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CNN Sunday Morning

Interview With Megan Farnsworth, Julianne Malveaux

Aired September 01, 2002 - 08:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

RENAY SAN MIGUEL, CNN ANCHOR: Most people don't think the U.S. is back to normal nearly a year after September 11. Since the attacks scarred the nation so deeply, it raises the question of how 9-11 will be taught in our schools. To discuss this, we are joined by syndicated columnist and former college professor Julianne Malveaux, and Megan Farnsworth, a former elementary school teacher, who is now with the Heritage Foundation. We want to thank both of you for joining us today.
And we want to make it clear for our viewers here that a lot of this has to do with the National Education Association's suggested lesson plans that they put up on the Web site that many groups, some of them conservative, believe took a "blame America" approach. Julianne, is that how you saw it?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Not at all. I thought it was a very balanced approach. I mean, we want to look at our country in context. After all, September 11 was just a horrible tragedy, probably one of the most horrible we've experienced in contemporary times, but we have had terrorism before. Our country has perpetrated it. I always say to people, if you want to think about domestic terrorism, think about Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 where air bombs were dropped on the African-American community there and thousands of people, perhaps as many as 3,000 did die.

So what the NEA is trying to do is put things in context, talk about tolerance. There were some evil people who used airplanes as weapons of destruction, but it was not all Muslim. So we have to make sure that we don't have a backlash against Muslim people, a backlash against those of Islamic faith, and that we look at our country in a context. And I think the NEA was doing a tremendous service, frankly.

SAN MIGUEL: And Julianne, let me ask you a quick follow-up, though, because the argument is that a lot of the mistakes that this country has made in its dealings with other countries don't have a lot to do with the facts of September 11. Yes, you have to deal with the motivations as to why those hijackers did what they did, but to get into the broader story of everything from Jim Crow laws to the internment of Japanese during World War II is not really about the content of that particular day.

MALVEAUX: You can't look at that day in a vacuum, though. You can't behave as if that day happened and nothing had happened before it or afterwards. I don't want anyone to think that there is anything justifiable about what happened on September 11, but I also don't want people to run around behaving as if the United States has never been perpetrator, as if, for example, in Israel, people there have had to deal with these kinds of unexpected attacks all the time, with the bombings and other things, all with Palestinian people.

We have to put this stuff in context. I think that's all the NEA tried to do. I don't think it's about blaming America but putting America in some kind of a world context.

SAN MIGUEL: Ms. Farnsworth, are you happy with that argument? I mean, we have talked about the issue, you know, that the old saying, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, the idea that you can't get into what happened on September 11 without talking about the motivations that the hijackers had a problem with the U.S. support for Israel and all of those kinds of separate issues. What about that?

MEGAN FARNSWORTH, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Well, it's certainly a problem that our students don't know their history and don't know context. But this particular group of lesson plans by the NEA is not going to improve their knowledge base at all. Unfortunately, most of the lesson plans that the NEA has supplied are more issues of teaching tolerance, but even more than that, it's a lot of psychotherapy, it's a lot of feeling good. It's having students draw color wheels where the students identify different colors and their associations with different feelings.

That's not going to improve their knowledge of anything from Jim Crow laws to the Japanese internment, which really don't have that much to do with 9/11 anyway. What we need to focus on on an anniversary event for 9/11 is what happened that day. It's absolutely essential that students learn about Jim Crow laws, that they learn about the Japanese internment, that they learn about different mistakes that the United States has done, but we also need to teach our students about the things that have happened in this country that are good. And if you look at test results in our country, we can see that the average student doesn't know a whole heck of a lot about history at all.

SAN MIGUEL: And Ms. Farnsworth...

MALVEAUX: Megan, if I could say something...

SAN MIGUEL: Sure.

MALVEAUX: ... about the color wheel. I mean, I think you're trivializing something here. It's not that the color wheel is about September 11. What's happened with a lot of young people, especially those who are like under 12 or so, is that they have a lot of feelings, they have a lot of anxiety, and the color wheel and the issue of feelings, this is possibly the only place that some young people will deal with how they feel about this.

