Should teaching make people uncomfortable?  In some parts of the U.S. today, many people seem to think not.  A number of states have passed or are attempting to pass laws that prohibit public school teachers from teaching anything, particularly subjects having to do with ethnicity or gender, which might make anyone listening "uncomfortable" or which might cause anyone to experience "discomfort."

    Last month, as I was leading a student group on a tour of various cities in Central Europe, I had a conversation in Berlin with a retired university professor.  A child of the Cold War as well as a scholar of the Holocaust, he told me that when he hears people complain that some teaching makes students uncomfortable, "it sends shivers up and down my spine."  With good reason.  Most Americans have not lived through a dictatorship in which a powerful central government sets out to control everything that schools should teach and that, further, penalizes with severe prison sentences or death any teacher who dares violate the informational strictures stipulated by the state.  Most Americans do not know what it is like to have an impersonal entity regulate what they can think, do, and say.

    But this retired professor knows.  He's studied it, he's lived it.  If teaching only mandates or reinforces what people already believe or know, is it really teaching?

    If teaching doesn't make people uncomfortable, it's not doing what it's supposed to do:  enlighten the mind and deepen the heart.

    We grow through what makes us question who we are.