Email to Lexington High School Mission Committee

November 2005

I am a parent of a junior at the high school and an eighth grader due to enroll at LHS next year.  I have in general been very impressed with the breadth and quality of the LHS academic and extra-curricular program.  For the sake of brevity my comments below are focused on an area that I think needs improvement, but they should not be construed as a sign of broad-based dissatisfaction.

My concern about LHS has to do with the misappropriation of some basic concepts that might get into the mission statement: diversity, democracy and free thought.  As Americans, these are concepts that are at the root of our founding documents, but as such they become powerful words that are often used to distort or even oppress.  For example, we “celebrate diversity” in a way that often stifles uncomfortable minority opinions.  If I still lived in the Texas house I grew up in, my son would be attending Ronald Reagan High School.  My guess is that it would be difficult there to express a strong anti-Bush, anti-war opinion.  On the other hand, how easy is it for the child of a U.S. Marine at LHS to express a pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War opinion?  To be “for diversity” in a way that reinforces mainstream community opinion is easy; to create an academic environment that truly fosters creative thought and diverse opinion is much harder, and in fact almost never happens in our society – let alone in our public schools. 

Here is an apt quote from Mark Twain: “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”  The opinions that we don’t want to hear are to the right and the left of our comfortable Lexington political consensus, or are idiosyncratic ideas beyond the bounds of current local standards.  A true model of democracy at LHS would give the members of our community the skills to welcome diverse opinions, and train administrators to adopt more democratic styles of leadership.  It would place less emphasis on “civility,” which often stifles creative thought, and more on making real the concepts of humanity, democracy and justice.  Public democracy is a noisy, raucous process.  Private corporations, for example and by contrast, are authoritarian and civil.  We can be noisily democratic while educating the members of the community to respect each other and avoid ad hominem arguments.

There is nothing more oppressive in our society than lofty, hollow phrases (we are liberators, we spread democracy, we respect human rights, we celebrate diversity), since they obscure the true evil in our midst and divert us from our complicity in the world’s horrors.  We liberate when we admit that we are not liberators, but oppressors; we respect human rights when we admit that we violate them, etc.  So I would hope our Mission Statement avoids hollow aspirational statements, but rather admits where we currently fail, and how we can do better.

Thank you very much for taking on this important work and for giving me an opportunity to provide input into the process.

Adam Seitchik