Note: I’m grateful for all the signups. My hope is to stimulate dialog, not just opine. Please use the comment function liberally, or illiberally, if that’s your jam. I welcome criticism and dissent, but affirmation is ok too. Fuck school! Fuck softball! Fuck cheer! Fuck everything!
"Students have incompletely developed frontal lobes. Expecting exquisite judgment or highly developed impulse control is unrealistic and unfair." Yes. As I get older, I've come to better appreciate my parents' simple wisdom involving young people. When hearing about some offense committed by a young person growing up on my block, (some of which were serious in the eyes of the law) my dad would say with a sigh, "dopey kid." It was said with compassion for the youngster, and the parents. My mom's response would be an understanding and forgiving "sono giovani" (they are young.) I find I am quoting them both more and more often as I get closer to the end of my teaching career. During my students' more mischievous and rascally moments, "sono giovani" works well. During the more serious moments of poor judgement, "dopey kid" helps me to keep a more gentle and loving perspective on their not fully developed frontal lobes. You always kept that perspective, Steve, even when the other adults were having a hard time with it. Albeit a little late, thanks!
I have very mixed feelings. Yes, off-campus events do impact in-school matters and school officials have to have some say so. But then I think about the recent case where a nine-year-old was suspended because his teacher saw a BB gun in his room during remote schooling
You're coming at this from a progressive school view (my kids also go to progressive school) where you had the opportunity to get to know all the kids and their families and you can think through individual situations. Public schools, especially ones that deal with many hundreds or even thousands of kids, just tend to have blanket rules whether they make sense in any given situation or not (like bringing a weapon "to school" when "school" is one's own bedroom).
I appreciate your distinction between addressing a problem and punishing it, but, sadly, public schools often don't make that distinction. Most run on some form of behavior modification like PBIS that just operates like a checklist of behaviors and subsequent mandatory consequences. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court can't mandate that schools think.
I support F.I.R.E. (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose mission statement is: [T]o defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty."
I cannot abide the trend in our country, both on and off school campuses (and I include K-12 in my statement), to attempt to abrogate the first amendment rights. of students, teachers, and other staff. I won't attempt to recreate the long history of censorship in the United States, a topic I first explored seriously in a year-long project in Comparative Government during my senior year in high school. I'll simply state that the notion that some speech is "hate speech" and hence can be punished simply on the basis of lexicon and the arbitrarily vague politicized standards of a given public institution and/or administrator is anathema to democracy. It's a very short trip indeed from banning certain words to deciding that someone is guilty of "cultural appropriation," "micro-aggressions," making someone else feel "uncomfortable" because of dissenting opinions, requiring "trigger warnings" for every course syllabus, book, article, movie, or other media used in or out of class, and "safe spaces," ad nauseam.
I sawa witch hunt conducted against a professor at the University of Michigan during my first summer as a doctoral student because he shared a single-panel Gary Larson cartoon involving a caveman "discovering/inventing" probability theory that a few students decided was a put-down of women. That is hardly an isolated incident. If you're unfamiliar with some of the more egregious cases over the last three decades or so, I suggest you read Greg Lukianoff's Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate or any of his other excellent books (he is the president of F.I.R.E.). Or watch the movies "Can We Take A Joke?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9emLcjMOk], "No Safe Spaces" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxDl0Ls4_Go]. and "Indoctrinate U" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA].
It is a thorny issue, Michael. Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I do think there is an important distinction between K-12 and higher education. I too have strong convictions about individual rights. I also have strong convictions about caring for children and those convictions lead to occasionally addressing others' speech and behavior in and out of school. You and I may disagree about safe spaces, micro-aggressions and the like. One should not craft a general argument from the most egregious examples. These phenomena arise out of generations of white privilege and insensitivity to those with little power. There may be overreaction at times, but the overall effect has been to alert folks to be more circumspect. I vigorously agree that when these issues become cause to censor curriculum, affect employment etc., it approaches a slippery slope. But it is also a slippery slope to hold the position that "I can do, say, or teach whatever I want regardless of the impact on others, because it's my 'right' to do so."
