One reason why a teacher is now a congressman ... and why Congress is better for it

It's not often when one is intellectually challenged by a politician. Sometime awhile back I was just so challenged by Rep. Tim Walz when he referred in a speech to the phrase "the banality of evil," coined by the author, philosopher and thinker Hannah Arendt. The audience was mostly high school and college students, and I wondered how many of them were likewise challenged. I had heard of Hannah Arendt, but somehow her work had escaped me.

The phrase comes from the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and alludes to the fact that even the most ordinary people can be perpetrators of the most hideous crimes. Of course, right away I found the book and read it.

Challenging students — and even older folks like me well past their high school and college years — is nothing new to Walz. The article below, relating to when he was still a high school teacher, illustrates why he brings a fresh and unique vision to Congress:

High School Project on Genocide Was a Portent of Real-Life Events

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN, New York Times

In 1993, when Travis Hofmann was a freshman of 15, he had traveled little beyond the sand hills that surrounded his hometown, Alliance, Neb. He was the son of a railroad engineer, a trumpeter in the high school band, with a part-time job changing the marquee and running the projector at the local movie theater.

In Travis’s class in global geography at Alliance High School, however, the teacher introduced the outside world with the word and concept of genocide. The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

Mr. Walz had already taught for a year in China, and he brought the world into his classroom in the form of African thumb pianos and Tibetan singing bowls. For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been — the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.

The rest is here.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Iraq war is that its proponents understood very little about the history, culture and geography of the region. Perhaps had they had a teacher like Tim Walz, they would never have initiated this monumental blunder that has so defined the George W. Bush presidency.

— LP