I don’t either, but when I took government in high school my teacher was the quintessential right-winger. He gave us a long disquisition on Karl Marx, ending with a comment that Marx once spent £167 (over $800.00 in today’s terms) on a drinking trip and then sarcastically followed this with a quote from Voltaire: “Go up to an attic and rule the world.”
I also found that George Bernard Shaw, who wrote* The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism* (1928), read Das Kapital and noted in his “Appendix instead of a Bibliography” that Marx’ book did not define capital. He also said that Marxism was “disastrous as a guide to the practice of goverrnment.”
Its not discrimination because no student was singled out. All students were given the same assignment (write the statement) and all except one failed to complete that. The student brought it upon himself to make his assignment harder.
The professor actually gave this student more leeway that I would. Why give him essentially extra credit to make up for the failed assignment? I would just fail the kid and move on because these kinds of things never lead to them changing their minds. You’d think that out of all the other kids who did write the statement, there has to be at least one other Christian in there. Why was he able to do the assignment but this kid can’t?
I think it would be a fun twist if I were teaching such a class, to assign all the religious kids to argue against the existence of god and all the non-religious ones to argue in favor. Philosophy is not about living in an echo chamber, its to expose yourself to both sides of the argument. Then you can live in an echo chamber
What learning objective is behind this assignment?
My question has a learning objective: I hope through your effort to answer it you’ll see what a crap teacher you’d be unless you changed your approach to education.
In fact, it makes you question why the kid would have been in this class at all. This kind of incident in a real-world situation would have almost certainly resulted from a professor trying to start the semester with a vigorous discussion instead of just being a dick and causing a scene, but even if this situation had sprung up as depicted, the student probably would have filed a complaint and/or dropped the class. I’m an atheist - if my university had offered a class on church teachings framed as THIS IS TRUE AND WHAT YOU MUST BELIEVE, I would have avoided it at all costs, hell, I would wonder how the fuck I ended up at a school that permitted such nonsense. And yeah, I get that what we’re talking about is lifted from what’s basically a masturbatory fantasy for evangelicals that have no idea what a secular college is like.
The only problem I have with this is that the professor is not portrayed realistically. There is a difference between arguing a point and being an asshole while screaming WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS WRONG over and over. A belief without rational justification is not fact - it is dogma, and antithetical to the very idea of what a university stands for. Your dogma vs. my dogma is not an argument that I want any part of - nor should it be part of any university curriculum, full stop.
Higher learning is and should always be about discussion and thought. The most appalling part of it all is that the cardinal sin committed by the fictional professor is EXACTLY how most true-religious types approach discussions about the existence of God. I don’t care what your position is - if you don’t bring facts to the table, you’re not worth my time.
The film targets a boogeyman that doesn’t really exist except when its audience looks in the mirror.
Movie way: Nothing, because its a propaganda movie done with a specific goal in mind. The teacher in the movie likely is an evil atheist, taking his orders from Baal to sacrifice babies and destroy Christianity.
Real world way: Assuming a hypothetical professor did that, which may or may not be based on that one incident with the professor who told her students to stomp on a piece of paper with Jesus’s name on it, we don’t know because it never got that far apparently
Hypothetical way: If I were that professor, I could think of several ways that this assignment teaches something worth learning. It could be that a prof wanted to show the power of symbols, or pull apart the tenuous thread linking a forced written statement and a genuine religious belief, or as a possible elimination of class distractions (or using it to identify potential distractions), a statement of where the class direction would be going, or maybe he just wanted to test to see if everyone brought in pencils that day.
Right on the post. Though since we know who made the movie, it probably represents the filmmakers’ wet dream of how class should be taught, except in this case it would be a smart, conservative, religious teacher convincing his atheist class of the existence of his god
The discrimination wasn’t the original “assignment” to write three words, it was the punitive assignment to prove God’s existence or fail the class.
That’s not how religious objections in a university setting work. There’s a formal process involved. A professor handing out a punitive, multi-day assignment that can by itself make the student fail the class, is in no way a reasonable alternative to an assignment to write three words.
Given your views on religion, this doesn’t surprise me at all.
There’s no indication that the assignment to prove God’s existence was extra credit, or that the original “assignment” was an actual assignment, with credit.
Not in a film that’s a persecution fantasy, the True Christian must be alone. Though, that’s not how religious objections are handled, belief is an individual matter, not subject to veto by a classmate of the same faith.
This is a very key point because what’s happening here is that the reason the student is being failed is because he was assigned the impossible because of his religious beliefs.
If I were the dean/appropriate school official, I would have some simple questions for the professor that determined whether or not I fired him immediately:
How could the student have completed this punitive assignment to your satisfaction? Is there any argument that he could present to you that would have convinced you of the existence of a God? If you had asked each member of the class in turn, under penalty of failure, to prove the existence of God, would any have been able to present sufficient evidence?
