All Rev'd Up: Diversity Of Thought, Not Facts, Needed In Mass. Classrooms

The Rev. Irene Monroe and the Rev. Emmett G. Price III called in to Boston Public Radio on Monday with reactions to a recent Boston Globe profile of the newly-emerged Parents United, a Boston-based organization aiming to promote “true diversity of thought” and quell discussions about race and sexuality in private schools throughout Massachusetts.

Price began the conversation by positing that the underlying ambition of Parents United appears to be the exclusion of non-white perspectives from school curriculum, in line with efforts from similar conservative parenting groups across the United States.

“If you’re trying to be inclusive, then you want everybody’s historical narrative to be represented in the macro-historical narrative that you teach,” he said. “Not just Black people, but Indigeonous people, Asian and Asian-American folks.”

He asked, “Can we let everyone feel their presence in the narrative?”

Monroe, meanwhile, acknowledged an importance in protecting historical fact in schools, but said there's an equally valuable need for today's students to be exposed to opinions across the political spectrum.

“We have to create, really, safe space,” she said. “The whole idea is that school is a marketplace of ideas, and they should be allowed to flourish. We should understand that we’re making a distinction between information and, really, indoctrination.”

She continued, arguing that left-leaning folks in cities like Cambridge and Somerville embody a similar “militancy” to conservative groups in line with Parents United. She said both sides ought to be acknowledged in American classrooms “if we want some moveable middle taking place around coming to some kind of consensus.”

“I always tell people here that while I reside in Cambridge, it’s easier for me to come out queer than it is to come out Christian,” she joked. “We’ve gotta understand that there has to be some balance about how we learn how to talk across these differences here.”

Rev. Irene Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist, the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Rev. Emmett Price is the founding pastor of Community of Love Christian Fellowship in Allston. Together, they host GBH’s All Rev’d Up podcast.