Concord Parents Protest Emerson [a guest post]

Concord, Mass., Apr. 27, 2009. Parents at the Walden Intermediate School PTA meeting in the school’s audio-visual facility (a.k.a., library) last night protested the teaching of Concord icon Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Self-Reliance”.

Ursula Heep, coordinator of Unconquered Concord said, “We don’t want our children to fall prey to this false prophet of elitism. When Emerson wrote, ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,’ he was both sexist and dismissive of the uniformity needed to make society cohere.”

Ms. Heep continued, “Self-reliance and nonconformity might have worked during Emerson’s time, but today Americans need to obey our intelligence agencies and police forces to keep us safe from Terror. And when he writes, ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,’ he sends a contrary message to our children. We all know that God and His Word are more sacred than any one person’s mind.”

Besides,” she added, “we already have enough troublemakers among our students”—a reference to Henrique Thoreau-Unamuno, the fourth grader suspended last month for writing an essay promoting the fair distribution of wealth in the U.S.

Ms. Heep concluded UC’s protest by leading her supporters in a chant of its motto, “Keep America safe to conform!”

School librarian Paula Revere overheard Ms. Heep’s remarks and sounded the alarm to school principal H.W. Longfellow. He said he would appoint a committee of parents and teachers on all sides of the issue to report to him before he determines Emerson’s fate in his classrooms. He said, “We need to resort to the old New England town meeting of minds on this potentially divisive issue.”