The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his092/untrneye.lzh/UNTRNEYE.TXT

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ISS:To an untrained eye  by James V. Schall

   On April 23, 1989, THE NEW YORK TIMES carried an unsigned item
datelined Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The article was about the principle of
a local grammar school who barred a young girl in the seventh grade
from exhibiting her competitive display for the school's science fair,
which was devoted to the theme, "Life Science." The young student's
evidently well-prepared presentation was of ten human fetuses in
various stages of development. "The fetuses, kept in preservative
solutions, were from pregnancy stages ranging from 6 weeks to 5-1/2
months."

   The girl's mother, it seems, was an art teacher in the same school,
while her uncle, from whom she obtained the fetuses, was a local
pathologist. The fetuses, according to the mother of the student, came
from miscarriages. The life-science presentation of the Gatlinburg
seventh- grade student was, it seems, quite a good one. It was so good,
in fact, that the principal arranged for the display to be given a blue
ribbon, but no student was allowed to see the display. Why? The
principal held it was "inappropriate for the age group here."
Evidently, somewhere along the line, some age group would find this
sort of exhibit "appropriate"? One cannot help but suspect that this
was not the real issue.

   In this connection, I have also heard that pro-life debaters are
often forbidden to show similar displays, even just photos or slides of
them, to college audiences on the grounds that this is an unfair
tactic, too "emotional." One wonders just how old we must be to see a
display of human fetuses without confusing them for human beings. In
any case, this prohibition is apparently one of the few things that
students are not allowed to see -- one might here piously hope, in this
instance at least, that the normal prurient interest of the healthy
adolescent might manage to sneak a look at this forbidden object, just
to see what it is that the elders do not want him to know.

   Significantly, also, in the article, there was no record of the
civil rights groups rising in wrath to protect the rights of students
to express their artistic talents and have others see what kind of
"life" was revealed in their "sciences." We should note, however, that
the very fact that the principal arranged for a "private" blue ribbon
ceremony indicates that he did at least want to protect himself against
the accusation of prior censorship or discriminating against a
hard-working student. He did fear a certain kind of liberal opinion.
Again we suspect that what was at issue was the effort to prevent the
students from seeing what one sees when looking at a human fetus. The
fear was that the students would see what someone did not want them to
know about.

   What was this sight that the school wanted to prevent the students
from observing? The curriculum director of the local county schools, in
explaining this prohibition of freedom of speech, gave this remarkable
explanation: "To an untrained eye, the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was
definitely a child." Needless to say, what this "5-1/2 months along"
fetus is to the "trained" eye was not remarked, nor was it explained
just how we go about so "training" our eyes that they see something
else in the jars besides objects that definitely look like the human
child. The hidden key to this whole little report was, no doubt, right
here in the fear of the supposedly "untrained eye."

   At first sight, however, along with the realization that some
children do not naturally come to term (a fact that children ought also
to know about, for many in fact have had mothers or relatives with
miscarriages), it would normally seem that we would want children to
know of the wonder of human growth, its stages, its linear development
that leads from conception, through the stages in the womb, to birth,
to the state of life a seventh-grader is. Someone does not want
children to know this sort of fact of life.

   Gatlinburg, Tennessee is not, of course, the center of the universe,
though it does have a certain charm in the world of country music. The
song I recall about Gatlinburg, in fact, is a very violent one, so the
area is not a stranger to human disorder. We can, if we wish, look on
this incident as a sort of amusing parody of what happens when someone,
even a seventh-grade student in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Eastern
Tennessee, seeks to explain reality. Yet, it is precisely in such
incidents, in such small, out-of-the-way places that the whole irony of
the death-and-killing society we have developed in our hospitals and
laws and, yes, mores is revealed most graphically. It is in such places
that we can see most clearly what we have brought about with our
practices that we do not want our children to see.

   Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there were no abortion
culture. Let us assume, furthermore, that we lived in a scientifically
honest and open society. Furthermore, let us assume that in some school
there came a proper "moment" to explain the growth of the human fetus,
from conception to birth. We will likewise presume that there would be
a normal number of miscarriages which were attended to by local
pathologists, one of whom had a niece who proposed such a science
project. We are assuming, in other words, nothing in the least immoral
or unnatural in the fact of miscarriages or in the legitimate
scientific or educational effort to study and explain the condition of
human growth. In such a situation, would there be any reason to forbid
the girl's display?

