Does anyone know how this would be viewed in a more progressive country like Sweden?
But this is exactly the question. A teacher who demonstrates good and respectful conduct in the classroom (and by extension, in all school functions and situations in which they are representing their school, the profession of education, or knowingly interacting with students) and does not otherwise commit criminal offenses or behave in an erratic or inherently threatening manner is providing a good role model. This nebulous “broader question about their character” is exactly the kind of ‘Gotcha!’ of a manufactured issue that is literally impossible to navigate because the notion of what comprises ‘good character’ varies widely from person to person. Some people believe that teachers shouldn’t wear masks during a pandemic, or express opinions on politics or religion that are too different form their own, or shouldn’t indicate that they are queer (or more pointedly, just shouldn’t be anything but heteronormative, period), and so forth, and if we held teachers to account for all of these disagreements on what comprises acceptable behavior they’d have lost many figurative limbs to all of these hyperbolic land mines because there are many parents who just seem to live to disagree with teachers or the education system as a whole.
Now, sexual proclivities are certainly a topic that teachers should not broach with students outside of a sex ed class, and I think we can agree that they shouldn’t advertise or promote intimate videos or other sexual activities to students in or outside of the classroom, not specifically because they are teachers but because it is just an inappropriate exchange between an adult and pre- or early teenager (again, outside of the specific context of sexual education and medical information). But—and I think this point needs to be stated bluntly—if you go on the internet looking for nudie pictures of your teacher, find them, and then can’t somehow develop the maturity to get over it and pay attention in class, that’s on you, and your parents who didn’t explain that respect for people means not looking for every bit of salacious ‘dirt’ you can find, and American society in general for being both so prudish that it can’t deal with a basic body function but so unwilling to do anything that might restrict commerce as to give virtually free access to anyone of any age who can operate a computer, tablet, or phone.
As for teachers, they can’t win no matter what they try to do, and it is a wonder anybody still wants to work in primary and secondary education even absent of this widely varying judgmentalism over “character” of what they do in their non-teaching lives which is guaranteed to offend at least a vocal minority of parents and at least half a dozen school board members who can use the outrage to vent their own spleens, and all of whom I guaranteed have no call to be criticizing anyone else about morals or ‘character’.
Stranger
You have plenty of company here; it’s not like you’re the only one. (Not me, though.)
A teacher who expressed good character, forethought, maturity enough to teach teenagers should also know if you post online porn, it will be found. Some one will. You can’t stop it. You can’t hope it away.
Virtually everyone will look down on it, after viewing it, of course and reposting.
It is how it is.
Stranger
I agree with this entire post. But I’m only quoting the introduction.
Obviously, we have a topic here were our community is split. Perhaps we need a poll.
I imagine that being a model or beauty contestant would also interfere with effective teaching, for the same reason, though not to as great a degree, because neither of those is as sexualized as porn.
Because children always behave the way their parents tell them to, right?
Again, the issue here is that children are, inherently, immature. Teenagers are obsessed with sex, and find it immensely distracting. And when a teacher is calling attention to their sexuality, students aren’t going to be paying attention to the lesson.
I’m with the OP on this one: I’m not sure how I feel, and can see both sides. And nothing I’ve read so far in the thread settles the issue for me.
They wouldn’t have to have direct access, to hear graphic descriptions or see leaked images of what their teacher is up to. What if an older sibling or pervy uncle says “Hey, guess where I saw your social studies teacher?”
Or, if it’s okay for middle school teachers because their students don’t have access to online porn, what about high school teachers?
I’m uncomfortable with this line of argument. Is it taboo for teachers who are just fine financially to earn some extra money this way, but okay for those who can demonstrate sufficient financial need? If so, what’s the threshold?
Of course kids can—and do—talk about and/or make up all kinds of things about teachers and other adults; this is a time-honored tradition of budding bullshitters worldwide, whether it is true or not. And frankly it is entirely possible at this point for a relatively AI-savvy teenager to scrape some images of a teacher off the net and use a generative AI to produce realistic nude and pornographic images. Should we start disciplining and firing teachers for ‘starring’ in a sex video if is a fabrication, just on the ‘principle’ that seeing or hearing about a teacher having sex irretrievably interferes with the education process?
I’m not trying to define a threshold or carve out a special exception for teachers who are in dire financial straits; I’m just observing that on top of all of the moralistic, ‘goodness of character’ demands that are being levied
on teachers even in aspects of their private and not-discussed-in-school lives, we’ve put teachers as a class into the situation that they have to find alternative ways of earning extra income above and beyond already working way more than a standard 40 hour week in their primary vocation, and then placing a restriction on what kind of otherwise completely legal employment is unsuitable because it contradicts someone’s notion of what is consistent with ‘good character’.
