Back to school: a time of fresh starts– fresh-scrubbed school, fresh-scrubbed students, teachers renewed by well-earned summer rest. Well, not everywhere. That happy picture is marred at Dennis-Yarmouth High School with the way last school year ended.
At a June llth assembly in honor of seniors, while six students were honored with special plaques for having chosen to enlist in the military, two teachers, Beth Verani and Carrie Koscher, held up 6×8 inch signs saying END WAR.
The teachers’ protest evoked an outraged response from numerous parents, students and other community members. There were calls for their firing. There were death threats that had Verani’s husband insisting they go to bed with a baseball bat at their side, just in case.
The school itself came down on the teachers. They were publically criticized by the principal and sent home on paid leave until the end of the school year pending further punishment.
The gist of the outcry against the protest was that the teachers had the bad manners to inject nasty controversy into what was otherwise a simple, feelgood event; to politicize a neutral ceremony.
In fact the assembly was far from neutral. Aside from the singling out for honor from all other careers the choice of the military, the school’s police officer, an army veteran himself, made a speech praising the honored students as sheepdogs protecting the sheep at home from the wolves. The school’s assistant principal, a National Guardsman, attended the assembly dressed in military fatigues.
The school’s neutral self-image notwithstanding, what happened on June 11 was a pro-military demonstration backed by all the pomp and ceremony and prestige of a respected institution against which two teachers had the temerity to stage a counter-demonstration.
You would never guess from the assembly or from the reaction to the protest, that the war in which no doubt some of the honored students will be playing a role is widely opposed in polls and controversial even amongst those in charge of it, as we know from Rolling Stone and wikileaks. As for the protective sheepdog analogy, this war is not for most of the sheep seen as a matter of national security.
And you would never guess that numerous documentaries and books and movies have, in the decades since Vietnam, made clear that wars like the one in Afghanistan that are seen as unnecessary and even morally dubious at home make the military to say the least a troubled, morally murky job choice. Participation in such wars, no matter how courageous, does not necessary bring either a hero’s welcome at home or a sense of personal achievement. The difficulties experienced by young people making this job choice in the post-Vietnam era is a matter not of political opinion, left, right or center, but well- documented historical fact and a painful theme of our culture for the past 40 years.
You would think a school would feel less obligation to cheer on a choice of the military than to let the students know what they are getting into.
It’s finally the student’s choice, of course, but a teacher or guidance counsellor, no matter what his or her personal opinion of the war, should feel an intellectual and moral obligation to expose all students to a critique of such staples of youthful idealism as “heroism” and “patriotism,” “support our troops.”
The school’s role in handling the controversy has no doubt had a chilling effect on dissent and free discussion. If the mid -Cape is at all representative of the nation at large, there are probably more teachers and students and parents doubtful about this war and the decision of young p eople to join up than have felt comfortable airing those doubts in this intimidating atmosphere.
A fresh start for D-Y would be for the school, after a summer of reflection, to reverse course, reinstate the teachers, stand up to its pro- military, pro -war parents and students and admit that it made a mistake in singling out for special honor those choosing a military career.
As principal Kenneth Jenks noted, “Most schools don’t recognize students who go into the military,” and maybe there is a good reason for that.
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