   In our current situation, however, it simply cannot be a question
that the average seventh-grader has not been exposed already to a
wide-spread knowledge of matters from sex to drugs, so that the
presumption of the principal in the present case cannot be based
primarily on the innocence of the students forbidden to see the
display. We need not doubt that this principal knows that even our
courts do not require pregnant teenagers -- only slightly, if any,
older than these seventh-graders -- to report their situation to their
parents.

   Rather, the prohibition is based on the fear that seventh-grade
children, seeing such a display, with their own eyes and brains, will
see the horrible lie that has been presented to them in various classes
or programs that explain that abortion does not deal with the death of
an otherwise normal human child. In other words, the schoolteachers do
not want their whole authority undermined in the light of the lie that
our society has chosen to present in this matter.

   "To an untrained eye, the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was definitely
a child...." Here we have a professional curriculum director at a
county school system in one of our states -- and therefore, I take it,
somewhat typical of the problem we face -- actually suggesting that we
must train the students not to see what is in fact there. I believe it
is possible for a 5-1/2 month fetus actually to survive, and some have
done so. But the fetus already looks "human" long before five and a
half months. What would normal students make of this display?
Obviously, they would make of it just what the curriculum director and
the principal thought they would. That is, they would have thought of
it as a human child. And they would have found no evidence that this
was not what it was or what it would become if left to grow normally.

   What the sytem did not want the students to know was what these
things in the bottles really were, for this information would cause
great consternation when it came time to present other subjects later
on in the school curriculum. Take for example the Declaration of
Independence. Let us suppose that this class of seventh- graders were
allowed to see this display of ten fetuses in various stages of growth.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were obtained
rather from abortions, though in that case they might be chopped up or
scalded or otherwise mutilated. The question of the right to life is to
be discussed in the following class as part of our national heritage
and national principle, that this nation under God recognizes that
there are norms or standards of human worth and value, that this is
what makes us different from totalitarian societies, which do not
respect human worth.

   No doubt, in this situation, some perceptive student will inevitably
ask the teacher about those ten fetuses, "Do they have some sort of
right to life, since they certainly look human and came from human
mothers and fathers?" If the teacher were to say, "Why, yes, certainly,
they are human," then he would have to answer the question about the
practice of killing them, which every seventh-grader knows about even
if he is not allowed to see the results.

   This civics teacher, in this circumstance, would, moreover,
immediately find himself in trouble from the pro-abortion front for
presuming to "indoctrinate" his views on people who have a "right" -- a
right to what? A right to call a human fetus something else so that it
does not come under any protection of the law as described in our
Declaration. So better not to let this happen. Keep the students from
seeing the display. It will make teaching civics easier later on. No
one will defend a teacher's obligation to call a fetus what it is. No
one will protect a student's eyes to tell him that what he sees is
indeed what he sees.

   In this manner, then, the whole school system, and through it
society itself, are corrupted in the name of "protecting" the children
so that they do not "see" what is before them. "To an untrained eye,
the 5-1/2 months along (fetus) was definitely a child...." Or to put it
in a converse fashion, to train the eyes of our children can mean
nothing but the establishment of the lie as the norm of our educational
system.

   This consequence, to be sure, is not a theme unfamiliar to political
philosophy. We do not have to go much beyond Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in
the Blue Ridge Mountains, to discover that the ultimate issues remain
largely what Plato had said they were, that there are indeed some who
would prefer their own opinions to the WHAT IS before their very eyes
and those of their children. When indeed does it become "appropriate"
for us to see what is in the ten jars containing the fetuses in the
various stages of normal growth that the seventh- grader displayed at
Pi Beta Phi Elementary School in Sevier County, Tennessee? The Greeks
and the writer of the Declaration, no doubt, would have been grimly
amused to contemplate the abiding pertinence of their theories.

   This article was taken from ALL About Issues/November-December 1989.
Copyright 1989 American Life League, P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22554