Don't Taze Me, Teach!

A friend sends the following piece about a student who won a court case against a bullying teacher.

http://news.yahoo.com/student-booted-class-saying-don-t-accept-gays-123034366.html


The case is not egregious—the school board itself ruled in the student's favour. I do wonder if the matter would have turned out so well in Canada, where freedom of speech is far less well respected. Moreover, it needs to be said straight off that the student is ill-informed about his own Catholicism. Catholicism certainly does not reject gays. In my experience, gays often make the best Catholics.

But it does illustrate a few interesting points. First, how "anti-bullying" programmes are so easily turned by any teacher already inclined to bullying into an ideal bullying opportunity. If you want to reduce bullying, you do not give more power to those already in a position of authority. Yet this is exactly what anti-bullying programmes do.

Next, the fact that the students seemed to stand up against this bullying speaks well of them. We hear a lot of complaints from teachers—and parents, for that matter—about today's students being harder and harder to discipline. But I wonder how much of this supposed growing problem with discipline in the schools us really due to the fact that we increasingly put people at the heads of classrooms that the students innately cannot respect, because they are genuinely not worthy of that respect. And how much of it is because the schools are trying to push political correctness and indoctrination instead of clear thinking and real learning?

In such a circumstance, the only intelligent and honourable response is to argue back and to rebel. Would we really want our kids quietly accepting this? Do we want our schools to turn out "Good Germans"?

I wonder how much less our supposed classroom discipline problems would be if we went back to the common-sense method of teacher recruitment: selecting teachers on the basis of 1) subject knowledge, and 2) good moral character.