There's a lot of hullaballoo in the media lately about teachers and professors crossing the line between instructing and indoctrinating. With the conservative community feeling as if they are under attack by academics and that their children are being Mansonized by left-leaning classroom authoritarians, it's no wonder that Sean Allen sits in the middle of a tornado of media vultures, education system beauracrats, and liberal lawyers determined to depict him as a conspiratorial compatriot of conservative talk radio.
I feel for Sean. I remember well what it was like to be young, impressionable and to be shut down by a teacher who didn't share my views. In my case, it was Mr. P. I sat in his classes for two years as a junior and senior in high school. He was the resident AP history teacher and I shared his Advanced American and European history classes with a small group of my peers. As I recall, we students actually signed a petition to show that there was enough interest for the AP European History class - we all enjoyed the way Mr. P. made us think and question everything. His classes were hard but he made the material seem so interesting that in his classroom, I decided to follow in his footsteps and become a history teacher myself.
Unfortunately, wsdom about the heads of European states wasn't all that Mr. P. passed on. He was at least a hostile agnostic and showed an unnatural level of detachment from the Southern Baptist community he was a part of. He frequently spoke ill of religion and on more than one occasion took exception to the specific beliefs of students in the class. As my church had received some local noteriety, my faith and I were frequent targets of his leading discussions and rhetorical questions. He really pushed the idea that religion was an opiate. Not that he was Marxist, I think his politics were actually quite mainstream for the time, he just held the entire world of the faithful in such low esteem. By midyear, I was about the most confused eleventh grader on the planet. I was starting to feel that my parents and all people of faith had been duped into believing a great lie. There was no God. There was only the world of men and somehow, I knew that without a god on my side, I would never survive in a Darwinian contest of the "the fittest". My world grew dark as I began to make choices that reflected the atheistic leaning principles of my high school idol, Mr. P. I wish I'd had the support and presence of mind of Sean Allen but in my community, in those days, we just didn't question a teacher's authority. And the world was changing so rapidly back then that I don't think my parents could have comprehended of any recourse against the unethical and damaging words of a beloved teacher.
Life moved on and eventually, I grew out of the funk of adolescence and came to see Mr. P. for the sad person he was, filtering his history instruction through the limiting collander of his personal war on faith. In spite of his crusade, he still built up quite a following among his AP students and we all spoke very highly of him. No doubt we would have rallied to his aid if a student would have taken him to task. But looking back and realizing how many teenagers just like me he may have influenced, I can only say, I wish Sean Allen had been in my class.
