Downward spiral in Education

SO, LPS (Lincoln Public Schools) recently fired a reacher for showing Baghdad E.R. While I know little of his history with the LPS administration, I have respect for his teaching methods. Reverse chronological history? Peace Studies? Wow....but to read the comments in the LJS regarding his teaching Here you'd certainly think he was the end of the world. How dare he teach outside the approved curricula!I certainly wouldn't call Socrates, Plato, Descartes,Benjamin Franklin, or Newton intellectual slouches. In the last 150 years with invention of public schools the intellectual level of students as free thinkers has dropped. Education is supposed to be messy; our country's founders thought of education as a basis for social cohesion and personal liberation and many were self taught. I hardly think that Jefferson or Adams would make it in a school today with what is packaged together as education. LPS only reinforces this idea with their removal of a teacher that broke some intellectual rules, bucking the cookie cutter public school tradition in the same way that Jaime Escalante did when he taught advanced math to students with little administrative or parental support. Their argument, " when are they ever going to use this..." ring now even as they did then with parents and LPS questioning Mr. Baker's reverse history teaching. Being exposed to some ideas you don't like is the purpose of learning. Homogeneous education is cheap yet looking at my line items on my tax form I should be getting Socrates.