The Bill of Wrong Answers

As a response to the recently posted review of Kirsten Olson’s book Wounded by School, John Loflin, author of the “Learner’s Bill of Rights” (with which Olson begins the book) recently emailed Accuracy in Media the following message:

“Dear (Name Withheld)

Back in 1992, I created A Learner’s Bill of Rights. I am glad you liked Ms. Olsen’s LBR. which you stated in your book review http://campusreportonline.net/main/articles.php?id=3123 Please consider looking at the powerpoint links below and either writing about it and/or passing the info around to your peers.”

Also included in the email were two links, one to the MySpace page for the Learner’s Bill of Rights (LBR) and the other to a YouTube video which displays these “rights,” animated against a starry background with Bob Marley’s “Get up, Stand up” as a soundtrack.

However, despite their ostensibly educational purpose, actual intent to educate is sparse on both websites, as little concern with truth is espoused, in contrast with a large number of apologies for ignorance. On the LBR’s MySpace page, an explanation for the different “rights” enumerated therein includes phrases such as “The statement, ‘I don’t know,’ does not bother me,” “I am not afraid of being wrong, giving up or failing,” and “I have a right not to compare myself or be compared to others.”

Yet the LBR has other purposes besides burying students under a veritable avalanche of excuses for failure and mediocrity. According to Mr. Loflin’s statement of objectives, “I did not trust the adults to maintain or to respect these natural human characteristics. I realized the power must be given to the students.” To that end, much of the bill is concerned with protecting the right of students to “question” almost everything teachers give them and to judge teachers with extreme prejudice, but offers little in the way of protections for instructors against indigent students. “I have a Right to ASK Whatever QUESTions I have, to Say I don’t understand, and I have a Right not to Understand (sic),” the fourth article of the LBR reads.

Despite this overwhelming concern with questioning, the LBR declines to ask questions about its own relevance. The preamble to the LBR declares that its provisions are “inalienable rights” and “fundamental human rights,” but neither the LBR itself nor its official explanation page explains how it has reached the conclusion that the “rights” it describes are either “fundamental” or “human,” a subject which many political and educational theorists continue to debate. Moreover, despite continually warning against the tyranny of correct answers, the LBR’s authors seem to take indoctrination into their own views for granted as a social good. “[I] believe it will be beneficial if students start each day by repeating the LBR’s ‘preamble,’” Loflin writes.

The sources behind the LBR’s ideas further call its conclusions into question. One, the “Math Anxiety Bill of Rights,” includes such “rights” as “the right to be treated as a competent person,” “the right to dislike math,” and the “right to define success in my own terms.” Another, the late 1960’s book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, suggests that teachers should chisel words from graffiti found in restrooms on the front of schools.

Finally, given the reception which the LBR has received from its supporters, serious educational theorists only have more reason to be concerned. On the video version of the LBR, one commenter writes “our ‘elite’s ’ don’t want us to think, hence the diabolical ‘education’ system they have created and dumbing down (sic) of society in every major institution and outlet. They are not like us,and they (sic) cannot control our consciousness.” As evidence of what such “dumbing down,” obscures, this same commenter rails against “Those controlled by the Illuminati through bribery,blackmail (sic) and or indoctrination were to be placed throughout governments, the military hierarchy, religion, banking, commerce and academia to serve the Illuminati conspiracy to impose a centralised global dictatorship” elsewhere.

Despite its name, Mr. Loflin’s “Bill of Rights” has more in common with the ill-fated “Declaration of the Rights of Man” authored before the bloodthirsty, tyrannical experiment which was the French Revolution in that it is filled with excuses for anarchy to run rampant in the classroom, for authority and truth to be continually trampled under the boots of the immature, and for schoolyard Robespierres to avoid guilt for attacking those students actually capable of learning by claiming that they, Rousseau-esque, are forcing the gifted to be free from their intelligence. Mr. Loflin is certainly free of the same affliction.

Mytheos Holt is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.