There are, however, a few rays of hope out there. Jay Bennish (pictured above), a high school geography teacher in Aurora, Colorado, was one of them. During the last week, however, he’s become a household name, suspended from his job and facing death threats after being vilified on reactionary talk radio for teaching geopolitics in a high school geopolitics class.
off to a good start, it's a Vast RW conspiracy that this kook was ranting in his classroom. He got caught, never exepcting to be held accoutn for his gross negligence.
After three weeks, Allen’s father Jeff found a bite with Walter Williams, a Virginia-based columnist and regular guest on Rush Limbaugh’s show. Williams argued that Bennish wasn’t preparing students for standardized tests and should be fired. One week later, with Iraq unraveling into civil war and with the Bush White House facing new charges of benign neglect in New Orleans and of misleading the nation regarding Iraq, right-wing talk radio switched over to an All Jay Bennish, All the Time format.
dripping with LW Bush Bashing, its obvious which side the author believes in.
Bennish’s syllabus admonishes his students to engage in critical and creative thinking and to utilize various social science tools when examining world geography. He asks his students to remain open minded and to tolerate differences in opinion. He writes that the main objective of his class is “to help students to think for themselves, and to become independent, responsible, upright young adults. This entails showing respect, consideration, and tolerance to all people and ideas in an academic context.”
Lets see the evidence that he taught from a perspective where America is not the most Evil nation in the history of the planet.
In the interest of balance, Bennish asks his students to familiarize themselves with right-wing Web sites such as those of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Project for a New American Century and the Wall Street Journal.
Cato is a libertarian website, hardly RW, nor is the Hertiage foundation,the Wall Street journal is well the WSJ. Bennish for his LW sites, suggested students look Indymedia, a cesspool of anarchists, communists and socialists.
During the seminar in question, Bennish attempted to stimulate a discussion by critiquing and responding to Bush’s State of the Union address. He put the U.S. into context by describing us as “probably the most violent nation on planet earth.” By almost every measure this is true. We have the highest incarceration rate, one of the highest murder and domestic violence rates, among the world’s most violent entertainment, and we have gotten ourselves into more wars than any other nation in modern history.
What a doozy. We are more violent than Saddam's Iraq, Stalin's Soviet union, the hell hole of Somalia, the killing fields of Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Serbia and Croatia. What about the violent punishments inflicted by the Cuban, Iranian, and Venezuelan governments?
Bennish also said that Israel’s founders engaged in terrorism. This fact isn’t in dispute. Israeli students learn this in their history books. Jewish terror groups Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, for example, assassinated the anti-Zionist British diplomat, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. The Irgun and Lehi (“Stern gang”) terrorist groups, in an attempt to drive the British occupiers out of Palestine, bombed trains, British officers clubs and, most famously, the King David Hotel. This is not edgy stuff. It’s history.
No, it's not edgy stuff, it's anti-Israel anti-Semitic stuff.
Then there was the bombshell line, where Bennish compared Bush’s rhetoric to Hitler’s. Anyone who has read a persuasion or propaganda textbook can see that most global political leaders in a time of war employ similar propaganda techniques. Both claimed the rhetorical right to ignore international law and engage in “preemptive” war against enemies whose threat they fabricated or inflated. Both then employed nationalism and flag-based iconography to shield themselves from accountability. Both defended spying on citizens and encouraged folks to report “suspicious” behavior, creating the illusion of an omnipresent enemy within. Both defended the need for internment camps and indefinite incarceration without charges as part of a fight against terror. Both rhetorical campaigns justified changing the map of the world, with Germany occupying much of Europe and with the U.S. occupying, for starters, Iraq and Afghanistan. This is geography. We don’t have to agree with the analogy. And there’s no evidence, in fact, that Bennish himself agreed with it. But it’s a good pedagogical strategy to get students to discuss geopolitical issues while juxtaposing contemporary realities with historic ones.
Godwin's Law is in effect. Whoever mentions the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. anyone dumb enough to see similarities between the current Bush administration and Hitler's Nazi party is a certified loon.
Most importantly, nowhere in young Mr. Allen’s 22-minute, out-of-context recording does Jay Bennish misstate any facts. The “what” is bulletproof. The “why” is up for debate. This is the hallmark of a good class. Bennish’s syllabus, and most of his students who have gone on record, state that he welcomes opposing views. In the end, if the argument gets lively enough, the class will succeed in stimulating critical thinking and meeting Bennish’s goal of helping students formulate their own informed opinions. Rosemarie Jackowski, writing for Mediamonitors, argues that the Bennish case “is not a freedom of speech issue. It is an issue of the right of students to have access to historical information.” I’d chance to guess that Bennish’s students would be better prepared to go to college knowing both the name of their governor and the definition of communism and capitalism.
These students deserve to be taught to think critically. The best way to teach is to make the students come to their own conclusions, not go off on 20 minute rants in a pathetic attempt to indoctrinate those students.
Actually the "BubbaBuddha law" is in effect: Anytime someone refers to Anti-Semitism or refers to Godwin's Law in which a person mentions Nazi's or any bogeyman of recent history occurs, the person having done such has lost the debate.