local elementary school. The school chose books according to criteria such as relevance, clarity, and value of information, and the text assigned to Bruce was a picture book on insects.
The book ended with a quiz, intended to test the students’ recall. To the question, “Can ants fly?” each of the 5-year-old students in the room offered the same response: “No.” In so doing, they were dutifully repeating what the book had plainly said, that ants march across the ground but cannot leave it. Bruce smiled approvingly.
But then a little girl, one of the many students from poor families at the school, dressed this particular day in a pink princess outfit that might have once been a Halloween costume, spoke up, evidently embarrassed by the sound of her own still voice. “But I have seen wings on ants. Why can’t they fly?”
Bruce was stumped. Surely the little girl was wrong, and whatever winged species of insect she thought she had seen had not been an ant but something else, such as a termite. Yet how should he respond? Should he simply point to the answer key, tell the little girl that she missed the question, and move on?
Bruce, a man of science, took a different tack. “I am sorry,” he said. “I will have to check into this and report back next time.” When he got home, he set about reading up on ants. To his surprise, he discovered that some ants are known as “alates,” or winged, and these reproductive male and female ants do indeed take to the air during their nuptial flight.
In short, the little girl was right. She trusted not what the book said, or what the authoritative figure at the head of the class had read, but what she had experienced and seen with her own eyes.
The next time Bruce returned to the classroom, he brought not only confirmation from the scientific literature that the little girl had been right but also something else—a prize to celebrate her courage. He had cut a star out of a sheet of galvanized steel, painted it gold with glitter, and attached it to a red sash to create a necklace. He draped it around her neck.
In so doing, Bruce was not only lauding the little girl but also sharing a lesson with the other students in the class, and perhaps indirectly, with the teacher, the school, and the children’s families. When we know something to be wrong, we should speak up, thereby placing ourselves in service of the truth, just as the little girl did.
By most conventional measures, the day, the classroom, and the book reading bore no special significance. But appropriately understood, thanks to a student, something extraordinary had transpired. The most unlikely of persons—not a legislator, an entrepreneur, or a professor, but a little 5-year-old girl—had assumed the role of truth’s defender.
Education Essential Reads
Amid the celebration, a classroom full of the most unlikely of citizens, far from the age of majority at which they would one day be qualified to cast a vote, had learned one of life’s most precious lessons, upon which the fates of all free societies depend—freedom is preserved only when truth can win the day.
