Teacher Suspended After Comparing Bush To Hitler

I thought only in totalitarian societies we locked up and silenced our educated people for having an opinion. While I did not listen to all of the State of the Union address, there are some very scary similarities to pieces of legislation that Bush has passed into law and laws created by Hitler prior to his invading of Poland. I am not suggesting that Bush is modelling Hitler, or that he is a Nazi. What I am commenting on is that the tightening of media laws, removal of civil liberties and freedoms, the constant refusal to answer questions publicly, spying on fellow citizens, etc. all were carried out by Hitler and his regime prior to ever going to war and perpetrating the atrocities that were later to become their nightmarish legacy.

I say that the teacher should be cautioned over voicing only one opinion, but he should not be disciplined for pointing out what is there for all who wish to find in the history books

He isn't locked up or silenced. He is on administrative leave. He is free to have his idiotic opinions if he so chooses.

But that freedom is not unlimited. For example, if he burst into my house and started saying those things I would have him arrested for trespassing.

He is a geography teacher. The principal and superintindent and school board can discipline him if he is failing to perform his teaching duties properly.

Perhaps if he had been teaching geography instead of spouting insane Chomsky rants, he wouldn't be in hot water.

I couldn't have said it better, madbad

But that freedom is not unlimited. For example, if he burst into my house and started saying those things I would have him arrested for trespassing.

How did you go from a Freedom of Speech issue to trespassing? Was there something in this news story that I missed? Has anyone ever argued that freedom of speech implied the right burst into peoples' homes? Is there some epidemic of this going on that I am not aware of?

Towards the end of the class, Bennish goes on to say, "I'm not in anyway implying that you should agree with me, I don't even know if I'm necessarily taking a position. But what I'm trying to get you to do is to think about these issues more in depth and not to just take things from the surface."

Heaven forbid that 16 year-olds learn that kind of craziness.

Doesn't sound like he was talking about tectonic plates, or mountain peaks, or topsoil, which is what you would expect to hear in a geography class.

Pssst, madbad, that's geology. You ever gonna reply to my challenge on the canadian healthcare thread?

Much more interesting history class than I've taken lately. I learned more in that twenty minutes than I did much of my school years.

I'd just like to point out that this is a global studies class, not a strict geography class. Global Studies takes geography a step further, focusing on different cultures and history as much as it does on the physical regions they inhabit. This teacher's comments, while biased and therefor inappropriate to a certain degree, are nonetheless germane to the general content of the class.

Superintendent Monte Moses tells the paper that Bennish's one-sided rant appears to constitute "a breach of district policy," which "calls for both sides to be present . . . in the interest of intellectual discourse."

what a double standard. If he was praising Gee Dubya he would have been lauded as one of the best teachers on the faculty staff. Only because he spoke out against Dubya, was he releived of this duty.

The entire purpose of "tenure" in our education system is so that teachers (and college professors) can teach about things that are not sanctioned by the State. Tenure is vital to the protection of academic freedom and without tenure we will return to the days when faculty were dismissed for teaching unpopular opinions.

He sounds like a sensible person that was trying to express an opinion that got blown out of proportion, isn't our country based on freedom of speech and expression ?

The issue is that this teacher is ranting in front of a captive audience. The students were in a sense, forced to listen to his opinions. That is not right.

Not anymore Rick W. I can see us resorting back to days without freedoms each and every day. Sad, that not only will this generation learn that, but they in turn will pass it on to the next generation. Instead of becoming a more free society, we're going backwards.

I don't think any of us can form a valid opinion on this, having not been there. I think a lot of this teachers "implications" are dependent upon context, tone of voice, etc. Shouting this at the class is different than doing a lecture on it in place of the normal lecture time, which is different than interjecting bits and pieces where they might actually be relevant to a topic at hand, etc.

More than 100 students at Overland walked out of class in protest of the suspension Thursday morning. Then, additional students walked out to protest the teacher's remarks.

Wow, this poor school. Darned if you do, darned if don't, aren't they? My personal opinion is that the school system needs to loosen up in general. I've read a lot of news stories of teachers being suspended for relativley small issues, and nit-picking each little detail deprives teachers of so much flexibility that they could be using to improve the class in cases.

.: T-BONE :. writes:

Can't people just teach objectively anymore? Blog your opinion somewhere else and just TEACH without injecting your personal opinions. Jeesh - common sense.

