There it is, busted pencils fully let it education talk educated educators talking education classes in session.
Dr. Johnny Lupinacci, Jacob chairman of the board.
Meet Dr. Tim Slacker.
Yeah, you know, Wednesday's time to get your learning on.
And boy, there's
there's no shortage of things to be learning about today but you know we're coming off though and we need to point out there we're coming off of uh you know what was it a national holiday uh this past monday um martin luther king day and um you know as people said it boy you know the the pre show conversation of getting ready for this classes in session um
you know lots to talk about where where do you go with it how are we coming across do we do you know history of MLK day you know things that have transpired over the history of MLK day teachers experiences students remembering maybe you know back when when they were a student in a certain time period how did MLK day
come about in the classroom, what were those things that were brought forward in the classroom that seemed to maybe in your mind dominate conversations about what it meant to talk, you know, to have a national holiday, to have your social studies teachers bring it up for something to be there and just, man, understanding that
You know, Johnny and Jacob, this is a rich, rich topic.
Is it more rich today, given the current moment we're living in?
You know, it reminds me all the time, Johnny, that we've had, you know, Dr. Kevin Kumashero on, who, you know, always reminds us that, you know, whenever we're talking about something, it really helps.
to get a get a understanding of the context of the moment we're in and um you know Johnny you were saying this moment like any other moment is is there's there's some realities that are uh that were surrounded by and immediate history but you know kind of watching for example the idea of
MLK Day and, you know, saying in the past three years where we've seen education legislation point out that topics such as MLK Day, you know, the justice, diversity, equity and inclusion that this some of this content may be something that needs to be.
even shied off from, I don't know if you can shy away, should point that out, how you do that and then understanding again too, we're in a moment where the country seems to be incredibly divided.
people, you know, where are we at at this moment?
You've got, you know, the immigration enforcement that's occurring, the backlash to immigration that's occurring.
And, you know, a federal day off, though, and I kind of think, you know, I'm feeling like, is it that it's not
as a prominent as it was say a few years ago is that just a feeling I'm getting is there evidence for that or is it a reality that no it is tamped on and is it though just potentially tamped on because there is just so much going on you know the unrest in Iran
you know, what's going across all of the cities right now with with ice protests or people in support of immigration enforcement.
Venezuela, Greenland, even though Jacob and I did a great history and kind of had a lot of fun with that episode.
I mean, Greenland now, this is serious stuff.
And is it just the overwhelm of
We say content, I guess that, yeah, MLK day just happened to fall in the, you know, this time, this moment where there's so much going on.
Holy crap.
I don't know if I set that up or if I just rambled Johnny.
Well, I think you did a little bit of both, Tim, which is what we do here.
Got things motor in here.
Tim, I especially appreciate you bringing up the topic, especially for class and session this week.
You know, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
is certainly a hero to democracy and is an important teacher for all of us educators who, you know, I think believe in human rights, you know, uphold children's rights that truly
to be cliche about truly share that dream that we can and ought to live together in peaceful ways and ways that respect one another and you know lead with rights and kindness and all these things that you've noted here have become you know uh you know uh like like seen as maybe weaknesses if you're coming from uh one side of the political spectrum or seen as identities
I mean, from the other side, maybe more of like an identity less of an action.
So we're in a, in a, in a moment that I would say for a class in session related to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
is that I don't feel like 2025 is.
And now
2026.
Oh
yeah.
The year, the past year, where we're at in this moment is that different than, in some ways, it's very different, obviously, but I think there are striking similarities between the political moment and the early 60s.
So like, let's say 62, 63, when the letters that we most often reference in teaching about MLK, right?
We have the iconic, I have dream.
speech, right?
We have, you know, the letters from Birmingham jail just months before the big March in August in Washington, you know, for the I have a dream, which we all see in like, if you think about, you know, lessons in school from Martin Luther King, you probably remember those visuals, right?
the big speech.