Can a teacher work as an exotic dancer in an adults-only venue, or at a restaurant/sports bar featuring waitresses in short-shorts, or a nude model for painters? What if a music teacher is also in a punk band that screams profane insults in their lyrics, or a drama teacher is involved in avant-garde theater where actors are naked or only partially clothed? What about an Lit teacher who writes erotica under a pen name? Where does the boundary of ‘good character’ get crossed, and who gets to make that decision?
Stranger
In probably 75% of the school districts in America, they’d fire her if she showed students the Venus of Urbino.
I so totally agree that we need to provide teachers with a livable wage. In fact we’ve come to the point that I think we should just double what most of them are earning.
However. Porn is a business. And it is - as they say - not run by the boy scouts. And the criminal end of that business is obsessed with young girls, especially teens. There are huge amounts of money to be made grooming and soliciting young girls for the industry. Which makes schools a potential hunting ground.
We also have States which are rolling back the requirements for teaching degrees or even Bachelors degrees to become a teacher. It is becoming easier for less dedicated people to slip into the system. This worries me greatly.
So I think a hard line between our schools and anything approaching the porn industry is just a necessity. It is always necessary to pay attention to the incentives in the case.
Someone making extra money off of OnlyFans is not terribly far from doing a porn film. And if their child gets leukemia, who knows what they might do to get the needed treatment? And if the Director says “We could take care of all of your troubles if you could bring a younger friend along,” what then? And if the teacher maybe has a student living in poverty? You can see how the path might lead even a formerly honest and well-meaning person astray.
And that’s before we even consider the guy who wants to be a porn director/actor and thinks the best way to break in is to recruit a bunch of young girls. And then he decides the best way to do that would be to sign up as a substitute at the local high school.
It’s all very sordid, and horrible to think about. But there are more of these guys than we want to admit. So I think anyone who is even peripherally related to that industry has to be a hard “No” to work in a school. (In any capacity.)
If you ask porn actors about getting into the biz they’ll advise you to be prepared for it to follow you the rest of your life. Nor is this a particularly new phenomenon. Just Google teacher fired for posing in Playboy and you’ll see Cristy Deweese’s name pop up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you find more stories like hers. I recall reading something by a former adult actress who had moved to Utah of all places. She signed her kid up for daycare and it didn’t take long for the faculty to figure out who she was. But at least in this case they staff didn’t treat her or her child like a pariah and accepted the kid into the daycare.
One of the negative things about everything being online is that everything is online. It’s a lot harder to escape your past and easier for people to learn more about you if you post anything online. Since the rise of social media, we’ve drilled into into the heads of younger people to take care what they post online lest it bite them in the butt.
So it’s okay for the person who watched the porn and posted it to have kids, but not okay for the person who participated in it to teach kids. Got it.
It’s kind of the way things work. How many people here who enjoy porn would be happy if their sons or daughters went into that industry?
Or checked out parents laptop some day.
Thanks for the discussion, folks. You are helping me think about this. When I read about this in the paper, my first thought was, “What dummies, to post that on-line given their jobs.” But, as many of you observe, why should their legal off-work activities impact their perceived job performance? Whether I personally think it ill-advised or not.
I’m not trying to suggest slippery slopes or identify precise lines, but so far we’ve discussed things like Nazism and porn (and drinking a beer.) I guess something like membership in Nazis or KKK are relevant, because they would reasonably suggest the teacher would not treat Jewish, non-white students differently. So, does EVERYONE agree Nazi/KKK is grounds for teacher to be fired? Anything else?
What standard should apply? US schools are generally funded by local property taxes. So how intolerant ought a community be allowed to be WRT its teachers?
What jobs - if any - ought to have “morals” clauses? And what ought such clauses proscribe?
Interesting questions. Sorry I have so little meaningful to add.
I’m sorry, but your logic here is shaky.
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Children are, inherently, immature: agreed, and part of the teacher’s duty is to work with that situation.
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Teenagers are obsessed with sex: well, a lot of them are, of course, but:
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Teenagers find LOTS of things immensely distracting. See point #1 above. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re distracted by sex, friendship drama, Local Sports Team, or whatever. Classroom management is about keeping the inevitable distractions from preventing the learning. And yes, not adding to the distractions is important, but if the students find out about something, that’s on them. What if their teacher is married to a famous actor? Distracting. What if their teacher is really fat, really bald, really red-headed? Distracting. What if their teacher writes romance novels? Distracting. Ad infinitem.
The point where we fundamentally disagree is that doing something outside of work hours is “calling attention to their sexuality.” Teachers who wore miniskirts in the 60s were accused of calling attention to their sexuality. That was, equally, a bullshit accusation. Someone who is professional at work isn’t calling attention to anything.
