Category Archives: education

A Free Speech Oral Argument

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(Pun not necessarily intended.)

The Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of a 14-year-old girl who tried out for, and didn’t make, a varsity cheerleading team and subsequently vented her frustrations in a Snapchat rife with “colorful metaphors.”

The girl’s school punished her with a year-long suspension from cheerleading, she demurred from the punishment, lower courts agreed with her, and the school continued its protest to the Supremes.

Attorney Lisa Blatt, representing the girl’s school, had this, among others, at oral argument, as paraphrased by Just the News:

Schools aren’t trying to police political, religious, or critical expression, or impose the heckler’s veto…. They want to address digital bullying, harassment, and cheating….
A student who is upset at her teacher can safely text her views to friends but not picket the teacher’s house, Blatt told Chief Justice John Roberts: the “manner” of speech is the issue, not the offensiveness of it.

And

[Blatt] rejected the suggestion that students can get in trouble for simply sharing unpopular views: wearing a Confederate flag symbol “alone” is protected, but not using it to “terrorize” a black student.

Blatt seemed unable to address those arguments in detail, however.

What about students or teachers who think a student’s positions on police, politics, or religion are themselves offensive?

What about students or teachers who think a student’s disagreement with another student’s (or teacher’s) positions on police, politics, or religion is harassment or bullying?

What about students who think another student’s wearing of a Confederate flag symbol “alone” terrorizes them?

We’re on a short, slippery, downhill road off the edge of a very high, steep cliff when we begin expanding limits on speech.

Problems, Problems

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The Class of 2020 graduates are missing their graduation ceremonies or are having to suffer the ginormous indignities of delayed ceremonies. The Wall Street Journal subheadline shows the pettiness of the plaint:

…some members of the class of 2020—and their parents—still long for their own missed ceremonies; “Do you guys still care about us?”

Huh. In a nation with 573,000 deaths from the Wuhan Virus, severe family and economic destruction from the fallout from the several governments’ reaction to the virus, a year of nonstop rioting, looting, and destruction of mom-and-pop businesses, the joblessness and associated stresses associated with the economic disruptions, it’s so sad that so many of us have not had time or resources for putting on the all important rite of a graduation ceremony.

One graduate, of Barnard College, yet, put it this way—with no idea of how self-absorbed she is:

She worries her class “will never receive the ceremony we deserve.”

That we deserve.

Wow. How entitled.

What, in the end, is truly important—the knowledge gained and the credential that certifies that achievement, or the ceremony? That the question even comes up is an indication of the quality of education these 21-year-old children have received.

This sounds to me like a Precious One’s First World problem and not anything to take seriously.

I can take seriously only the impact such spoiled, self-important, obliviousness is going to have on our nation’s culture and on our nation’s viability.

“Troubled by the Strikes”

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Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.

Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:

For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]

And

This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]

You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.

It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.

Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.

That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.

Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.

Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.

There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.

Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.

‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.

A Couple of Test Outcomes

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…illustrate the problem.

Since schools across the US first closed last spring, sending about 50 million children to learn remotely, one looming question for educators, parents and children has been: how much has learning suffered?
Data from two national testing programs, Renaissance Learning Inc and NWEA, which are used widely by US public schools to assess students’ progress, show widespread performance declines at the start of this academic year, particularly in math.

These are the outcomes. The teachers unions don’t care, though. They don’t want their teachers to return to the classroom unless and until union leadership can be guaranteed absolute freedom from the risk of Wuhan Virus infection. Which is, of course, a deliberately impossible criterion.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals. This one, in Australia, illustrates another failure of those secondary schools that are trapped in the gaols of the Woke Left.

Australian National University have a new Gender-Inclusive Handbook out—fortunately not authoritative, only “advisory,”—giving “guidance” on the correct terms professors should use.

A couple examples:

  • not “mother,” but “gestational parent”
  • not “father,” but “non-birthing parent”
  • not “breastfeeding,” but “breast/chest feeding”
  • not “mother’s milk,” but “human/parent’s milk”

After all, according to a Lauren Dinour bit of…research…

heterosexual and woman-focused lactation language…can misgender, isolate, and harm transmasculine parents and non-heteronormative families.

Right.

I have a question. What if the father identifies as the mother?

OK, two questions. Why is the handbook only in English? There are five Asian and Middle eastern languages spoken in Australia, and over 250 indigenous Australian languages spoken there. I thought they were serious about inclusivity.