Well, the school boards of this country - and the people of this country, in large measure - don’t agree with your proposed standard. They want to be able to fire a teacher for being a member of a Neo-nazi group, or a spokesman for NAMBLA, even if those activities are legal.
Sure, and American communities used to think they ought to be able to lynch black people* but that didn’t make it right.
*And the occasional Jew.
You don’t think it would be acceptable to fire a teacher for being a NAMBLA spokesman?
Put me in with the people wondering what the hell business it is of the schools if one of their teachers- an art teacher, no less- wants to take some some nude pictures in her own time, and when she in no way identifies the school or affiliates her work with them or the educational department
Hell, I think it’s important for kids to realise the human body is a natural and beautiful thing, no matter what it looks like (jokes aside), and that it is a worthy subject of art.
It’s important for kids at that age to realise there’s a world of difference between an artistic nude and OMG t3h pr0n!, and telling teenagers that ANY kind of nudity is equivalent to t3h pr0n isn’t helpful.
I have to say this “Morals Clause” thing sounds very American. I’m not sure what sort of contracts teachers in Australia have to sign, but I’ve known a few teachers in my time here (not as a student, though) and some of the stuff they get up to… well, yeah, I doubt many of them would be able to find gainful employment in places like Texas, put it that way.
In short, I don’t see how artistic nude photos on the internet- which you’d have to be looking for, as I understand it- could be, or should be, considered to be warping the student’s fragile little minds.
Would they fire a teacher who smokes cigarettes outside school? That’s arguably doing more harm (in a social sense, at least) than a teacher who poses for nude art photos that were never intended for distribution to his or her students.
Wow. My contract has a clause which says I CANNOT be fired or disciplined for anything I do during my personal time. I had no idea it was unusual… another reason to stay in this school district.
No, because I consider adult sex with minors to be de facto rape, and rape is both immoral and illegal. I’d have no problem with a teacher who was a member of a gay pride organization or a Gorean, however.
And in any event, this doesn’t even address my point, which is that just because people on the school board want to do something, that doesn’t make it right, as Bricker seems to be suggesting.
I believe that all Bricker was suggesting was that there are certain non-teaching-related things that are legal but that a school board might nonetheless be rightly concerned about. Once you grant that, the argument that the school board is behaving inappropriately in this case becomes somewhat more tricky - though I still think it’s a slam dunk case, myself.
What if the teacher was also a lawyer, in his/her non-teaching hours? A lot of people don’t like them, either. Surely someone who defends criminals for a living would be a bad influence on our kids, too, and therefore shouldn’t be teaching our precious little bairns.
Slippery slope, ya know.
I don’t see that happening anywhere. If you show me a teacher being fired for being a lawyer, I’ll agree with you.
Hey, Bricker? You must’ve missed that whooshing sound as I posted that.
My point is that you seemed to be arguing that a teacher who’s a neo-nazi or a spokesman for NAMBLA could rightly be fired for being so, because neither of those organizations is considered to be wholesome enough to be associated with the teaching profession… and that nobody in their right mind would object to that firing.
Well, a lot of people don’t like lawyers, either. If a teacher can be fired for being a neo-nazi, why can’t they be fired for <insert other occupation/hobby that all right-thinking people, or at least the school board and concerned parents, disagree with>?
If you weren’t, in fact, arguing that, then I apologize. I don’t withdraw the analogy, however, as I feel it’s completely valid.
My son had a ** Junior High ** teacher whose name was Miss Rape. She allowed “distraction and giggling” about her name on the first day of class. Should she not have been hired because of her name?
This “morals clause” seems terribly vauge. It may be in the employer’s best interest to leave it vague, but isn’t there some way the contract could have been written to give the teacher better notice that her activity would get her fired? To me that seems like a bigger issue. The school district may have a lot of latitude regarding who they want to fire and why, but they should at least put their scruples in writing first such that the teacher could feel forewarned.
–KidScruffy
It seems to me that she’s got two good grounds to fight this decision:
- Taking nude photos is not “base, vile, or depraved acts”: it’s a longstanding artistic tradition. Contracts, as I understand them, are construed against the writer: that is, when you get a vague phrase like this, it will be construed in favor of the teacher, who didn’t write the phrase. It would therefore be up to the schoolboard to prove that her posing for nude photos is a “base, vile, or depraved act”; I cannot imagine how the school board could establish that.
