Republican Indiana state senator said teachers should be impartial on Nazism -

tz620q said:

Good, I didn't think so. So I formed the wrong opinion on what you believed based on a very limit knowledge of you and a few words in a post. I don't think that sort of shooting from the hip attitude towards others is helpful in any way.

Click to expand...

You can't just make up any silly thing and say it was "implied." That absurdity does not prove your point.

JustOneWay said:

I posted a specific definition.

Morality:
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.

If you can't trust a teacher to do this as needed, then homeschooling is for you too!

Teacher scenario:
Little Johnny urinates in the corner, and the teacher does nothing except tells the parents to teach their child the right and wrong about urinating in the corner, then asks the parents to come and clean the mess....

Click to expand...

You might be able to trust one teacher and not another. However, if you are wise you simply don't allow strangers to indoctrinate your children into their ideas of morality. Instead, you insist that they teach your children the skills they need to think for themselves.

JustOneWay said:

I posted a specific definition.

Morality:
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.

If you can't trust a teacher to do this as needed, then homeschooling is for you too!

Teacher scenario:
Little Johnny urinates in the corner, and the teacher does nothing except tells the parents to teach their child the right and wrong about urinating in the corner, then asks the parents to come and clean the mess....

Click to expand...

I was about to say something like this.

Every human interaction includes a component of morality, particularly group functions.

The schoolteacher will have to enforce the moral judgment that it's wrong for Johnny to smack Billy in the mouth and take his sandwich.

And if that is wrong for Johnny, then it was wrong for the Nazis to invade Czechoslovakia.

grasping the after wind said:

You might be able to trust one teacher and not another. However, if you are wise you simply don't allow strangers to indoctrinate your children into their ideas of morality. Instead, you insist that they teach your children the skills they need to think for themselves.

Click to expand...

Does that mean the teacher cannot control order in the classroom?

My daughter went to a high school that attempted to practice the philosophy you stated. It essentially became a Lord of the Flies situation, with the jocks performing mock homosexual gang rapes of weaker boys in the hall and sexual harassment abounding.

essentialsaltes said:

The question is how one could possibly avoid it. When teaching The Diary of Anne Frank in English or the Civil Rights movement in History. How do you avoid (and should you!) discussing 'colored' water fountains or people pouring sugar on the heads of the lunch counter protestors without making some judgments? Do we say "there were fine people on both sides" and leave it at that? Few human beings could maintain some sort of neutral impartiality in these or many other situations.

Click to expand...

And how would you explain the reason the status quo changed?

RDKirk said:

I was about to say something like this.

Every human interaction includes a component of morality, particularly group functions.

The schoolteacher will have to enforce the moral judgment that it's wrong for Johnny to smack Billy in the mouth and take his sandwich.

And if that is wrong for Johnny, then it was wrong for the Nazis to invade Czechoslovakia.

Click to expand...

When the NAZIs invade Czechoslovakia at the school during school hours then the teacher can tell the Nazis it is wrong and perhaps send them to the principal's office. But since the teaching of History and what is happening within the school during the school day are very different things they can be handled in very different ways. I expect that the teacher did not have to tell the students that Johnny was wrong for smacking Billy but maybe you think they would never have had any idea it was wrong until the teacher told them? "GOOOLLLY! who would have thought that smacking people and taking their sandwich was not a perfectly wonderful thing to do? Good thing the teacher informed us of that, or we would never have known." says little Anita in shocked amazement.

grasping the after wind said:

When the NAZIs invade Czechoslovakia at the school during school hours then the teacher can tell the Nazis it is wrong and perhaps send them to the principal's office. But since the teaching of History and what is happening within the school during the school day are very different things they can be handled in very different ways. I expect that the teacher did not have to tell the students that Johnny was wrong for smacking Billy but maybe you think they would never have had any idea it was wrong until the teacher told them? "GOOOLLLY! who would have thought that smacking people and taking their sandwich was not a perfectly wonderful thing to do? Good thing the teacher informed us of that, or we would never have known." says little Anita in shocked amazement.

Click to expand...

