This. Allowing someone like this in a position of authority over kids is just asking for LGBT or just suspected LGBT) students to be subjected to bullying at best, with a strong likelihood of it escalating to assault, rape and murder.
And if your kid suicides? Or is raped, beaten or murdered by other students who listened to that “pontificating teacher” and took his or her message to heart?
Ideas that make your kid angry are one thing.
Ideas that make your kid believe s/he is worthless and stupid and will never be able to get ahead are something else. So are ideas that teach your kid it’s okay to be a bully, to discriminate against others on the basis of race or religion or orientation, and so forth.
Would you involve yourself if your kid came home and announced that Mr. Teacher says that Christians are inherently stupid and will never ever under any circumstances earn an A in the class? [Substitute your religion or atheism/agnosticism as appropriate.] How about if Mrs. Teacher says it is okay to go burn crosses in the front yards of minority students, because “those sorts” don’t deserve to live in America anyway?
Certainly no school should punish a teacher who, for instance, said he or she is opposed to SSM. This person went a lot further than that.
It was a hypothetical so that I didn’t have to look up the cases, but my scenario is that she posed for a magazine. So, no expectation of privacy. I’m fairly sure that teachers have gotten in trouble for this, and I think we’ve had threads on it. Many schools have or used to have morality clauses. The point is that a homophobe is much less moral than a nude teacher, and if anyone thinks he should keep his job while the teacher loses hers - well, that person’s moral sense should be recalibrated.
Nude directly in front of student in school or out - definitely a firing offense. (Unless there is a popular nude beach around or something.)
We’re in agreement on that. My point was to raise what would happen when the person, in a liberal district, you just described is found to have those views and then some students or teachers or parents try to make such belief one that cannot stand in their school.
I had teachers in high school who spent so much time on their pet theory, that we never got around the the subject matter. I was missing information when I got to college in one area because of a teacher who did this. The other guy taught “Health,” a required class no one liked, so the fact that he rambled on and on, and we never had tests wasn’t a big deal.
Here are a couple of stories about teachers being fired for nudity.
What if people oppose homosexuality for religious reasons?
Do we still tolerate the religion?
Yes. But not the discrimination.
Consider Christian Identity, a religion that opposes nonwhites for religious reasons. Do we tolerate the religion?
Consider Salafi Islam, especially strains that support terrorism against the US. Do we tolerate the religion?
You may object, with some justification, that these are not proper analogies: whereas the jerk in the OP merely believes in eternal damnation for secular humanists, the Identity Christian believes in removing legal protection for nonwhites, and the Salafist believes in murdering Americans. These are in crucial ways different.
However, they are in a crucial way similar: they are all religious beliefs that actively work against our pluralistic democratic society, and they are all religious beliefs that, when revealed, are likely to make a significant number of students justifiably uncomfortable in the classroom, so uncomfortable that their ability to learn from the teacher will be impaired.
I certainly don’t think that smoeone’s religious beliefs should be a prima facie reason to kick them out of a school. But I also don’t think that, if a belief would otherwise disqualify someone for a job, dressing the belief up in religious clothing makes it acceptable.
So the question should not hinge around whether religious beliefs are respected. The religious status of the belief should be irrelevant. What should be at issue is whether these specific beliefs, accompanied by these forms of promulgation, are appropriate for a public school teacher, regardless of their provenance.
Make the teacher a pro-civil rights person, in 1962 Mississippi, and we ‘fire his ass’ because his employer is still in favor of Jim Crow laws and defacto discrimination against blacks, and this is the law of the land, to boot. So I would be expressing a vote of no confidence if I criticize those policies. So I think the basis of the decision can’t be primarily, or maybe shouldn’t be, current community standards. Seems to me this becomes too subjective, and we cheer or jeer depending upon whose ox is gored.
Those are good points, but I’m not sure I agree with “The teacher can do what he likes on his own time” as necessarily a universal truth, nor do I believe that it’s actually the case in many places.
Obviously if he’s spouting this stuff in the classroom he deserves to have his ass fired on the spot, but even if he’s not – or not obviously or directly – is it not usually the case that teachers are held to a much higher standard than most other employees, precisely because of their influence on kids and presumed role as mentors? Would anyone hire a convicted – or even suspected – child molester as a teacher just because he promised never to molest anyone in the classroom? How about a neo-Nazi? A reformed drug dealer?
Even ordinary companies that try to project a reputable image in the community often have behavior expectations for their employees outside of work – the standards for teachers should be the highest of all. It’s the nature of the job, IMO.
Agreed, actually. We can even put it today. Imagine a TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL teacher who objects to the amount of standardized testing that students are required to undergo, who writes an opinion piece suggesting that such tests are inappropriate and that they’re a major problem with our educational system. That would be a significant vote of no confidence in our current educational policy, but I’d be very uncomfortable with firing the teacher for that reason.
The difference, I think, is again whether students in this teacher’s class would be made to feel unsafe. At the risk of sounding all touchy-feely, I genuinely think students need to feel psychologically safe in a classroom in order to learn the most they can. This doesn’t mean a teacher never challenges a student’s beliefs, but it does mean a teacher cannot indicate that the student is by their existence a problem. A teacher who thinks black students are subhuman, or who thinks that lesbians are agents of Satan, is most likely unfit for the classroom.
There is a difference of degree, here, as well. Saying, “I think the current focus on testing is ultimately detrimental to the education of our students,” is a far cry from, “This school is a concentration camp.”
That’s true. If my COMPLETELY HYPOTHETICAL teacher thought that standardized testing was sucking all the joy out of childhood and destroying children’s souls, he would be well advised to tone down his rhetoric in public.
My district is very liberal, and my kids had a teacher in high school sociology class who was conservative and religious, and let the kids know it. No problems at all. No evidence at all he even had the slightest trace of homophobia, so I admit it is not an exact example.
The example seems completely different to me. Your teacher apparently doesn’t engage in a public debate against public school, don’t say that what is taught in school shouldn’t be taught, there’s no reason to assume he might be unwilling to teach his subject matter or comply with the official program…
You’re example seems more similar to a teacher privately advising parents that such and such private school is better that the public school where he teaches.
This, right here. Every teacher has his or her own set of prejudices, biases, etc. The critical aspect is the professionalism to put aside those biases and treat students as students. Not everyone can do that.
Or, more briefly, /thread.
This is one of the all-time dumbest statements I’ve ever read on these boards.
I don’t dispute that. But what if there were a teacher in a very liberal district, say Berkeley. What do you think the odds are of him getting the Brendan Eich treatment? “We’re Berkeley! This man doesn’t share our values, blah blah, blah.”