Do you prefer Dolly Parton’s version, or Whitney Houston’s, of “I Will Always Love You,” the classic pop ballad? How about choosing between Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and the original, recorded by Otis Redding? Or maybe you’d like to compare The Byrds’ tight harmonies and jangly guitar rendering of “Mr. Tambourine Man” with Bob Dylan’s first take on the song a few years before.
You don’t have to choose, of course. Music thrives on interpretation and innovation, and when you hear a piece differently than you might have imagined it, well, sometimes it just turns your head around, doesn’t it? In music, as in other realms of the arts, there’s not necessarily a “right” way to do things.
And that’s a notion we might hope to apply to a lot of what we encounter in our lives. The human capacity for change, and our ability to learn and then adjust to something new: that’s worth celebrating and empowering. Surely a key goal of education must be to teach young people to value the great variety of ways we lead our lives on this planet. Since the world is always changing, it’s our job to inspire rising generations to study and appreciate the past, to examine what’s new and to embrace the richly varied paths that people follow in their lives.
But we’re not doing that so well these days. We’re often confusing educating with indoctrinating, and we seem to prefer that our schools provide training — which is about imparting skills for the next step in life, like a job. We seem less enamored of teaching, which is aimed at opening minds for lifelong learning. You get the distinction, right?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons that our society seems to be splitting apart: With encouragement from cynical politicians and audience-hungry media stars, we’ve abandoned the essential human quality of empathy, leaving us unconcerned if our schools, from pre-K through the college years, fail to imbue the next generation’s minds with the values that can make them open to understanding and change.
Education should expand our consciousness and enlarge our worldview. But that’s pretty far from what’s happening in many parts of America, where state-level politicians and local school boards are instead fighting to limit what’s taught in classrooms, as though there’s nothing to be gained by seeing the world any differently than we did a few decades ago. It’s happening on a lot of college campuses, too.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the avatar of this campaign to re-impose a mindset from an earlier time. DeSantis seems to be a throwback to an era when those in charge — straight white men, mostly — didn’t really have to consider the needs of everybody else in a diverse society.
Is Florida really “where woke goes to die,” as DeSantis proudly proclaims? That makes it sound as though it’s a bad thing to be awake to today’s realities. My old dog-eared copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, by the way, cites some antonyms for “awake” — including “asleep,” of course, but also “unaware,” “inattentive” and “ignorant.”
DeSantis isn’t any of those, though his presidential campaign seems to be counting on the support of those who are. He knows what he is doing. By imposing a right-wing stamp on education in his state, DeSantis can fire up the conservative base. So he pushed through a law giving parents the right to sue schools and teachers if they have a hunch their kids aren’t being taught what the parents want, and another law to ban discussion of gender and sexuality in lower grades, and to restrict it even in high school. And Florida’s new standards for teaching history prompted some fearful teachers to drop classroom references to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and to stop teaching the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This makes no sense. Our society can fully and fairly consider controversial topics — including how we teach about gender identity, sexual orientation and the nation’s history of racial inequity. But it can do that only if people understand the facts. Clamping a lid on even talking about them isn’t going to give us a chance for those conversations.
That’s the glory of being open to the great panoply of experience all around us. If we want the rising generation of Americans to respect our history, we owe it to them to be honest about all of its truths. Our hope lies in, first, recognizing and appreciating our nation’s checkered past and, second, in remaking what we’ve been given to meet today’s challenges.
That is worth celebrating. So, as Leonard Cohen so movingly sang, “Hallelujah!” That sentiment was set to music before, of course, and even Cohen’s approach to it has been performed beautifully since then by others. Hallelujah, indeed.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.