So, I’ll say first of all, I don’t really watch modern porn; not because of any hangups about the sexual aspects per se but because how performatively exploitative, misogynistic, and frankly kind of gross it is, not just for the performers but even for the intended audience. The common tropes of incest, ‘barely legal’ girls conned or pressured into various acts, “I hired this guy to bang my wife!”, et cetera, are not just weird niche areas that have somehow come to dominate pornography but they also portray a highly unrealistic view of sex that is unhealthy even for adults and is outright toxic for developing teens who will frame this as normative. I don’t think that kids should watch porn (and yes, I know they will figure out a way because they have nothing but time and streaming hormones), and I certainly don’t think that teachers or other adult role models should be introducing them to pornography or discussing it beyond that this is something that is scripted and produced, not to be taken as instructive.
I’m sure you can find examples of teachers behaving ‘badly’ by luring children into any number of illicit activities—I had a couple of coaches in my high school who turned out to be running a coke-and-steroids ring (to the surprise of exactly no one) which was only ‘uncovered’ not because the police cared about the drugs but because one of them was also a kiddie-diddler and the other was (pretty openly) having sex with female students—but I think it’s a pretty big leap to go from amateur (essentially home) porn videos to recruiting underage students into some porn ring; and if they are, that is a clear abeyance of trust and integrity that should be punished, and not just by being fired. Of course, children living in poverty, or in an abusive or neglectful household, or are subjected to bullying at school or home, et cetera are going to be vulnerable to predatory adults; and everything should be done to ensure that this category does not include teachers or other school staff. But policing the ‘character’ of teachers doing legal things to earn money outside of school activities is actually a distraction from that, and one that is going to be even worse once students or anyone who wants to defame said character can use readily available generative applications to create an indistinguishable-from-reality video of a teacher doing anything.
I agree we should pay teachers much more, and vet them thoroughly for past behavior, and have certain expectations of their ethics and interactions with students above and beyond their performance in teaching. If the overall attitude is that teachers shouldn’t take ‘extra’ work, or that they shouldn’t do certain kinds of legal work, that should be explicitly defined in their employment contract, and they should be compensated such that this isn’t typically necessary. I think it goes without saying that teachers should not perform illegal activities to make money, and certainly should not recruit or embroil their students in anything unseemly, unethical, or illegal. But the notion that teachers should somehow conform to some constantly shifting template of ‘good character’ that is never clearly delineated, or be responsible for someone rooting through garbage or looking through images for clues that link them to an ‘adverse’ activity even though they have made reasonable efforts to maintain privacy and anonymity, or that we should rationally assume that because they have violated one arbitrary norm that they will now become degenerate criminals straight out of Reefer Madness is just kind of an absurd set of expectations.
Stranger
The Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, et cetera movement all call for discrimination and (at least implicitly) harm toward the ethnic groups they target. Not only would a member of such a group be a poor role model (for a student in what is hopefully still a liberal democracy, at least) but they present evidence of being an active danger toward students in those groups. I wouldn’t support hiring a teacher who was a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, either, because they are essentially advertising their predilection to commit what is clearly a criminal act. But this is very different from a teacher engaged in a legal activity with other consenting adults, which they have not brought into the classroom and have made reasonable efforts (however futile in the era of no personal privacy) to maintain anonymity.
There is an entire history of “morals clauses” in employment, renting and home ownership, business, et cetera. Many are deeply rooted in racism, misogyny, homophobia, and the imposition of religious order on ‘community standards’ without any actual basis in functional ethics or actual harms, and often reflect a regressive view of society in which free expression takes a back seat to compliance with social norms at all costs. It is perfectly reasonable for an employer with a face-to-public position to have certain standards of behavior because the employee is a representative of their organization, but such requirements should be stated up front, in an employment contract with clearly stipulated consequences, and with compensation commiserate to the duty of adhering to those standards even when ‘off the clock’.
Stranger
As most of you know, I taught high school. I don’t think teachers should be posting porn, and it has nothing to do with moral character or role modeling. While it’s nice to dream of a day when Americans have a less prudish view of sex in general and porn in particular, that’s not the reality we live in. The fact is, many Americans have little or no respect for porn stars. They may buy subscriptions to OnlyFans, but few respect the people on there.
The war on education has made it hard enough for teachers to get respect. I have friends who are still in the classroom, and many of them are planning on quitting the field entirely in part because they’re sick of the contempt of parents and conservative community members, contempt that is trickling down to students.
You may be thinking that one way to keep porn from lowering respect for teachers would be for more of them to post it, but I assure you in ultra-conservative states (Wyoming, Utah. Oklahoma, Iowa), the more porn that’s posted, even elsewhere, the harder it’ll be on teachers in red states. Blurred faces won’t matter. The knowledge there are teachers on there is enough. My old district, like so many others, has pitchfork-bearing parents protesting because the school library contains The Catcher in the Rye and Boy Meets Boy. This is on top of teachers having no planning periods because of the sub shortage, teachers having special ed students and no paras to help implement IEPs, the general consensus among conservatives that we’re all brainwashing their kids. (If teachers only had that power!), and other issues.
If we’re really concerned about teachers, the time to pour gasoline on the flames. is not when they’re battling multiple fires at once.