Our Quest Can Continue Or We Can Step Backward

Another in the Voices of Venango County series, by Robert Gatesman of Oil City.

I'd like to respond to the homophobic tirade of Dian Gramley of the American "Family" Association of Pennsylvania in the newspaper's opinion page in which she bemoans the fact that some schools are becoming "institutions for social change."

Apparently, in her myopic view, education consists of merely stuffing our children with traditional facts and figures that their parents and grandparents learned. Any school worth its salt is an institution for social change. It strives to produce students who have a broader, more realistic view of the world than the previous generations.

We want our children to be better informed, more capable and, hopefully, more tolerant than we were. We want them to be better prepared to enter society and to seek to change that society in a changing world.

Ms. Gramley wouldn't be so afraid of "social change," of course, if it complied with her traditional, white, right-wing Christian views. She shudders to contemplate that, somehow, somewhere, someone dares to have an un-Gramley thought or express an un-Gramley opinion.

Perhaps we should throw out our entire public school curriculum and invite Ms. Gramley to devise one to her liking. Then we can all join hands and in lockstep march backward. Or, on the other hand, we could continue our quest to expand our children's minds and hearts and consign the narrow-minded view of education to the obscurity it so richly deserves.


Excerpted from a letter-to-the-editor in The Derrick, 4/23/07.