Tim, we used to take classes, not together, but probably a social studies teacher to Washington, DC.
And you go to the, you know, what is it in front of the Lincoln Memorial?
There's the place where MLK gave that speech.
My, my, get in these, my, my, my geography, correct?
Right, right on the steps, right on the steps
right there, right?
The I have dream.
And, and it was,
It's been pretty stalwart and I'll say we could do a whole nother show.
Maybe we will on the side extra content or Saturday show because I don't want to take up our whole 30 minutes here.
But like the idea, you know, we could talk about how and what we teach from Martin Luther King's teachings to us about how to be in a democracy, about how to dream big, about how to take action and say what's not always, you know, polite.
about things, but that are like, what do the kids say these days, dead ass, right?
That are right on point, right?
That are exactly calling out what is happening.
And, and there's some pretty amazing lessons in there that we could get into.
But Tim, I, I resonated with what you opened up with because
I'm not sure.
I've been really busy as listeners know.
It's hockey season.
We're back in school.
There's a lot happening in the world.
We're sifting out the politics of protests all around us.
You know, students are planning walkouts across the country in response to violence from ICE and increased protests.
There is a lot happening in our country right now.
And I thought to myself, is it just my busyness as a teacher, as a professor, as a coach, as a parent, or
Is it a little quiet around for me this heroes celebrating this heroes?
I remember growing up as a kid in the 80s.
Stevie Wonder is happy birthday.
I mean, little lesson for folks.
We know that song was in part Stevie Wonder building momentum.
to advocate, to lobby, to push for Martin Luther King's birthday to be recognized.
Fun fact.
Yeah, come on, throw it in there.
By like our Republican president at the time, Ronald Reagan.
There
you go.
So this is nonpartisan in terms of how it's become deeply political.
Republicans, Democrats, the liberals, they like, I'm okay.
It's like, this was one dude.
Growing up most people landed on and we get into like how it's sanitized and some of his teachings aren't so fun and friendly for everyone like we would like certain Like the letters from Birmingham jail to be taught as much as I have a dream But in general the sentiment the lessons that he brought forth wrote right and spoke out about as unpopular or as dangerous as they were to say at that time
became something that our country celebrated as part of a democracy, as a success.
From a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, right, who signed it in.
And so for most of my years as being a student and being a teacher, this was no-brainer.
It was taught about, it was celebrated.
We had all kinds of awesome events in our school, service opportunities, right?
Because Bill Clinton named it as a national day of service.
then right because people were saying well it's a day off some places it's not a day off other places how are we celebrating the national holiday well let's celebrate it how Martin Luther King would want us in action in service not just on his birthday but all the time but let's reconnect to it on his birthday right let's reconnect it as you democracy is something you have to be active in right so democracy in action
to me is what Martin Luther King pushed us to strive for.
So we had that.
So Tim, but I get back to my point.
Yeah, exactly.
Now you're rambling.
Yeah, exactly.
I got a lot of knowledge to drop.
But the idea is, uh, you know, you were saying, I actually doubted myself this week thinking, is it a little quieter than usual?
Is it me and a little bit?
I'll take responsibility for like I said, I've been really busy and I was thinking, Hey man, you know, what are we?
doing this week for Martin Luther King Day.
How are we celebrating?
What are the things that we're doing?
How come I haven't been bombarded with emails and like all kinds of invitations to events and celebrations?
And I thought, man, I must be really disconnected.
And I went digging and I didn't find a whole lot.
And then I went digging a little more and I found some really awesome stuff.
So I don't want to say nothing's going on and in part taking personal responsibility for
Kind of like this week sneaking up on me, but also I think it's been a little quieter.
And then, right, we do have some news headlines here related to it.
Cause I think this is, what did Jacob say?
This, this is connected, right?
It's a, there's a correlation here, possibly.
Uh, this is the first time a president has not acknowledged, made an official statement since Reagan named Martin Luther King juniors.
birthday or right around his birthday as a national holiday, right?
