The road to hell is paved with good intentions
January 14, 2020 | 3-minute read
An extraordinary writing assignment I got came about when a college of education hired me for a three-month stint. Along with a photojournalist and a professor who directed an urban education leadership program, I boarded a chartered bus to a public school in the East Bronx to spend a day with a group of Brazilian teachers on a subsidized trip to New York City. The teachers turned their North American idyll into a busman’s holiday when they met the professor’s protégé, a thirty-something principal and doctoral candidate who had been profiled in The New York Times as a brilliant school reformer.
The middle school in a notoriously violent neighborhood was an educational marvel. The principal had lifted the school out of the academic dungeon to become the tenth top middle school in all of New York City. One of his biggest achievements was a financial literacy program that rewarded students with school bucks to buy books, pens and computer peripherals. A more magnificent success was the relationship between the middle school’s teachers and students. It was loving. Respectful. The kids at my son’s private school were often far more out of control.
All of my stories for the college of education publicity machine featured professor after professor who had done equally admirable work showcasing the connection between a “holistic” education and nutrition, physical activity and health care.
Then came the day I interviewed a professor about the worldwide refugee crisis. Her research focused on internally displaced persons — people forced to flee their homes but who remain inside their country’s borders. I was stunned to learn in 2014, when I did my interview, that 38.2 million people qualified as internally displaced persons. I was so moved by the professor’s travels to refugee camps from Colombia to Pakistan that I even asked if I could come along and write about one of her fact-finding missions.
A twentysomething star pupil of hers, invited to participate in our conversation, startled me out of my humanitarian reverie.
“The popular media rarely if ever give you context for the unrest in a country,” the young graduate student informed me. “Take a look at that school in Peshawar. The way The New York Times tells it, ‘innocent’ children at a military-run high school were massacred by the Taliban.”
The recent event he referred to was documented in a story that Reuters headlined Taliban go on killing spree at Pakistan school, 132 students dead.
The star pupil narrowed his handsome blue eyes and asked rhetorically, “But who were these ‘innocent’ children?”
He gave me an answer that elevated the killers as resistance fighters against a militarist state.
“The ‘innocent’ students were the children of Pakistan’s military elite,” he said in a coup de grâce.
He did not have to spell out his conviction that the teenagers deserved to die.
Instantly I regretted having asked about accompanying the professor on her next fact-finding mission. Her tacit approval of her star pupil’s political analysis told me she too valorized the Taliban’s idea of diplomacy. If “context” meant using your “humanitarian” values to justify killing kids in a classroom, or anywhere else, for that matter, I preferred staying a feckin eejit.
Just as you do not break up with a boyfriend at the first sign of incompatibility, I did not immediately “break up” with the college of education, which has produced thousands of talented educators like that principal in the East Bronx. My interaction with the refugee experts, however, slowly unwound my commitment to the college’s publications. It did not help that my hack editor butchered my articles and published them without my consent. Eventually I declined further writing assignments.
Still, I wonder: Why not kill the children of other hated people? IRS workers? Lawyers? Dentists? Carnival barkers?
