That Dad-blamed "D" Word

Let’s be realistic. “Diversity” means “the condition of being diverse.” “Diverse” means “different,” or “partly or totally unlike in nature, form, or quality.” Tradition is much better than diversity. Tradition is, well, traditional. Whenever I think of how the word “tradition” was invented to signify “cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions,” I breathe a sigh of relief. A school board that reveres traditional activities, or traditional anything, is to be commended.

With the passage of a landmark policy on non-school activities and information dissemination in the schools, Washington County School Board should not be content to rest on its laurels. More discussion should be devoted to how something as pernicious as diversity is embodied in the basic school curriculum. Forget school-sanctioned events. As it stands, children could come home from regular classrooms talking about “diversity,” a word that is a euphemism for all things nontraditional.

Consider the fact that Virginia, with its innovative Standards of Learning, is considered a model of curriculum reform. When Leah Vukmir and William Durden wrote "Introducing Rigorous Standards into Wisconsin's Schools: The Virginia Model," they were highlighting the exceptional job Virginia has done to classify learning objectives over thirteen years of schooling, from kindergarten to graduation. What were they thinking? Surely they could have picked Utah, or even South Carolina, to exemplify right thinking for the rest of the educational world.

And why is that? Diversity! Just read The Virginia Standards of Learning, a government document published in Richmond and also free for view on the World Wide Web. Diversity is written all over the face of this document. It is written between the lines. Although schoolchildren are introduced to the concept as early as kindergarten, that is not enough for our broad-minded state education system. Diversity is cycled and recycled throughout the curriculum, from science to English to social studies. Even math!

For example, History-Social Science Standard 3.12 boldly states the following objective: “The student will recognize that Americans are a people of diverse ethnic origins, customs, and traditions, who are united by the basic principles of a republican form of government and respect for individual rights and freedoms.” Should schools be teaching our children that Americans by definition are diverse? That they respect individual rights and freedoms? Shouldn’t inherently volatile concepts be taught in the home?

If it’s not worrisome enough to find “diverse” and “tradition” mentioned in the same sentence, just consider Science Standard 3.6: “The student will investigate and understand that environments support a diversity of plants and animals that share limited resources.” If we start teaching children that diversity exists not only in the American way of life but also in nature, there is no telling where their minds will take them. They might start putting two and two together.

It gets worse. English Standard 12.3 expects seniors to “relate literary works and authors to major themes and issues of their eras.” I’m not sure high school seniors are ready to discuss “a matter that is in dispute between two or more parties.” Seniors who are voting, or who are close to becoming voting members of society, should immerse themselves in literature that avoids major issues and themes, especially issues and themes of contemporary American society.

Not even mathematics is sacred. Geometry students studying logical symbols such as Venn diagrams to quantify verbal arguments must, according to Standard G1, identify “the converse, inverse, and contrapositive of a conditional statement.” Just think. This SOL assumes that adolescents can be trusted with alternative points of view. It presumes that a truth can be conditional. What’s next? Abandonment of family values?

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 15 December 2004, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2004.

All Men are Brothers

Friday, my family celebrated my older brother’s fiftieth birthday. He could not be with us. John died in 1976 at 21. His grave may be in a national cemetery for veterans, but John’s final resting place is not a grave. It is the heart of loving family.

John died of Hodgkin’s Disease, a type of lymphoma affecting less than one percent of our population. Some people get over it and thrive. Others survive the disease only to end up with other types of cancer. Even treated with chemotherapy and radiation, Hodgkin’s can be fatal. More people survive today than when John was sick, in part because he participated in clinical trials for drugs.

Early symptoms of Hodgkin’s Disease are subtle, including fevers and night sweats and fatigue. When you’re in the Navy, working hard, it’s not unusual to experience fatigue. My brother complained about his health for a few months before he could convince anybody that he was truly sick. After that, he got the best care available through the Veterans Health Administration and an affiliated medical university.

Unfortunately, my brother’s disease was virulent and progressive. Radiation didn’t help much at all, and chemotherapy helped some yet also made him sicker. But, you know, John was a hopeful sort of person. What 19-year-old isn’t? He enrolled in clinical trials. He took all kinds of medicine, knowing that one day somebody would learn something from his experience, even if living a little longer meant he would live longer with chronic pain.

While doctors didn’t expect John to live more than a few months after the diagnosis, experimental drugs gave him another year. You can do a lot of living in that time. You can read a number of books, hang out with your friends, go to movies, and generally have fun even if you don’t feel like getting out of bed. You can buy a car and work on the engine in your spare time. You can enroll in college too. John did, his report card arriving the day of his funeral.

In addition to taking painkillers, my brother drank gin. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Now and then, he would run out of his daily quota of pain pills, which only relieved the pain. Nothing could make it go away. Gin failing, he’d try Beethoven, turning up his music up as loud as it would go. And he would still hurt. There was nothing available in the medical world that would begin to alleviate the discomfort John felt, an all-encompassing pain that I have never quite been able to fathom.

Through John, I first learned of efforts being made to bring back the medical use of cannabis, a drug that had been available to previous generations. Given the persistent pain and nausea John experienced, I suspect he could have found some marijuana. After all, it was the Seventies. We lived in a college town. John, however, wasn’t the sort of person to break the law. Instead, he dreamed of a time when terminal patients would be given more alternatives than the establishment had to offer him.

Radiation made John infertile, and the disease disfigured him. His hair fell out, his spine crumbled, and he felt queasy every day of the last year of his life—but John didn’t complain. He waited to die with the same attitude that kept him hopeful he would live one more day. One morning in a biology class he took while he was waiting for Hodgkin’s to claim his life, a classmate asked him, “Are you terminal?” He answered, “We all are.” We are.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 8 December 2004, p. A6. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2004.