There's usually an official statement from the White House recognizing it or at least speaking to it.
Again, related to that greatness of what he contributed to democracy.
What does democracy look like?
Watch Dr. King's speeches.
Look at the people who are rallying around his issues, poverty, racism,
you know, war, these things that we can and do better by together.
So, you know, in general, Tim Black, I'm left thinking, okay, maybe I'm not so disconnected.
It is probably a little quieter than usual.
And I think that's what you were hinting at, like, are we concerned about this?
What are we doing
about it?
I don't know if it's, yeah, I agree.
There's a quiet and, you know, again, yeah.
Just the fact, you know, the current President Trump made this decision.
You know, 1983 is when Reagan signed it, the first celebration, 1986.
And, okay, you know, try to understand that for what it is, but it
You know, you think about what it means then to be an educator in a public school and a public school and a public schools connection to democracy as we point out here on busted pencils and You know the in one way the
the down what we might be observing and it may be an anomaly.
I think part of it definitely speaks to, you know, the legislation across the country to really create the chilling effect for teachers involved in teaching to, you know, not be seen as promoting some form of activism as opposed to teaching.
teaching the facts and teaching what happened.
I see that.
And then, you know, Johnny, this might be a Tim bomb for you guys, but I'm kind of also looking at it again and seeing the push for public school reform, quote, in general.
And I got to say that, you know,
The response then for all of the legislation kind of really creating a chilling effect, you know, you would say, well, then here's an opportunity to craft a very pro public school, Democracy Matters platform politically.
And Rom Emanuel.
There you go.
There's another young guy right off the bench coming out with some new ideas is leading the Democrats' charge on public education.
He's talking about the need to double down on literacy and numeracy testing.
I kind of like put that together with understanding.
At what point though, during all this time, Johnny, as you pointed out, 1983 till now has been a MLK day.
And I'm thinking about in 1983, also a nation at risk was published.
And the onslaught.
towards American public education to reduce it down to, you know, the facts of numeracy and literacy has itself been, you know, an onward upward march that maybe has done more to take away the democratic mission of public schools over the last 40 years than any one single quote.
president or administration has because I, you know, other than, as you said, those massive celebrations and days of service and school events, they were always still, you know, kind of like one offs, right?
And, and, you know, I know I'm pushing the limits here of saying, you know, cause and effect or correlation, but
I, in one way, the fact of, you know, having anything other than just a day and now that it seems to be that it's not even a day that, you know, we even do the one day celebrations.
Well, has school ever in the last 45 years really been intentionally about democracy?
And, and in fact, that push to
To me kind of put the you know some some I don't know if it's the last nails of the coffin but to continue putting nails in the Democratic mission of public schools Here it you know, we've got an early Democrat coming out and then I see another one in Utah pushing And they're pushing math and reading scores and no one
is coming back to the idea that the public mission of democracy that is part I would say is fundamentally why we have public schools is just lost and I don't know are we ever going to get that back because I don't see anybody running on democracy right now I don't see anybody running on democracy maybe maybe
Um, the new New York city mayor is trying to revive a little bit of a movement there.
I could see the look on your eyes.
You're like, man, Tim, you went too far for me.
Well, I mean, not too far.
Oh, I think it's a great conversation.
I'm just like making the connection back to Martin Luther King and what his heroic contributions to democracy were.
And I think that you're, you're, you're related here.
You're pivoting us to, you know, talking about current
Democrat party, Johnny,
it's easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than to find the connection between the initial subject and where we have now arrived.
Okay.
Well, I mean, I
do, I think Tim sentiment though is saying, you know, I don't want listeners think Tim just, just basically sidestepped our hero this week and said, let's talk local.
Let's talk more politics of the Democrat party.
But I think what you're saying, Tim, is we,
We've fallen short.
Have
we
ever really taught or learned the lessons that Martin Luther King was teaching, that he was speaking loudly about?
