The Hitler Of Arizona Education

I was recently educated on an attempt to ban Mexican American Studies programs in Tucson, Arizona. Because of this idea, they have constructed a bill that will prevent Tucson Unified School District and many others from having any class that might “promote the overthrow of the American government”. Or in this case, a Mexican American Studies class. The superintendent of schools in our state, John Huppenthal is trying not only to make sure that these classes do not exist in the public school system, but he is taking it further now. In an article titled, “Arizona Official Considers Targeting Mexican American Studies in University”, author Roque Planas informs us that Huppenthal now intends to target universities. He believes that while cutting off children from learning about it, they need to target where the teachers learned it from and stop that before they all have the knowledge to teach it as well. In my opinion, he is sounding less like a superintendent that is supposed to be concerned with students learning, and more like a crazy dictator.

            I was asked if I think legislators should be able to dictate university curriculum and content, to which I responded, absolutely not. When we’re in high school we have a set curriculum to set us up for SAT’s and AIMS so that we may receive our diplomas. I was always told that after high school, you have a lot more academic freedom, that you can pick what you would like to study and major in, and so far I have been lucky enough to have experienced that in my college career. When I read this article I was actually in disbelief that someone would attempt to limit the knowledge that we, as “free American citizens” are allowed to obtain. I see college as the foundation for all of the knowledge that I will actually use in the real world. Never once have I heard a college professor say to me, “I don’t really want to teach this but I have to” like I very honestly have in high school. I believe that we get taught the more narrow understandings of the broad and partially useless knowledge we learned in high school. To demean college professors by telling them what they can and cannot teach after all of the years of schooling they went through themselves is absurd and un-American. For reasons like this I refuse to believe that our country is really free. I feel passionate about subjects like this in the sense that growing up I was told that I could be and do anything I wanted to and I’m feeling like as I get older I am finding that to be less true because of the restrictions put on us by our government. If Huppenthal successfully takes away these kinds of studies in Arizona Universities it could quickly become a trend Nation-wide, limiting a lot, if not all of our academic freedom. We need to learn about our history, and what made our culture and other cultures the way they are. I believe being cultured, and the freedom to be cultured is a blessing. At a very extremist standpoint with this bill in act, colleges could soon be educational factories, pumping us out one at a time with the things that only they want us to learn, so that we will never question our government or how we got to this point.