I’ve only seen the movie Holes (and barely remember it) but from the Wikipedia article on the book, “fired from her job” doesn’t seem like an especially accurate description:
Summary
In the year 1888, Green Lake is a flourishing Texas lakeside village. Katherine Barlow, a European-American local schoolteacher famous for her spiced peaches, falls in love with Sam, an African-American onion farmer. She rejects the advances of Charles Walker, the richest man in town, who is nicknamed Trout because his feet smell like dead fish. After Katherine and Sam are seen kissing, Trout raises a mob to burn down the schoolhouse. Katherine goes to the sheriff for help; but he refuses to help her and instead demands a kiss. Katherine and Sam attempt to escape across the lake in Sam’s rowboat, but Trout intercepts them with his motorboat. He shoots Sam dead and wrecks his boat, while Katherine is “rescued” against her wishes.
Perspective: employers cannot fire an employee due to his sexual orientation as of 2020. Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (2020). And this protection is not based off moral analysis or relevance to job duties at all, it is based on interpretation of the word “sex” in a sixty year old federal law regulating interstate commerce. Insofar as there is a right, it is a right vested by statute and neither inherent nor inviolable. And rather than a general principle based on privacy, the protection comes down to the enumeration of “sex” as one of five protected characteristics of an individual:
unlawful … for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
AFAICT the book’s actual events were substantially different from what LHoD described:
What actually happens, over about eight pages of the 200+ -page book Holes, is that a white schoolteacher in late 1800s Texas falls in love with a black farmer, and is spotted by a neighbor while kissing him. The neighbor spreads the story and the townspeople immediately burn down the schoolhouse and come after the farmer to lynch him. The teacher and the farmer try to escape, but are caught; the farmer is murdered and the schoolteacher takes off and becomes a famous outlaw.
Sure, one of the author’s points is that murderous persecution of people who have interracial relationships is bad. But I think it’s fairly weaksauce to try to represent that kind of murderous persecution as the white teacher being “fired from her teaching job”, in order to make it seem more closely analogous to a modern school board merely not wanting to continue employing a teacher because she has a side career in homemade porn.
We don’t have to support the firing of the sex-worker teacher in order to consider that the history of the schoolteacher in Holes isn’t a particularly apt analogy for her situation.
I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, so I’m pretty familiar with it.
Although my intent was to avoid hyperbolic analogies, if it resulted in a misleading description of the scene, I apologize.
Yes, I underplayed what happened–but only because I didn’t want to hyperbolize the situation. The underlying point of that scene is that her sexual/romantic activities weren’t the business of the townsfolk, but they ruined her life over them. Had they taken less murderous action and simply fired her, it still wouldn’t have been okay. And third graders have no trouble understanding that point.
It’s a much more dramatic and violent ruining of a life, but other than that, it’s a perfectly apt analogy.
ISTM that that’s still way too misleadingly muted. The underlying point of the scene is that it was wrong and evil for the townsfolk to murderously persecute her and her lover for their interracial relationship.
If the townsfolk’s reaction instead had been merely along the lines of “um, we think it was indecorous and immodest behavior for you and your lover to kiss on a public street where the neighbor or anybody else could see you, and consequently we don’t want to continue employing you to teach our children”, that would have been far less reprehensible (although still open to objection, certainly).
And it would also have been far more analogous to what actually happened to the modern-day teachers on OnlyFans.
Unless, of course, it’s not all good because the people who act on their deviant attractions go to hell. And the parents tell the student the teacher has given in to temptation and is an agent of the devil who will try and corrupt (“groom” in today’s patois) the child. Tell me this wouldn’t affect your ability to teach a classroom. There’s a reason gay teachers in Florida chose to keep their orientation a secret, even before the recent legislation.
Now consider what happens, in the real world, when it becomes public knowledge that a teacher is posting homemade porn. A nontrivial fraction of girls will come to class after having been told by their parent(s) that the teacher is a slut, a pervert, an exhibitionist, a mentally sick person, and if you follow in her footsteps you too will become trash. Maybe even the religious aspects too. That teacher’s credibility gets shot to hell. And what is she going to do when such a kid acts out in class? The parent’s aren’t going to respect her in a parent-teacher conference. The school board will start hearing complaints like, “Who put some slut in charge of my daughter’s education?” Because hello, it’s 2024 and slut shaming is still a problem. And unlike sexual orientation or race, what a teacher does generally in her private life is not protected.
