Educating Children Is Grounds for Being Fired from Teaching in the United States

[queerbychoice]

Look here, I already knew that the scary Christian fundamentalists were trying to prevent evolution from being taught in biolgy classes, but the fact that some of them in the state of Maine are also now going so far as to ban teaching the history of any non-Christian civilization in public school history classes goes even further than I've ever heard of before.

Not that, you know, the really non-Christian parts of history get taught anywhere anyway up until college: the public school high school teachers all over the U.S. are all blithely pretending that people in all cultures everywhere have always categorized themselves as hetero or homo and considered it "normal" to feel incapable of attraction to anyone of the same sex. But still - it just seems to get more ridiculous all the time.

(Thanks to Jayelle for the link.)

Comments

[chisparoja.livejournal.com]

Educating Children Is Illegal in the United States

this is America's biggest problem, right here. :p

[q10.livejournal.com]

this is indeed disturbing, but i think your title is misleading. nobody is going to lock you up for standing on a street-corner in maine and handing out decent history textbooks, or running a class on weekends. you probably won't even be treated as a criminal if you ignore the state history curriculum. you'll just get fired. deciding not to have the state pay people to do something (in this case, educate children), is not quite the same as making it illegal. of course, since they're paying people to work against it, it still demonstrates an active hostility. and that's really scary.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Okay, point taken. But firing teachers for educating children is also not the same thing as simply only requiring them to teach the history of Christian civilizations, but not voicing any objection if the teachers simply happen to want to mention Ancient Greece, Egypt, etc., in addition somewhere along the line, which is the policy that would probably be implied in most people's minds if I said merely that the state of Maine had "decided not to have the state pay for" teaching the history of non-Christian civilizations. Granted, the teachers would be paid for anything they said during class hours, but teachers also sometimes mention in passing completely random nonscholastic things like what baseball team they prefer or how they get along with their in-laws, and the state is not exactly intending to pay the teachers to teach about their in-laws, so we could say that the state is paying the teachers for the hours, not for the nature of what they said about their in-laws. And teachers do not generally get fired for this as long as they also teach what they're being paid to teach. Yet somehow teaching actual history in ah istory class is worthy of firing a teacher, even when irrelevant small talk is usually not.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

P.S. I found a better way to phrase the title now.

[violin.livejournal.com]

Wow. ::boggle:: I take some solace in the fact that I'll (eventually?) be teaching the rather politically neutral fields of math and physics.

A nit to pick with the article, though.

A seventh-grade social studies teacher in Presque Isle who said he was barred from teaching about non-Christian civilizations has sued his school district, claiming it violated his First Amendment right of free expression.

I hope he didn't actually say that, as it'd be wrong. In the capacity of teaching, it is not his personal opinion that he's supposed to be teaching. As a representative of the governement, while he's teaching, he has relatively little freedom of speech. In much the same way that (ex)Justice Moore is welcome to have the monument in his bedroom but not in the lobby of the courthouse, say whatever he wants in press conferences but not in his courtroom.

That sentence, though, may be more a result of poor journalizm than anything he said.

Cole's lawsuit alleges that the curriculum infringes on "his students' First Amendment rights to the free flow of information within the classroom"

Hmm... this I'm not so sure about. I dunno the case law, but it's not immediately clear to me what the first amendment says about a person's freedom to hear.

and that it "constitutes an illegal establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment."

Of course.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I agree with everything you said.

[groovesinorbit]

Wow! I didn't realize Maine was a southern state.

[rekraft.livejournal.com]

Beggars belief. I say this not knowing how strictly this ruling is actually enforced, but if I were a history teacher in Maine I might just find it more enlightening, entertaining and even productive to simply teach the curriculum as prescribed-- and proceed to uphold that as a perfect living, breathing example of knowledge fascism to the students.