Matthew LaClair is dope! This kid deserves all the accolades he gets and then some. For those of you who haven't followed this story, young Matthew covertly recorded his high school history teacher, Mr. David Paszkiewicz, proselytizing during history class to say nothing of deeply insulting the non-Christian students he's charged with teaching! (For the record, Matthew was raised in the traditions of the Ethical Culture Society. Damn Secular Humanists!)
What's worse than mixing church and state? Living in a community that condones, and even supports, this type of "teaching". Apparently, the good people of Kearny, NJ have remained silent while the Charlie Churches in town post messages supporting the teacher on websites, even going so far as offer a death threat against this courageous kid.
Now, surely, it's a little unseemly to record people without their knowledge. Go ask Linda Tripp. But it doesn't seem like this kid had any choice, especially given the local reaction to his objections. And to be honest, if you can stand behind your comments, I don't see why people should have a problem being recorded. Yes, things can be taken out of context, but if rational people will give one another a fair hearing, (yes I know that doesn't happen often,) then everything should be able to be worked out with little fanfare. Or maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
There may not be anything anyone can do to help this kid out, short of the ACLU giving him an award this year, (are you reading this Deborah Jacobs? She's the Executive Director of the ACLU-NJ and if she is reading, she's the only one!) but at least he'll have a great essay to write for his college applications. And maybe a job offer with Google when he graduates.
I never had to deal with anything so insane when I was in high school, thank G-d, but then again, Columbine changed everything. Or was it 9/11? I forget.
The bottom line here is, while neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights at the school house gate. (Do you hear me, Mike Kelly? He's a columnist for my hometown newspaper with no respect for the constitutional rights of students or teachers. We had an email spat a few years ago in the run-up to the Iraq war about a Catholic school teacher, who had recently retired from teaching high school history at my alma mater, Teaneck High School, and was fired for refusing to remove an anti-war button from his shirt. It wasn't that the school was pro-war, even the Vatican had come out against the Iraq war, but the school had a rule against wearing apparel with writing on it and he was in violation. I didn't dispute the school's right to set its own rules, after all it wasn't a public school, but Mr. Kelly couldn't wrap his little mind around that point and had an even larger problem understanding the governing distinction in public schools between dress that is disruptive to the educational environment and dress that isn't.)
But I digress, yet again. My point is, Christians, even Christianists, have a right to free speech, but they don't have a right to indoctrinate students into their belief systems, particularly when religion is not germane to the curriculum being discussed. Perhaps if they had been talking about something religion-related, say Lincoln's faith during the Civil War, or the religious motivations of the Prohibition movement, or the Civil Rights movement, whatever, then he could discuss his religious beliefs, as long as he made clear, they were his beliefs and no one else was required to believe as he does.
Unfortunately, he couldn't do that, because, as many Christianists believe, "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. John 8:12" and therefore, non-believers in Christ will go to hell. Fortunately for me, (I'm Jewish,) most of my friends, even my Christian ones, will probably be there with me, so it should be pretty fun!
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2 comments:
While I sympathize with Tripp Jr. and understand his desire as the only God-hating Pinko in his tribe to verify the insanity he's hearing to people not so enamored of Christ's nuts, I fear this kind of thing only plays into the hands of the rabid bible-bashing right, who will instantly start yelling about Communist-style thought-police or Orwellian "scout" children recording the words of adults so as to report them. I also think the tendency of the secular left to go ape-shit whenever Christianity enters a classroom is a touch hysterical.
I'd be personally hard-pressed to come up with a fair and serviceable distinction between "germane" education and "indoctrination," which is one of the reasons I always rejected such efforts at classification in the speech-code debates as micro-managing hubris that would be potentially chilling to the free exchange of ideas. Simply uttering a statement of faith or religious opinion in a classroom is, I think, pretty harmless and the effort to stamp out such utterances would be far more harmful.
I'd be curious to hear all the tapes or to know to what extent the student recorded what was said. If the teacher was simply going off on Christian preach-fests for the full duration of class, he would obviously not be doing his job and should be fired no matter whether the tangent were Christ, Britney Spears or the Teletubbies. But if the teacher was given to a few theological asides or thought Christian examples had pedagogical value, I don't see why those ideas should be treated as some kind of terrible pollution against which children's delicate minds have no rational defense. If a teacher, after a long lecture about troop movements at the Battle of the Somme, happened to say "oh and by the way, God doesn't exist" or "little-known fact: Bush snorts coke off of Cheney's shiny bald head. Don't do drugs, kids," that teacher shouldn't be hauled away for the aside.
I had teachers who made snide remarks all the time that I'm sure lots of different groups would have found inappropriate, and no doubt would have protested had they heard it on tape, which is one of the reasons I think teachers should have broad leeway within the classroom.
I understand the concerns that teaching professionals have about their words being recorded -- especially without their knowledge -- and played back, perhaps out of context. It certainly can cut both ways, left and right, as David Horowitz has aptly proven.
But I think, as an educational professional, particularly one who works with underage kids (read, not college professors,) you have an obligation to remove, or at least limit, your controversial beliefs when lecturing in class. I believe the line between germane and indoctrination depends on that day's lesson plan. And when they do slip out, as they inevitably will, to make absolutely clear that those your personal thoughts and that others are free to disagree. This didn't seem to be a simply utterance of faith.
It's that openess to other thoughts that seems egregiously missing in this Kearny, NJ classroom. And for the record, I loved my teachers' asides, it let me know they were human. For me, the bottom line is, can you stand behind what you said when confronted by it? If not, you probably shouldn't have said it.
I'm interested to hear what other classroom teachers think. I guess it's not something that comes up often in a math class, though.
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