Are high school teachers finally going to be held accountable for extremism in the classroom?
In Denver, a 16-year-old World Geography student, Sean Allen, taped 20 minutes of his extreme leftist high school teacher's rants against the United States, capitalism, and the president. The audio is here. Michelle Malkin has transcribed the tape here. After Sean shared the tape with his father, who shared it with the media, the teacher was put on leave. It's now a big story in Denver and has been picked up and spread nationwide by DrudgeReport and other sources.
You will hear about "academic freedom" in the defense of this teacher. The "academic freedom" mantra may work on college campuses -- although even there, I've argued that students need academic freedom even more than the professors do. It's the students who are there to learn, and the job of the teachers and professors is to support that learning, not to parade their own political views for applause or indoctrination purposes.
Arguing for "academic freedom" for high school teachers is even more iffy because we are dealing with students who are almost all minors living at home. In addition to being easily dominated by the teacher holding the power of the grade, students are very easily swayed politically. Put them in an extremist classroom for a year and you are not doing them a service. As the Denver Post noted:
James McGrath Morris, an author who has written about academic freedom issues, said Bennish's comments are acceptable for an adult audience, but they are hard to defend in a high school classroom.
In a number of legal cases, courts have ruled that "up until the age of majority, children are easily influenced ... in a way that they don't have the faculties to sort out rights from wrongs," Morris said.
Our children are captive audiences in high school classrooms. They cannot leave if they are offended by the teacher's extremist rants. They cannot speak up except at risk of possible damage to their standing in the the class and to their academic future.
Hugh Hewitt puts into the proper context a report that students at the high school have "walked out" -- or, to put it more bluntly, used this teacher's leave of absence as an excuse to skip class. "Dozens" reportedly walked out in support of the teacher, while others walked out in support of Sean, who recorded the teacher's remarks. (Hmmmm . . . if the students are cutting class, maybe it was an overstatement to call them "captive audiences." But when they walk out, they are at risk of being arrested for truancy, so I'll stick with my earlier remarks. This "walkout" will not last long.)
Clearly the academic freedom excuse would not fly if a high school teacher wanted to use his or her class to promote fascism. We all have personal political opinions as well as human biases. But if nobody ever takes teachers to task for going overboard, this kind of thing will run rampant in some places.
In addition, let's look at the intellectually vacant content of what this teacher was teaching. This comment for example:
"I'm not saying Bush and Hitler are exactly the same, obviously they're not. OK? But there are some eerie similarities to the tones that they use," says Bennish in his critique of U.S. economic and foreign policy.
What does it mean to say that there are "eerie similarities" in President Bush's and Adolph Hitler's "tone"? Adolph Hitler's affront to humanity was not the "tone" he used; it was this little thing about genocide and trying to take over the world.
You might as well point out the "eerie similarity" that Al Gore and Adolph Hitler both wore pants -- not that they are exactly the same, of course, but there are some eerie similarities in the clothes they wear. (Oh, yeah -- and Al Gore had facial hair a few years back -- as did Hitler! Also, I could have sworn I've heard Al Gore mention "brown shirts" more than once . . . .)
If we were to dissect the rest of this teacher's intellectually shallow 20-minute rant in similar fashion, we would be here all week.
So this isn't about academic freedom. This is more like "freedom to waste classroom time offending and confusing students with one illogical, extremist remark after another, without any consequences."
It's about time that this kind of extremist, intellectually vacant teaching got some close scrutiny from the public and the media. Our students deserve better than this.
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