As you can imagine, I'm familiar with most of the arguments on both sides. But if I'm going to err, I will do it on the side of protecting the speech of anyone and everyone. There is no legal right to be protected from outrage. If someone finds someone else's speech/expression offensive, the onus is on the first person to avoid within reason whatever is pissing him/her off. In cases where that is not possible (e.g., in a classroom as opposed to a comedy club), there are still codes of conduct I can and do support that are intended to protect people from bullying, harassment, and more direct sorts of harm. Teachers can't start screaming insults at students with impunity, though exactly where the line gets drawn is likely a local phenomenon. What I will always fight against, however, are policies that restrict free expression on the grounds that something offends someone else. If that were allowed to become a fundamental legal precept, we would all be limited to what the least tolerant, most hypersensitive/fragile person in our society or subset thereof can put up with. And given current trends, that would leave most of us unable to speak in public at all. The fact that there are differential degrees of power in our nation historically and at present is simply not a reasonable justification for preventing people from saying offensive or blatantly untrue things. The world's not an easy place even under the best of circumstances. And there's simply no reasonable way to navigate life in the unmitigated world if you have been allowed to avoid struggling with others over difficult, unpleasant, or offensive words and ideas. We're turning our classrooms into ICU's for preemies instead of places to develop citizens who can stand up for their ideas, persuade others, and modify their thoughts as a result of all sorts of challenging conversations and interactions. I worry, in fact, that the sort of disagreement/conversation we're engaging in here is precisely what the forces of political correctness and intolerance of "illiberal" opinions would prevent from happening in K-20 classrooms.
I find much to agree with in this comment. I would only add that I think the power differential is more important than you concede. I too am familiar with the arguments on both sides. While not in any way ascribing this behavior to you, many with power and privilege use the cover of "liberty" to gratuitously offend others. I do think our exchange is precisely the range in which this should be discussed.
One of the (in my opinion, necessary) flaws in a democratic, free society is that it allows for people to be assholes. Yet I am hard-pressed to find examples of societies that seek to remain democratic and free to eliminate or punish assholery while retaining the essentials of democracy and freedom (and I always try to remind people of the crucial differences between freedom and license, taking a page out of A. S. Neill).
The frightening thing about our current shift towards attempts to legislate morality and ethics, censorship, cancel culture, and political correctness is that all too often our first impulse when facing opinions/speech/behavior we dislike and find offensive is to bypass any attempt to politely reason with the "offender." Sometimes there can be good reasons for such a detour: the person in question exhibits extreme hostility or has in the past rebuffed attempts at reasoning and negotiation, perhaps even to the point of violence or threats thereof. No one is obligated to put her/his hand into a buzzsaw. But having grown up in an era when people were struggling for more freedom, more independence, less interference from authorities (particularly police), I am repeatedly amazed and disheartened by the trend on college campuses to either respond with extreme incivility (shouting down disliked speakers if they haven't successfully been disinvited in the first place) or with instant appeal to institutional or civil authorities.
I would have hoped that administrators and police would generally eschew the opportunity to have to intervene frequently in disputes and disagreements on college campuses that could be addressed reasonably and satisfactorily by the disputants. Unfortunately, such is not the case. One argument offered by Lukianoff and Haidt in CODDLING is that the explosion of middle-level administrators at colleges and universities has resulted in (among other, more monetary woes) a bunch of people who view themselves as solutions looking for problems. Such people are only too happy to step into these situations, much like a parent with oft-bickering children who never try to sort out their differences on their own. As for our heavily militarized police, most of us are aware of the frequently-tragic consequences, particularly for people of color both on and off college and university campuses.
I can only think that if Mario Savio were alive to set foot on the Cal-Berkeley campus (or hundreds of other campuses) he would think he'd somehow landed in the past rather than the future.
Yes, I suppose I occasionally invite inaccurate accusations of assholery. (A fine variation on a fine word. "Asshole" is a word with no equivalent. Rather like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography - you know an asshole when you see one.) We are probably of similar age, although I may have a few on you. I suppose for every overbearing, entitled jerk, there is at least one over-entitled student who wishes to whine away anything uncomfortable.
I am grateful social media was not yet a thing in my youth. As a fairly respectable and fruitful adult, I was a train wreck as a teen and twenty. Now, our youth may never be able to fully escape their stupid escapades, as I did.
