Posted on 01/23/2014 1:51:41 PM PST by Eleutheria5
The Ministry of Education will reportedly allow teachers to express their political opinions in the classroom, as part of the "Israel moves up a grade" program being pushed forward by Education Minister Shai Piron (Yesh Atid).
Under the new guidelines teachers will be given a freer hand in their class of impressionable young students, and will be able to determine the topics of their instruction in 25% of the hours of their annual educational curriculum, reports Channel 2.
The new move, which allows teachers to hold discussions in class on political topics and express their opinions, follows closely on the heels of a recent case in which a teacher tried to force leftist ideology on his students.
The civics teacher in Kiryat Tivon, near Haifa, was set to be fired on Monday after a student complained about his slipping leftist ideology into classroom lessons. The teacher, according to the student, tried to convince students to dodge the IDF draft, and further announced his support for Hadash, the Israel communist party.
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
I’ve told this story before, but I think it bears repeating. As I came towards the end of my schooling, I was seriously thinking of the services as a career path. And I sought out a number of my teachers for advice, asking their opinion. Most of my teachers were a fairly conservative lot, most of the older ones were veterans of the Second World War, and many of the younger ones had some military service as well. And I wasn’t at all suprised at their support.
But I went to the Chaplain - who was also a teacher, taught us scripture. I respected him, and that’s why I went to him, but I knew he was a pacifist and more specifically I knew that he was quite active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. So I expected his views to be different.
Instead he told me that the services were a good career, and that I would find myself challenged in ways that I’d never been before and which would be good for me, and that there was real honour in serving your country.
I was very surprised at this, given his views, and I said so. And what he said has stayed with me, all my life, and especially since I’ve become a teacher myself.
He told me that he didn’t hide his political views, but as a teacher it wasn’t his job to impose them on his students. He said that he would view himself as a profound failure as a teacher if his students grew up parroting his views. It was his job to teach students how to make their own decisions, and how to make up their own minds about issues - not to tell them what to decide, or what they should think. His success as a teacher was most evident in the students who were able to challenge his views. Not the students who could simply repeat them.
Now, today, I am a history teacher (my second career - I did serve in the Australian Defence Force) and I try to live up to that idea. I don’t think I would be able to teach history effectively to high school age students without being free to express my beliefs - but I always make it clear when I am talking about what I believe as opposed to the hard facts, and I do my best to also mention other alternative viewpoints fairly. It’s about teaching kids how to think - not what to think. And they need to see that their teachers do form opinions and have opinions and can defend those opinions, or we are failing to make it clear to them why we study these things in the first place.
Unfortunately, teachers such as the one at Kiryat Tivon are content to simply tell students what to think, and want no dialogue and no debate about it.
Yes, unfortunately that is true. But what worries me is that we have rules to stop the bad teachers, they wind up stopping the good teachers too.
I’d rather have rules that say we can be open about our politics, because the bad ones are going to do it anyway.
I’d be all for that, outside the classroom. Inside it, I think teachers who keep expressing their views instead of teaching are being coercive. They’re saying, disagree with me, and instead of a c- you’ll get a d, or if you need extra time to turn in a paper, I’ll give you five minutes and then fail you. It becomes worth the student’s while to nod his head and agree, which then turns into Pavlovian training.
Actually, if anything a student who disagrees with me is more likely to get a high mark - because he shows he must be thinking for himself.
Parroting back my own ideas will not get you good marks in my class. It’s not that agreeing with me is bad, it’s that you need to make it clear why you agree with me, not just that you do. If you’re just trying to suck up to me, it won’t work out for you.
And it’s not about ‘expressing (your) views instead of teaching are being coercive.’ It’s about not concealing your views while you are teaching.
My country’s current opposition leader was a student at my school. Our current Prime Minister was a student at our brother school in Sydney - quite literally the opposite sides of Australia’s political spectrum. (Note, both of these were students at the schools well before my time as a teacher). So I’m also not necessarily teaching the ‘average’ students. My school produces its fair share of my country’s leaders. And part of the reason we succeed in that is because of how we teach and how we are allowed to teach.
Well, in an elite school for future leaders, I’d say the rules should be different. My concern is for the regular schools that teach the average students who just want to muddle through and get a job doing something they don’t find repulsive. For them, I’d prefer that boundaries be set, and the easiest way to do that is permit any sort of dialogue anyone wants in the hallway, but not as part of a class.
Government teachers are allowed to dominate and control politics in the USA.
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