Is Arizona Looking for Controversy?

Arizona, it seems, has or is about to take another public relations hit. The state has passed a law banning ethnic studies in the state's public schools. Such a move will almost certainly bring out the protests, a la the recent immigration law. But would that be a proper reaction this time around, if indeed it was the right response over the first act?

The director of a program in Tucson says that the students relate better when literature and other content is from and about people like them. This is no doubt true, and it be wrong to say that anything is wrong with that on its own terms. All history, all prose, almost all of any given subject, is worthy of study for a variety of reasons. We can surely glean truth and insight from Indonesian history and literature as well as from the American or British counterparts. So surely Latino and African American literature merits study.

But necessarily in American public schools? We are, after all, in America. It would be absurd for US families to move to Berlin and demand that German schools adjust their curricula to American tastes. If we are to stay a cohesive nation, we need a common background of understanding for our own authors and institutions ahead of comprehension of other people and places.

This is not, emphatically not, any kind or attempt at condemnation of other folks and their reflections. It is merely a recognition that we live here, along with the reasonable presumption that the people who came or are here want to become like us. Then they need to study what other American youth study in public forums; it's as simple as that.

No one is stopping anyone from reading their own authors or about their own cultures at home or on their own time. The Polish and the Irish, among others, have done remarkable jobs of keeping the home fires burning as they became Americans. There is no reason other cultures cannot do as well. Indeed, they should, for their heritage is part of what they are.

But not as a matter of course when paid for by American taxes. To be sure, any study of literature as literature or history as history requires an overview and inclusion of the best writers and greatest events of all peoples and cultures. But is it the job of our schools to promote the rest of the world and its mores, or our own? Outside of true moral evils, the best advice is, when in Rome.