"Students have incompletely developed frontal lobes. Expecting exquisite judgment or highly developed impulse control is unrealistic and unfair." Yes. As I get older, I've come to better appreciate my parents' simple wisdom involving young people. When hearing about some offense committed by a young person growing up on my block, (some of which were serious in the eyes of the law) my dad would say with a sigh, "dopey kid." It was said with compassion for the youngster, and the parents. My mom's response would be an understanding and forgiving "sono giovani" (they are young.) I find I am quoting them both more and more often as I get closer to the end of my teaching career. During my students' more mischievous and rascally moments, "sono giovani" works well. During the more serious moments of poor judgement, "dopey kid" helps me to keep a more gentle and loving perspective on their not fully developed frontal lobes. You always kept that perspective, Steve, even when the other adults were having a hard time with it. Albeit a little late, thanks!
I have very mixed feelings. Yes, off-campus events do impact in-school matters and school officials have to have some say so. But then I think about the recent case where a nine-year-old was suspended because his teacher saw a BB gun in his room during remote schooling
You're coming at this from a progressive school view (my kids also go to progressive school) where you had the opportunity to get to know all the kids and their families and you can think through individual situations. Public schools, especially ones that deal with many hundreds or even thousands of kids, just tend to have blanket rules whether they make sense in any given situation or not (like bringing a weapon "to school" when "school" is one's own bedroom).
I appreciate your distinction between addressing a problem and punishing it, but, sadly, public schools often don't make that distinction. Most run on some form of behavior modification like PBIS that just operates like a checklist of behaviors and subsequent mandatory consequences. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court can't mandate that schools think.
True enough, Dienne. The Supreme Court cannot mandate that schools think, but they shouldn't prohibit it!
I support F.I.R.E. (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose mission statement is: [T]o defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty."
I cannot abide the trend in our country, both on and off school campuses (and I include K-12 in my statement), to attempt to abrogate the first amendment rights. of students, teachers, and other staff. I won't attempt to recreate the long history of censorship in the United States, a topic I first explored seriously in a year-long project in Comparative Government during my senior year in high school. I'll simply state that the notion that some speech is "hate speech" and hence can be punished simply on the basis of lexicon and the arbitrarily vague politicized standards of a given public institution and/or administrator is anathema to democracy. It's a very short trip indeed from banning certain words to deciding that someone is guilty of "cultural appropriation," "micro-aggressions," making someone else feel "uncomfortable" because of dissenting opinions, requiring "trigger warnings" for every course syllabus, book, article, movie, or other media used in or out of class, and "safe spaces," ad nauseam.
I sawa witch hunt conducted against a professor at the University of Michigan during my first summer as a doctoral student because he shared a single-panel Gary Larson cartoon involving a caveman "discovering/inventing" probability theory that a few students decided was a put-down of women. That is hardly an isolated incident. If you're unfamiliar with some of the more egregious cases over the last three decades or so, I suggest you read Greg Lukianoff's Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate or any of his other excellent books (he is the president of F.I.R.E.). Or watch the movies "Can We Take A Joke?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9emLcjMOk], "No Safe Spaces" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxDl0Ls4_Go]. and "Indoctrinate U" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA].
It is a thorny issue, Michael. Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I do think there is an important distinction between K-12 and higher education. I too have strong convictions about individual rights. I also have strong convictions about caring for children and those convictions lead to occasionally addressing others' speech and behavior in and out of school. You and I may disagree about safe spaces, micro-aggressions and the like. One should not craft a general argument from the most egregious examples. These phenomena arise out of generations of white privilege and insensitivity to those with little power. There may be overreaction at times, but the overall effect has been to alert folks to be more circumspect. I vigorously agree that when these issues become cause to censor curriculum, affect employment etc., it approaches a slippery slope. But it is also a slippery slope to hold the position that "I can do, say, or teach whatever I want regardless of the impact on others, because it's my 'right' to do so."
