Bad from the Goose, Bad from the Gander
On Tuesday a Judge ruled that a lawsuit would go forward against a Santa Ana History teacher who was making disparaging remarks against Christians during his class. James Corbett had asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by his former student, Chad Farnam, and his parents. Farnam tape recorded some of Corbett’s lectures, thus bringing us the now infamous line: “When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth.” This situation is quite similar (in the reverse) to the Matthew LaClair case where he recorded a teacher proselytizing a type of Christianity to his students.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a reason to say that Chad Farnam was less courageous than Matthew LaClair, and given what we know now, I can’t say that this teacher is much different from the other teacher. More people are jumping behind Corbett because they seem to think he was trying to engage students in intelligent discussions. Just because a conversation seems to start from a secular proposition does not guarantee an enlightened discussion or even a free discussion. Certainly, opening with, “When you put on your Jesus glasses” isn’t likely to encourage everyone to feel like they can join in the conversation or keep to facts rather than opinions.
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This puts me in a peculiar place because I tend to agree with much of what James Corbett said but I have issues with when, where and how he said it.
His criticism amounts to a denounciation of Christianity and therefore inappropriate for a public classroom. I agree with people who say that this kind of discourse is good for students but the price we pay for public education is watered down class discussions which cannot discuss certian forbidden ideas. The govenment has to be all things to all people. One way to do that, in an educational environment, is to avoid hot button issues like harsh critiques religions and philosophies.
The sooner we get the government out of education the better off we will all be.
Both teachers overstepped their bounds. Their different ideologies are irrelevant.
I guess that’s why I added the disclamor of given what we know. I tkink you can challenge student but you have to be very careful how you word it. You especially can’t present it as your opinion because you will crush disagreement and dissenting opinions by doing that.
It appears that both teachers presented their opinions and did quelch dissenting opinion so they weren’t helping to engage their students in discussions of hot button issues but were proseletizing. Corbett wants his day in court so it’s harder to say for certain that is what he was doing, but the sound bites I’ve heard sound like that was what happened
A good educator will present opinions no less than facts - but they include all opinions, and they will not be just his own opinions. His task is to show that these opinions exist, not to advocate their acceptance or to present them as required of his students.
Recently I attended a two-hour lecture on Jewish-Muslim relations. The speaker was apprently an Egyptian Muslim. But his presentation was free from advocacy of personal opinions. I was very impressed, and I was not surprised to learn later that he has been a professor at America’s foremost Jewish university, Brandeis.
In those two hours I learned from him a lot of material consisting of opinions as well as facts, but at no point did he attempt to impose his views on his audience. That, I think, is true scholarship, and I found it admirable.
In the case of this dude who is being judged on sound bites, that is not fair. To judge his worth as a teacher you would have to look at the entire content of his course, and see what context there was for the remark. Maybe he was playing devil’s advocate. Even Socrates knew the didactic application of deliberate provocation.
And in any case, the measure of a teacher’s worth is not in what he says, but in the intellectual growth in those whose minds he touches. If he has managed to expand growing minds, give him a raise.
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