Our entire nation, as you can see from the poll results that you just showed, many in our nation are still in mourning, many still feel grief, many still feel we haven't got back to normal, and we're acting that out, and we need to get a grip on that.

FARNSWORTH: And the best way to get back to normal is to actually have students teaching -- actually have students learning history, and learning reading and learning writing. Students don't have a capacity to know their subject matter background. If you take a look at the national assessment of educational progress, our nation's report card, only 11 percent of 12th graders scored at the proficient level on the U.S. history exam last year, 11 percent. We've got a lot of teaching to do.

MALVEAUX: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) that we have to teach in context.

FARNSWORTH: Absolutely.

(CROSSTALK)

FARNSWORTH: But teaching that red is a symbol of anger is not going to make that much of a difference.

MALVEAUX: No...

SAN MIGUEL: Let me step in here, ladies, for just a second here, because I want to follow up on Julianne's issue here of -- how the idea of teaching tolerance, as a word, to give kids a chance to express their feelings. I mean, even President Bush in the speech to Congress after September 11 made it clear, went out of his way to say that the U.S. is not at war against Islam. Some of these people who put these guidelines together for the NEA were saying, we wanted to make sure that we help kids who were thinking about acting out their feelings, maybe against people who don't look like they do.

Ms. Farnsworth, what would be wrong with wanting to extend that lesson that started with President Bush to the classrooms, to talk about the whole issue of tolerance?

FARNSWORTH: Teaching tolerance is fine, but that's only a portion of what should be taught during an anniversary event for 9/11. Teaching tolerance is all well and good, and I'm certainly not disputing that we need to teach tolerance at all, but what we need to teach is that students have to understand, what is Islam, what is the United States? Why does this country represent freedom? What are the valuable things that can be learned from the history of this country?

There's much to be learned. Tolerance is absolutely essential, and regarding the issues of dealing with those students who are still having problems and emotional issues, let's focus on those kids. Let's focus on those ones that are having problems and pull them aside and work with them in small groups, not with full class discussions where they have to share their feelings in front of an entire classroom.

(CROSSTALK)

SAN MIGUEL: Let me go ahead and turn the question around to you, Ms. Malveaux. Why not, you know, based on certain ages, kids can't process a lot of this information about September 11 about the motivations, give them just the basic facts at the early ages, and then when they get older, start talking about the motivations behind it, and then start talking about, you know, what America has done in the eyes of many in the past?

MALVEAUX: I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all answer here. I don't think -- I think Megan is misstating the NEA's case when she says that they want to teach just tolerance. No one is saying we're going to have a day of teaching tolerance. That would be a mistake. It would really, I would say, it would be a distortion of what September 11 was about.

But if you take what the teaching tolerance piece has to be a part of it, and what also has to be a part of it is the issue of context. I mean, when you say the word "terrorism" to some people, they think Oklahoma City. They think the civil rights movement. There are people in this United States that have been victims of domestic terrorism, and you can't get around that. You can't pat yourself on the chest and say we're a great country without saying we've also made mistakes.

SAN MIGUEL: Ms. Farnsworth, 15 seconds for a response, and then we have to end this. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

FARNSWORTH: Three thousand people died on September 11...

MALVEAUX: Not the first time nor the last.

FARNSWORTH: Absolutely not, but unfortunately, 3,000 people died, and the NEA's focus is drawing murals and doing color wheels. And there's so much more that can be learned.

MALVEAUX: You distort the NEA's purpose...

(CROSSTALK)

SAN MIGUEL: We've got to...

MALVEAUX: The NEA has done a major service to our country with their lesson plan.

FARNSWORTH: It is a start, but not...

SAN MIGUEL: We have got to leave it there, we have got to end it at that point. Syndicated columnist and former college professor Julianne Malveaux. Megan Farnsworth, former elementary school teacher, now with the Heritage Foundation. Thanks, both, for the spirited discussion. We appreciate it.

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