Did we hold care for those and put them into action?
Or like you're saying, or did we make them part of our identity in terms of a political identity or a school day?
bad.
This is saying like it happens.
It's certainly by and large how most schools, right?
As we know, celebrate heroes and holidays, not deep content of the actual history, right?
And connected to action, but often just in the like, Hey, it's a holiday today.
Um, which is also like surface level is important.
Why I'm like kind of like why I'm caught off guard by the silence or the quietness.
at least in that we're anecdotally recognizing here like, hey, maybe it seems a little quieter.
It's a loud time.
But Tim, I think your point being, what are the priorities of whether it's people running for political office or teaching in a school or running a school or sending our kids to a school?
What are the institutional commitments that we have to things like,
ending poverty, opposing violent conflict or unjust war, right?
Speaking truth to power, right?
Being firmly against racism, sexism, ableism, just the downright mistreatment of humans and violence against one another ourselves and future generations, right?
If we can, are we committed
to those things, to learning about those things, to ending them as part of reading and math, as part of being together, socializing as school.
Or are we, you know, just birding ourselves with topics like Tim, you brought up like school reform, quote unquote, more reading, more science of reading, more math facts.
Let's keep it to the facts only not to these.
you know, feelings things as though you could separate facts and feelings related to what I'm calling core lessons for being a democratic citizen.
I mean, to me, the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King and there's other heroes, like there's help us understand how to put into action core democratic values.
And Tim, we've said it here on Busset Pencil so many times that essentially ought to be
the purpose of public education, where we learn to put concepts into action, especially related to core democratic values in this great democracy in our country.
Nonpartisan here saying that like whatever party you believe to believe you're part of, to be a patriot means to put into practice.
This is the definition of
patriotism.
Bring it
to put into practice.
all the core democratic values.
Even Dr. Martin Luther King didn't introduce diversity as a core democratic value.
If you're a farmer out there, you knew about diversity way before because crop diversity is absolutely essential to the health of your farm.
We know this, all of us in community and society, people have amplified and echoed it over the years to help us.
you know share why it's so important because people suffer unjustly and when people suffer unjustly at the hand of governments or institutions or our schools or the decisions we make right we have the human capacity and the responsibility to do better together that's what it means to be in a democracy so
to not recognize and celebrate the people that do that, or to Tim, as you say, to teach them lightly, or to forget about them, or to roll them into a campaign to get more standardized tests in our schools, is not just a shame.
It's an absolute disregard for the core sentiment of what it means to advocate and remind one another of how we behave in democracies.
the way the reason I went there and you just you brought it up though too is is that I mean you know he was used as leverage for you know the movement towards what we have now the standardized test the ed reform movement as saying that remember they were not
early on it was this was they framed education as the civil rights issue of today and that academic achievement and particularly academic achievement in largely minority and or you know poor poverty-stricken public schools was alarming.
And in fact, was harmful to allow such academic underachievement to allow it to happen in a country like ours, because actually nothing would be more harmful to.
democracy than an uneducated citizenry.
And those initial framings, MLK was cited as saying that this is an MLK issue to bring academic parity, to bring equality, to elevate
equity in these moments.
And so in one way, you sit there and go, okay, I get it.
So it wasn't that I was trying to move away from MLK Day.
It was just how we potentially even now use to elevate a position certain people's perspectives.
And
For anybody who's going, so Tim, you don't think that underachievement and all of those, like, no, they weren't wrong to point that out.
You know, as John, Johnny, you say, you know, our, our, our friend Jonathan Kozel, Savage inequalities, pointing out, you know, that book that I know moved you, moved me when I met him that brought, you know, sunlight into.
literally schools across the train tracks from each other in St.
Louis, the amount of despair in poverty in our public schools, literally in the same city in an American country.
You know, you read the I Have a Dream, you read Birmingham, you read any of the writings of MLK, you listen to his speeches.
you can see that a school system that that is so inadequate for some is absolutely rises to the level of an emergency concern that says we should all be worried and concerned about it.
