Sunday, March 05, 2006

Jay Bennish - Teacher?

This one has been going on for a while, and since he's nominally a history teacher, I, of course, went to the source on that. The article is reasonably good, but the discussion below is great. It included a link to this article in Monthly Review magazine (socialist? maybe trending towards marxists?). That article and the comments below it were equally interesting.
My thoughts... If this yahoo wants to teach some kind of socialist nirvana as opposed to the evils of capitalism, fine. The problems I have with him are two-fold. The lesser problem is, these are high school kids, minors, and as such, something of a captive audience. Yes, there will be plenty of kids speaking up for themselves, but there will also be a bunch that simply swallow the propoganda. More importantly, as clearly pointed out in the discussions over at HNN, he's presenting incorrect facts. I have to fall back on that old saying, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. When the teacher is simply wrong on the facts, that is the biggest problem I have with them teaching my kids.
On a side note, I almost feel bad for my kids history teachers, when they get old enough to have them. I will be correcting or completing information that the kids get.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd have to agree with you on what you said. While Mr. Bennish is entitled to what he thinks, he may have gone a little too far. Though I hate when students try to pick up what I have to say on political matters, I tend to stray away from the topics myself. When these topics do come up, I handle them with care. I try not to coat what I have to say with my own political views. Instead, I try to lay out the facts, and what is being said by both sides on the matter. In doing so, I try to let the students make their own decisions.

On a side note...I'll probably also be correcting my own child's teachers.