So hitting IS wrong and you can have rules against it, but you cant say its wrong.

grasping the after wind said:

When the NAZIs invade Czechoslovakia at the school during school hours then the teacher can tell the Nazis it is wrong and perhaps send them to the principal's office. But since the teaching of History and what is happening within the school during the school day are very different things they can be handled in very different ways. I expect that the teacher did not have to tell the students that Johnny was wrong for smacking Billy but maybe you think they would never have had any idea it was wrong until the teacher told them? "GOOOLLLY! who would have thought that smacking people and taking their sandwich was not a perfectly wonderful thing to do? Good thing the teacher informed us of that, or we would never have known." says little Anita in shocked amazement.

Click to expand...

The jocks in my daughter's high school did not think it was wrong to do mock gang rapes of weaker boys in the hall, and the disdain of the teachers watching confirmed that it was not wrong.

Ultimately, children only learn the beginnings of morality from parents. If their society (and school is "their society") does not back up those rules, children quickly learn that morality is nothing more than the rules of whoever is in power in that situation.

grasping the after wind said:

When the NAZIs invade Czechoslovakia at the school during school hours then the teacher can tell the Nazis it is wrong and perhaps send them to the principal's office. But since the teaching of History and what is happening within the school during the school day are very different things they can be handled in very different ways. I expect that the teacher did not have to tell the students that Johnny was wrong for smacking Billy but maybe you think they would never have had any idea it was wrong until the teacher told them? "GOOOLLLY! who would have thought that smacking people and taking their sandwich was not a perfectly wonderful thing to do? Good thing the teacher informed us of that, or we would never have known." says little Anita in shocked amazement.

Click to expand...

If we wait until the Nazis invade Czechoslovika we end up with exactly what happened with that invasion. The Czechs left alone to fight and die for 'peace in our time'. Our time lasting less than a year no matter which point one uses to mark that invasion. There are 2 points one could pick. The treaty of Munich where Hitler got the Sudetenland or the armed invasion a few months later. Rather like when the bully starts with taking lunch money and a few months later has poor johnny selling stuff for the escalating extortion.

If one waits until the bully is at their door before even speaking out it is far too late. Martin Neimoller comes to mind, even though he in fact did speak out.

RDKirk said:

Does that mean the teacher cannot control order in the classroom?

My daughter went to a high school that attempted to practice the philosophy you stated. It essentially became a Lord of the Flies situation, with the jocks performing mock homosexual gang rapes of weaker boys in the hall and sexual harassment abounding.

Click to expand...

No, the philosophy I have stated in this thread would not lead to what you have described at all. Controlling a classroom and indoctrinating children into a specific morality are not at all the same things. If you read my previous posts in this thread, you ought to already have known my answer. There is a difference between a code of conduct of appropriate behavior within a situation and a code of morality. When one enters into someone's home or establishment one does as they ask, or one is ejected or punished in some way for not following the rules. That is an amoral thing. The action one may perform or refuse to perform that is against the rules may be entirely morally upright or may not be, but the basic morality of the action is not the issue when one is enforcing those rules. When teaching history, one is not dealing with rule breaking within the classroom one is not required to correct the Nazis or the Bolsheviks for their bad behavior in class, one is only required to tell the students what they did. If the students can only recognize that what they did was wrong by the teacher saying that it was wrong, then the education system that produced that result is not only worthless but a negative in terms of educating students as it would have to have made them impervious to logic to not immediately recognize how immensely wrong the actions of those two groups were.

grasping the after wind said:

....When teaching history, one is not dealing with rule breaking within the classroom one is not required to correct the Nazis or the Bolsheviks for their bad behavior in class, one is only required to tell the students what they did. If the students can only recognize that what they did was wrong by the teacher saying that it was wrong, then the education system that produced that result is not only worthless but a negative in terms of educating students as it would have to have made them impervious to logic to not immediately recognize how immensely wrong the actions of those two groups were.

Click to expand...

Wait what?

School shouldnt teach morals, but if the kids cant recognize moral wrongs then its the schools fault???

grasping the after wind said:

There is a difference between a code of conduct of appropriate behavior within a situation and a code of morality.

Click to expand...