And so, you know, here we are now, though, to 2026.
And, you know, the MLK day, maybe what
I kind of get a sense of Johnny what you're saying is is that Maybe I don't see a lot of motivation from anybody Really kind of at this point other than yeah, you know is it now just back to that's a good day off and you know geez maybe a mixture of of people I Don't know not not say not using his lessons
Um, correctly, but picking and choosing has allowed for distortions over time of, of, of somebody.
And I think, you know, this is where we're at in social studies and history teaching you and I, Johnny, no, that's always the case whenever we turn human individuals who's done great things into heroes.
Um, and in fact, I'm.
drawn a blank right now, but in fact, one scholar in the 90s, Heroification, he called it.
He likened it to Calcification.
It takes away the contours and the feelings and the humanness of these people and turns them into things that are untouchable by any of us because they're so far above anything.
And then, you know, so hero worship.
I would just like
you know, to to acknowledge what we saw this year, what we're seeing this year.
And there's so much richness in this topic that you and I hear now, you know, going on our right up around our limit of 30 minutes to remind people that, man,
there is so much to learn and so much to be gained.
Yes, James Lowe and Lies, my teacher told me, thank you, producer Jacob.
In fact, we even had him when I was at Penn State Altoona, he was a guest speaker talking about Lies, my teacher told me, you know, so time, time moves forward and let's see, though, you know, with everything that's going on, I still'd say, you know,
Hey, hey, happy.
And as I remember one social studies professor very specifically pointing out when I was working on my doctor work and I was literally studying the way he taught, he reminded those future social studies teachers that it's the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And don't you ever forget all of that in his title because
that was earned and therefore that's the respect minimally that had to be given to him.
Johnny, I'll let you close up.
I
mean, Tim, I think that's great.
And I just, you know, I think my biggest thing, like to build on what you're saying and to close us out is, you know, let's not forget the teaching.
I know there's like a whole academic thing around this hero thing, but I always
I always was like, that's great.
I'm still going to keep my heroes.
And the, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
is going to be one of them.
No matter how many of you nerds tell me heroes is a bad thing.
I'm going to have them.
Hey, you know, and for me, there's going to be a handful of them and they're going to be my Mount Rushmore in a sense.
We all have them.
It's kind of part of like how we set the compass on our life.
And as a teacher, you know, MLK.
reminded me so much of how important character education was.
He talked about, you know, to be intelligent was one thing, but to have morals and ethics was the, was the, you know, the left to the right hand of those two of that pairing.
You can be really smart, but you also have ethical responsibility and moral obligation, right?
And so I think about that all the time.
And so I celebrate him
you know, all the time and think about how his teachings can help us be better teachers.
And as part of that, it's teaching about the things he taught, right?
And, and reminding ourselves, like even for us, Tim, you know, like your, your whole reason and impetus for starting busted pencils to go into the beginnings was you kind of identified as a nonconformist in education, pushing against schooling.
Right?
You know, as an institutional practice that was deeply problematic and cruel to children, right?
And that was not benevolent in the social ills of the time.
You said, we have to have a group of nonconformists, but Martin Luther King, right?
Said education should produce nonconformists, right?
People who question the status quo, right?
To ask questions when there is something going on that doesn't seem quite right because of our character.
and our moral compass.
So I'll say it boldly, I couldn't think of a more relevant time as more and more leaders devoid of moral compass and character take rise all over the world.
It's common.
It's part of our human capacity.
You could be not a great person, right?
And have different ethics, we're not so great morals, right?
And be in leadership.
But
To be an intelligent leader, to be a compassionate leader, to be a strong leader, you have to have a balance of intellect and character.
And so on that, Tim, it's time.
Now it's time
for your moment of zen.
You read a book, you meet a person.
you have a single experience and your life is changed in some way.
No act therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.
Thanks for listening to busted pencils class in session.
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