What he’s doing is like demanding of a student in high-school PE “bench press 2000lbs right now or you fail this class.” It’s impossible, and he knows it, and that’s before getting to the part about the student being singled out for such auto-failure because of his beliefs.
That’s not discrimination. He, out of all the people in the class, didn’t do the original assignment. That’s his fault, not the professor’s
This was a philosophy class. Justifying yourself through a reasoned debate doesn’t seem onerous nor out of line.
Well of course it doesn’t say that, its a movie. But its a reasonable explanation. An assignment was given, one person didn’t do it, he was offered a way to make up for it with another, more difficult assignment. No problems with that at all
Disagree. I don’t believe one can justify, in a philosophy class, that they didn’t have to write that statement. Sure, maybe if this was a math class, or a cooking class, it would be kind of weird. But philosophy is about challenging beliefs such as this. I do not think that making a kid write those words or failure is impossible because of his religious beliefs
I’m sure the film doesn’t address that because the filmmakers do not have an answer to that question either other than unsupportable dogma or poetic rhetoric
One caveat, he asked before the 2000lbs that everyone bench press 20lbs. One person refused and was given an impossible assignment. Maybe there was no way to prove god to the professor’s satisfaction. As I mentioned in my other post, its essentially extra credit, the professor is under no obligation to offer it. This may be even better: offer an impossible task, punishing the student for not doing the original, easier assignment, and make him waste his time trying to do an extra credit he can never complete. This movie atheist professor is brilliant!
It’s no one’s fault, he had a religious objection.
You honestly think that a reasonable alternative to the “assignment” to writing three words on a piece of paper is spending several days trying to prove God exists, or fail the class?
Giving a vastly more difficult assignment to a student who had a religion objection to a pseudo-assignment is punishing the student for speaking up with a religious objection, which is unacceptable.
That’s not how religious objections are evaluated, because that makes them meaningless. How would you like your professor telling you that making you get baptized in his church isn’t impossible because of your religious beliefs?
That is punishing a student for their religious beliefs.
These are mostly terrible examples that ought to get you fired as a teacher, but I’ll address them all.
Elimination of class distractions? What the fuck does that mean–how does asking people to violate their deepest religious views eliminate distractions instead of creating them?
Statement of where the class is going? A better statement of where the class is going would be to call the class “Douchebaggery 101: How to insult people’s sincere beliefs for no fucking reason.” Then you could avoid this stupid charade. If that’s not the title of the class, you suck at naming classes.
Testing to see if they brought a pencil? Maybe it’s just because I’ve been teaching for so long, but I’ve got a test. It goes like this: “Please hold up your pencil.” Notice how my test doesn’t ask people to violate their deepest religious views? That makes it better than your terrible test.
Now, you did mention one legitimate possibility among all your shit-tastic ones: maybe the professor is trying to illustrate the power of symbols. Well, guess what? The dude that refuses to do the assigment HAS JUST ILLUSTRATED THE POWER OF SYMBOLS! A professor who wanted to make this point has just gotten “Mission Accomplished” in a big old banner across the front of the room, and the student who hung that banner in no way should be failed, as you suggested.
While, the movie being discussed is obviously an evangelical tract, I could see a professor using the scenario being discussed as an introductory teaching tool in variety of humanities classes. It could be used as an intro for ethics, religion, philosophy, rhetoric, etc. And it’s not necessarily anti-religous, more like anti-don’t espouse beliefs you are not able or willing to defend. The student has the option of trying to prove the existence god, or fail the class.
Again: terrible pedagogy. The message here isn’t, “don’t espouse beliefs you are not able or willing to defend.” It’s, “don’t espouse beliefs you are not able or willing to defend, unless you’re an atheist, in which case, cool, I’m not gonna teach you anything.”
A different scenario has the prof asking students to write:
GOD IS DEAD
HEIL HITLER
I LIKE TO HAVE SEX WITH OTHER MEN
POOP IS DELICIOUS
and several other statements that various cross-sections of the class might find taboo to write. Students who refuse to write any of them must write an essay on why they refused to write the one they refused to write; students who write all of them must write an essay on why they have no problem lying in a signed statement to their professor.
In that case, everyone must do some work, and everyone will presumably learn something. I still think it’d be a mediocre assignment, but at least it wouldn’t be a terrible and unethical and bigoted assignment.
While this movie is a persecution fantasy, it’s pretty troubling that there are people here who are perfectly willing to excuse and defend the persecution.
True, dat. I’m as anti-O.R. as one can get, yet I think the professor as portrayed is a total fucking tool. He should have been fired on the spot (and would have, in any universe resembling reality.)
This suggests to me that you can conceive of people who differ from you only with great difficulty, if at all.
That people will have different opinions and beliefs, different goals, different techniques.
That people might propose a difficult task for a reason other than persecution.