Anymore? Teaching has never been about objectivity! For the past 2000-3000 years teaching has been about instructing others in what we believe, it is how society has evolved. Plato, Aristotle, etc all taught based on what they believed to be accurate, and ever since then they have gotten in trouble for it. America is tolerant, hence, why this guy isn't jailed and killed. But every teacher knows that going against the government in their teachings will lead to hot water, this holds especially true for schooling less than colleges (where profs have little more leeway). I don't disagree with this guys comments nor do I disagree with him teaching it (provided that he teaches facts as facts, and clearly states opinions as opinions. I don't know if this was done or not, so maybe he was suspended for presenting opinions as facts, or maybe the place that he was teaching at wasn't open minded. Either way, he knew the risk he was running and I also don't feel bad for him. It is to be expected when you teach unpopular thoughts. At least the guy wasn't forced to drink hemlock.

Aine,

One possibility of him being suspended is that he may not have earned his tenure yet. In some schools it can take five years or more to earn tenure where other schools award it immediately. I am in favor of his comparisons, as it was a world studies class and realizing that if you don't learn about the past you are doomed to repeat it. If students don't want to listen, then they wont. However after there were over 100 students who walked out of class to support this teacher means that the younger generation is seeing some of the wrongs that are going on in our political system and the strangling of personal freedoms that are happening every day

My mother teaches at an elementary school in which her fellow teachers positively fawn over Bush as though he's the messiah. No one's ever even thought to discipline them for being too "pro-Bush." Teachers have opinions. Some of them are stupid. When I was in high school, I was smart enough to figure out which were which.

shagybones and Aine MacDermot:

Bennish has been employed at the school for six years (you'll have to watch the last video about student reaction).

I'll get to the video in a moment... I just wanted to add a little anecdotal info, because I do think it adds value to this thread:

When I was in college I had a professor who used to teach outrageously idiotic things (on purpose)... his method was to challenge our thinking skills on a broad range of issues, to push us into challenging HIM in the classroom and arguing the opposing viewpoint. Many students didn't *get* that this is what he was doing (but I did), and they were too afraid to challenge him for fear he would give them a bad grade. When I realized what his method was, I began loudly challenging him in class, arguing the opposing viewpoint. My fellow students gasped in surprise that I would have the audacity to challenge a tenured professor -out loud- in class.

As it turned out, several weeks later, the professor pulled me aside after class to apologize to me, for making me the antagonist, but congratulated me on my courage for standing up to him and having the ability to defend my ideas. I got the only "A" in that class that semester.

:)

This is stupid IMO. Chances are, that someone in the class brought up something that delt with Geography and some sort of catalyst to talk about Bush. The teacher probably explained [insert explanation here], and the class joined to commence in an offtopic discussion.

It's the teacher's responsibility to not only inform students on a subject, but to show the subject's connections to real life situations. These slightly offtopic discussions happen all the time in Middle/High School (I would know, I currently attend). Hell, if they're allowed to discuss an unproven subject such as Evolution in schools while informing the student body that the theory may not be completely correct, why can't a teacher express their opinion about Bush while saying that they might not be correct?

By stating that their thoughts are strictly an opinion, the teacher is infact giving factual information. This might be stretching it- but we wouldn't hold a protest against an Algebra teacher for giving their opinion on Geometry, would we? I think that whoever started the protest was probably some uninformed, biased, immature child, just as 90% of people at live protests are.(go to a protest against any party or organization and ask any person there if they have a damned idea of what they're talking about).

On the original recording of what the teacher was teaching, I don't see anything wrong with the material he was teaching, nor the way he went about teaching it. The teacher is challenging his students' on what they "think" they know about American history. Everything he says about the history of American foreign policy can be verified using our own government's document archives (national security archive at Georgetown University is one such place to find this information, though it is certainly not the only such place.) Comparing Bush's policies and even some of his rhetoric to that of Hitler, while it may be offending to some Americans, can be considered a valid comparison particularly considering some of the documents on the PNAC website (where many members of this administration's government, as well as the president's own brother, are signed as agreeing with those documents -- keep in mind that some of those documents have been altered since they first appeared on the PNAC website, although cryptome.org does have the originals in its archives).

The teacher has been accused of presenting a biased, one-sided viewpoint without presenting the other side, but I would counter that by saying that the mainstream media, and Fox News in particular, and this is particularly true of "talk radio" in this country, have presented the American public with the opposing pro-administration viewpoint 24/7 on a daily basis for the past 5 years.

Why is it that when one teacher in one American school has the audacity to challenge that viewpoint it is seen as inappropriate, when five years of administration rhetoric on television, radio, and in print going unchallenged is not also seen as inappropriate?

Well said Aine. After reading the article now, I don't think the teacher's done anything out of line.

As a teacher myself, I don't agree about objectivity per se. Obviously, it is important, but it should not stop the teacher from voicing an opinion so long as he is clear that it's an opinion.