- On similar grounds, they would need to prove that posing for the photos was “intended to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of the [teacher].” How on earth would they begin to prove such a thing?
If they cannot prove that both these conditions apply–and I doubt they can prove that either applies–they cannot sever the contract based on this clause.
They may want to add in another clause in future contracts: “Teachers will not engage in acts that may cause high-school students to giggle.”
Daniel
I was going to address two points, the legal and professional side of this decision. I see that Left Hand of Dorkness has just stated exactly what I was thinking on the legal side, so how about professionally? By this I mean how it affects her job and her ability to perform it.
Several people have posted how they see that this could be disruptive to her ability to teach. I, on the other hand, see it as reflecting positively on her. How many of us have had a highschool math or science teacher who did research in their field, published papers, or attended non-teaching academic conferences? I never have. I don’t know anyone who has. They settled into teaching and stopped, or in most cases never started, actually discovering anything new.
Here we have a teacher that is actually creating new work, analagous to an English teacher who is a writer in her spare time. I haven’t seen the pictures but I from their description she is the equivalent of an unpublished English teacher who writes pulp romance in her spare time, but at least she is actually creating new work. Heck, I would consider this to be a bonus showing that she is committed to her subject area.
I’m also not seeing that, because I can’t find the pictures at all. Does anyone have a link that still works?
And how, in your judgment, is she supposed to heal society’s hangup without “pushing boundaries”?
I like the idea, but it’s probably been done. Straight-up nudity is just as good at fighting the hangup, & makes no concession.
I saw a few of the pictures in question. In my opinion, I didn’t think that they were tactless. (My “artistic opinion” might be less favorable, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I think the main question is whether or not either her contract or the general bylaws of the school district expressly forbid her from such actions on her own time.
And if they did, then the question that must be asked is: “Are these laws within the bounds of the constitution?”
Should the school district forbid the teacher from posing nude for artistic photographs? I don’t see why. One could argue that the children being exposed to the photographs damages her reputation as the teacher and harms the children. Maybe. But, we are talking about high school children here: minors. Maybe their parents should have been keeping their children from viewing naked pictures on the internet in the first place? Maybe this is another case of parental responsibility being discarded in favor of institutionalized/state responsibility?
Bricker, you have asked, I believe a few times, whether or not a teacher should be forbidden from being a member of NAMBLA or the KKK or the like because it is “outside the classroom.” I don’t think such a person should ever be hired in a public school in the first place. A case could be made to show that such activities directly and negatively effect a person’s ability to teach. Whereas nude art can be kept in the privacy of one’s own home.
A public picture posting area on the internet, Flickr.com, is hardly one’s home. Especially if her Myspace.com website, under her real name, had links to the picture. And if her students knew about the website with links to her nude pictures, that included nude bondage shots and direct crotch shots, because she mentioned it? She begged to be fired. And, like like most school systems in the US, she got what she was asking for. How many public school teachers on here would publish bondage shots of themselves naked on the internet that clearly pointed to who they were and not expect some reprecussion if found out at the school level? If these pictures are so just “normal every day art,” then why did the Blog that used to have them remove them? Why did the Straightdope disable making them a one click link? Could it be that nude pictures, especially bondage ones, might not be well recieved by many employers in the US, even those that don’t deal with minor children (like this teacher did)?
Jeez, what’s with calling these “bondage shots”? IIRC, the one shot had her knees tucked up to her chest, and her arms around them, and leather cuffs on her wrists. The other was shot from above, and she was holding her hands in front of and slightly above her head, and again had the leather cuffs. In both she had on a studded collar. In neither case were the cuffs attached to anything other than themselves, and in fact they might not have even been attached to each other, I don’t recall. I might have the posing slightly off, but that’s the gist of it.
When someone says “bondage shot”, what I envisage is something rather more graphic, and involving rather more bound-ness. It is at the very least misleading to call these “bondage shots” without qualification. They are clearly intended as art nudes, with very, very mild leather fetish elements.
The “crotch shot” is nothing like the gynecological closeups commonly seen in regular porn, but was a picture of her midsection lit from behind with her body a near silhouette. The details of her genitalia were pretty much impossible to make out.
I’m not saying the pictures aren’t rather graphic, but lets try to be honest in how we describe them. They bear virtually no resemblance to actual pornography.