Storytelling (was Critical Race Theory)

[richard duncan]

Mike Masinter makes a good point about the folly of generalizing from
an anecdote. However, those of us who work in the religious freedom
area have seen many cases like Timmy's. Not exactly like it, of
course. But similar enough to show a pattern of indoctrination
of a captive audience of impressionable students. Paul Vitz has
published a powerful study about censorship in public school
textbooks, a study that concludes that there is bias indeed and "the
nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and
conservative political and economic positions have been reliably
excluded from children's textbooks." Frankly, compared to many cases I
personally have seen, Timmy's story is a mild case. Although his
answer was correct in my opinion (and in the opinion of most of my
fellow citizens), it was a conclusory assertion. He should have
mentioned the Big Bang Theory and then deconstructed it. Indeed, this
was the point of Colson's article (another reason why the story rings
true for me)--Colson was *not* writing to trash the public schools;
his purpose was to encourage believers to get involved in the
marketplace of ideas, to defend their faith by "arguing persuasively
for the principles" we know to be true.

Stories are important in law (and, I think, in legal scholarship) not
because we should generalize from a single anecdote but because they
put a human face on our abstract calculations. The public schools
do a lot of good; but the government school monopoly extracts a heavy
price on the religious and intellectual liberty of citizens whose
values and beliefs have been excluded from those biased texts that
Vitz wrote about. Timmy's story, the Settle case, Brown V. Hot, Sexy &
Safer and many other stories I could tell put human faces on Vitz's
study and on the price we pay when we try to impose a "common"
curriculum on children in a pluralistic society.
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             Rick Duncan (rduncan at unlinfo.unl.edu)

"There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of
an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's
Home, Weston-Super-Mare." Horace Rumpole