No, actually there isn't a difference. They are the same thing.

keith99 said:

If we wait until the Nazis invade Czechoslovika we end up with exactly what happened with that invasion. The Czechs left alone to fight and die for 'peace in our time'. Our time lasting less than a year no matter which point one uses to mark that invasion. There are 2 points one could pick. The treaty of Munich where Hitler got the Sudetenland or the armed invasion a few months later. Rather like when the bully starts with taking lunch money and a few months later has poor johnny selling stuff for the escalating extortion.

If one waits until the bully is at their door before even speaking out it is far too late. Martin Neimoller comes to mind, even though he in fact did speak out.

Click to expand...

None of that requires a teacher to tell students what is right and wrong about anything in history. Students that have been taught to think critically will come to the correct conclusion without having to wait for the teacher to tell them what the correct conclusion is. Nazis and Bolsheviks are only able to flourish in an environment where one has been conditioned to wait for an authority figure to tell one what is right and wrong instead of coming to those conclusions on their own.

Our children are not blank slates to be indoctrinated by the loudest voice. They think. They evaluate. They judge. They accept or discard. They have minds of their own. I think we do not give them enough credit, or perhaps we only wish to control them as much as we can for as long as we can.

durangodawood said:

So hitting IS wrong and you can have rules against it, but you cant say its wrong.

Click to expand...

Once I deal with the rule breaking, I can say whatever I like but my making a point of telling everyone that hitting is wrong shows how insecure I am in my ability to teach children to think critically. If I thought I was doing a good job in that regard I would not have to make a point of telling the class "doing this is wrong" as I would be confident that any student would come to that conclusion without my having to tell them. If I am under the impression that they are incapable of understanding that hitting others is wrong or that NAZIs were wrong without my telling them that it is wrong, then think how unsure I must be when the case is not so clear? So, if I am convinced that abortion is wrong should I be teaching the children that abortion is wrong instead of laying out the facts on abortion and women's reproductive rights for them to judge for themselves? How about what constitutes proper speech outside the classroom setting? What should I,as their teacher, be telling them is wrong speech and worthy to be censored or what is good speech and worthy of being allowed? Or any other matter on which there is more nuance than hitting other children in the classroom or the evil of war crimes? Like them or not, Naziism and Socialist Oligarchy (which is what is practiced by those that claim to be Communist) are political ideologies. Even though they are heinous at their core or maybe because they are heinous at their core if we merely expose student to the facts about them, they will not need to be told they are wrong. It is too obviously apparent by how they have manifested that they are wrong. If we are in the business of teaching what to think about a political ideology rather than teaching what the political ideology is and what it has produced, then we open the door to the kind of divisive atmosphere we are now seeing as one school or even one teacher teaches that X political ideology or political idea or political party is wrong while another teaches it is correct and Y is wrong and students simply digest what they are told to think about it at and maybe just because they desire good marks they convince themselves to believe it. I give human beings a bit more credit to be able to understand what is right and wrong without having to have an authority figure tell them what it is. What I don't give credit to is the ability of an authority figure to be right about it 100% of the time.

seeking.IAM said:

Our children are not blank slates to be indoctrinated by the loudest voice. They think. They evaluate. They judge. They accept or discard. They have minds of their own. I think we do not give them enough credit, or perhaps we only wish to control them as much as we can for as long as we can.

Click to expand...

In the case of public schools that are invested in teaching what to think rather than how to think to control the children of others and make little carbon copies of their teachers out of them. Much like what the Nazis were trying to do in their schools.

HTacianas said:

It is not the government's place to indoctrinate children as to what is "good" or "bad". Teachers should present facts to students and allow them to determine that for themselves.

Click to expand...

Then I guess schools can’t have rules or teach that kids should share and treat each other with respect?

Maybe, like the Pledge of Allegiance, we can just have the government create a list of certain value statements that are mandatory in schools, and all others are forbidden. This will entirely prevent indoctrination.

grasping the after wind said:

Much like what the Nazis were trying to do in their schools.

Click to expand...

How did they achieve that? By creating legislation that dictated what teachers did in class.

RDKirk said:

Is that what you say about the teaching of sexuality in schools?

Click to expand...

Yes. It is.