As you can imagine, I'm familiar with most of the arguments on both sides. But if I'm going to err, I will do it on the side of protecting the speech of anyone and everyone. There is no legal right to be protected from outrage. If someone finds someone else's speech/expression offensive, the onus is on the first person to avoid within reason whatever is pissing him/her off. In cases where that is not possible (e.g., in a classroom as opposed to a comedy club), there are still codes of conduct I can and do support that are intended to protect people from bullying, harassment, and more direct sorts of harm. Teachers can't start screaming insults at students with impunity, though exactly where the line gets drawn is likely a local phenomenon. What I will always fight against, however, are policies that restrict free expression on the grounds that something offends someone else. If that were allowed to become a fundamental legal precept, we would all be limited to what the least tolerant, most hypersensitive/fragile person in our society or subset thereof can put up with. And given current trends, that would leave most of us unable to speak in public at all. The fact that there are differential degrees of power in our nation historically and at present is simply not a reasonable justification for preventing people from saying offensive or blatantly untrue things. The world's not an easy place even under the best of circumstances. And there's simply no reasonable way to navigate life in the unmitigated world if you have been allowed to avoid struggling with others over difficult, unpleasant, or offensive words and ideas. We're turning our classrooms into ICU's for preemies instead of places to develop citizens who can stand up for their ideas, persuade others, and modify their thoughts as a result of all sorts of challenging conversations and interactions. I worry, in fact, that the sort of disagreement/conversation we're engaging in here is precisely what the forces of political correctness and intolerance of "illiberal" opinions would prevent from happening in K-20 classrooms.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/]
I find much to agree with in this comment. I would only add that I think the power differential is more important than you concede. I too am familiar with the arguments on both sides. While not in any way ascribing this behavior to you, many with power and privilege use the cover of "liberty" to gratuitously offend others. I do think our exchange is precisely the range in which this should be discussed.
One of the (in my opinion, necessary) flaws in a democratic, free society is that it allows for people to be assholes. Yet I am hard-pressed to find examples of societies that seek to remain democratic and free to eliminate or punish assholery while retaining the essentials of democracy and freedom (and I always try to remind people of the crucial differences between freedom and license, taking a page out of A. S. Neill).
The frightening thing about our current shift towards attempts to legislate morality and ethics, censorship, cancel culture, and political correctness is that all too often our first impulse when facing opinions/speech/behavior we dislike and find offensive is to bypass any attempt to politely reason with the "offender." Sometimes there can be good reasons for such a detour: the person in question exhibits extreme hostility or has in the past rebuffed attempts at reasoning and negotiation, perhaps even to the point of violence or threats thereof. No one is obligated to put her/his hand into a buzzsaw. But having grown up in an era when people were struggling for more freedom, more independence, less interference from authorities (particularly police), I am repeatedly amazed and disheartened by the trend on college campuses to either respond with extreme incivility (shouting down disliked speakers if they haven't successfully been disinvited in the first place) or with instant appeal to institutional or civil authorities.
I would have hoped that administrators and police would generally eschew the opportunity to have to intervene frequently in disputes and disagreements on college campuses that could be addressed reasonably and satisfactorily by the disputants. Unfortunately, such is not the case. One argument offered by Lukianoff and Haidt in CODDLING is that the explosion of middle-level administrators at colleges and universities has resulted in (among other, more monetary woes) a bunch of people who view themselves as solutions looking for problems. Such people are only too happy to step into these situations, much like a parent with oft-bickering children who never try to sort out their differences on their own. As for our heavily militarized police, most of us are aware of the frequently-tragic consequences, particularly for people of color both on and off college and university campuses.
I can only think that if Mario Savio were alive to set foot on the Cal-Berkeley campus (or hundreds of other campuses) he would think he'd somehow landed in the past rather than the future.
Yes, I suppose I occasionally invite inaccurate accusations of assholery. (A fine variation on a fine word. "Asshole" is a word with no equivalent. Rather like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography - you know an asshole when you see one.) We are probably of similar age, although I may have a few on you. I suppose for every overbearing, entitled jerk, there is at least one over-entitled student who wishes to whine away anything uncomfortable.
I am grateful social media was not yet a thing in my youth. As a fairly respectable and fruitful adult, I was a train wreck as a teen and twenty. Now, our youth may never be able to fully escape their stupid escapades, as I did.
Yep! I have ghosts too.