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> The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently

• geofft 11y ago
  That's a good example, thanks. It looks like he still has a job with the school district and he's not hiding. The job of high school principal is one, also, where I think there should be space for someone's private opinions to qualify or disqualify them for the job, just because of the enormous trust and power we place in them. I'm not sure what I think about these comments, but in general I think it's fine for us to be more cautious with schoolteachers. Especially because he currently has a job with the same school district on "administrative duties", I expect that if he expressed the same opinions as a back-office employee with the district, or in many other individual-contributor careers that do not involve management or oversight, he would have been fine. I'm curious how we can measure that it's getting worse. In 2003, this teacher was fired after sending an e-mail (we had no Facebook back then) with certain distasteful remarks about race, and claimed to be a "victim of political correctness": https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20030308&id=pisbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MEgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5478,889731&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1696&dat=20030308&id=... In 1995, this teacher was fired for making a single, though completely unacceptable, comment to some students with racial slurs: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19950130&id=aXReAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_WENAAAAIBAJ&pg=3141,9073110&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19950130&id=...
  • hoopd 11y ago
    I can't read enough of the first link to comment, the second one makes me think "you said what to your students??" But then again, that was 1995 and cases like that are part of how language like that became unofficially outlawed, not just for teachers but for everybody. When a principal gets fired for calmly saying he agrees with Interpretation A of events it's clear that he's being fired for having the wrong belief system. The fear is we're not just removing words from our lexicon but attempting to eradicate entire belief systems. The problem with that is who gets to decide what the right belief system is?
    • geofft 11y ago
      Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs). In the 1800s, you could talk in public straight-up about how black people are naturally suited to not having the rights to life, liberty, and property. That belief system is all but gone today. And that does not strike me as a great loss. Historically, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice: I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.
      • hueving 11y ago
        >Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs). This is true, but why is it just for a majority to censor belief systems out of existence. Your example is obviously extreme, but what about something like censoring a religion out of existence? >I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool. Do you not think that would be a natural side effect of the people in charge of censoring things also applying their censorship powers to history? Take communism for example. It is quite conceivable that people hating the general idea will heavily conflate the idea with the poor implementations when writing history. Then people studying it in the future will wonder why anyone in their right mind would have ever wanted anything to do with communism. This should be getting much harder with the Internet and the easy storage of information, but it's likely to have been quite prolific throughout history. Especially when governments wanted to make sure a belief system that was a threat to its existence never rose up again. So, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice because that's the way the arc of history was intended to be written.
        • geofft 11y ago
          I dunno. As a schoolchild in a conservative region of the Southern US just after the end of the Cold War, I distinctly remember thinking that communism was actually a pretty cool idea, and just had some bad implementors. There are real people in the hacker community who advocate the restoration of the monarchy, the elimination of democracy, and the return of certain races to slavery, which naturally suits them. In Christian theological discourse, it's not uncommon to see people accuse certain liberal theologians of first-millennium heresies. Unless there are other actually unspeakable things that were popular in the past, I don't think there's any evidence that we're writing ideas out of existence, just exerting social pressure to keep known-bad ideas from being retried again without learning the lessons of history. This (naturally) involves knowing what those ideas are. Basically, given empirical evidence that a certain approach is actually having good effects for the world, and a complete lack of empirical evidence that it's having bad effects of the world, I think it's somewhat misplaced to worry about potential bad effects, unless we can come up with a way to maintain the good effects.