Maybe it should be protected, but it isn’t. Maybe parents shouldn’t be able to use slut-shaming or religious arguments to impair a teacher’s ability to do her job. But they can.
If the community thinks sex work is icky, or more precisely if this opinion actually or foreseeably prevents a former sex-worker from teaching effectively, I say the school is ethically and legally justified in firing/not hiring that teacher. As MandaJo wrote, the school represents the community at large. To which I add, I don’t think of social progress as a primary objective of school, I think of it as a nice side effect. I like the concept of representation in public policy. I say a school is ethically obligated to conform to the community’s moral standards, to the maximum extent within the letter of the law. And here the law does not command the school to normalize sex work. Therefore the school is not ethically justified in normalizing sex work in the minds of children. I believe Florida law expressly prohibits that, actually.
Race, religion, and sexual orientation are legally distinguished by specific legislative enactments that justify the school in normalizing these factors for the children, despite the community’s resistance. Sex work is ethically distinguished, in my personal opinion, when it is voluntary. I try to place value on personal responsibility in my personal ethics. If it helps to understand my personal ethical position, I consider religious beliefs involuntary, and religious affiliation I special-case assume to be involuntary even though in practice it often is.
There are a couple of situations where I think a school could be ethically obligated to do something I think would otherwise be ethically wrong. (The obvious analogy would be corporal punishment…) I wrote above that I personally distinguish sex work from race, religion, and sexual orientation when sex work is voluntary. Not all sex work is voluntary.
Unlike beckdawreck I’m not personally convinced sex work or pornography (or covering one’s face… was that this thread?) are inherently wrong, but my argument doesn’t take a side on that issue.
I’ve not read the whole thread, but my takeaway is: Should she have been fired, provided the kids didn’t find out? No. Should she have expected to get fired and planned accordingly? Yes.
AFAICT from the OP’s link, the “outing” of the OnlyFans teachers happened on community social media, so the kids knew about it pretty much as soon as anybody else did. There’s not really any viable way these days to have a community discussion about information available on the internet that schoolchildren in the community won’t find out about.
How many years do you have as an educator in our schools to back up these “facts”?
Or is this more, “I’ve never been in a classroom as an adult, but I know how they work better than teachers do.”?
Almost all of that was opinion, but it would help move the discussion along if you pointed out what specifically you disagree with (and why - I’m not a teacher so it’s not apparent to me).
My default position is that a community’s moral standards should not be disturbed. Schools are uniquely positioned to disturb a community’s moral standards, from which arises the unusual obligation to conform to said standards. Furthermore, schools serve the community’s interests (n.b. not only the community’s interests, also state and federal interests). It is not in a community’s interest to defy its own morals, by definition.
My position is too nuanced to answer the question as you seem to frame it. Let me put it this way:
I’m of the weak opinion that the law shouldn’t give special protection to teachers who moonlight as adult entertainers. I am of the strong opinion that until such time as the law provides special protection, schools should fire teachers who moonlight as adult entertainers… if that circumstance actually or forseeably impairs his or her ability to teach students.
Employment law here allows companies to fire employees for ‘behaviour likely to bring the company into disrepute’, whether on or off the clock. I would be surprised if that was not the case in this instance also.
Or let’s get a bit more complex - there are often competing “moral standards” that different members of communities would endorse to different degrees, including a common endorsement in America for various freedoms and respect for the individual.
Why should a very specific set of moral standards that reflect anxieties regarding sexuality and its expression be as a fragile house of cards at the cost of stomping on other moral standards regarding the freedoms of individuals?
I have repeatedly in this thread. 2.5 decades teaching middle and high school and students in my experience students just do not perseverate on things like that. Yes, for a day or two it may be, “I saw Miss Krabapple’s titties.” but after that they are on to something else. Certainly no refusal to do work because of a lack of respect because they did porn. They refuse to do work for Mr. Ahole because he’s a jerk of a teacher. That’s the criterium they use.
I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, so I’m pretty familiar with it.