Posted on 01/14/2021 11:54:43 AM PST by Kaslin
A Tennessee high school principal is on administrative leave after he told students they should be alarmed by the recent crackdown on free speech on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Barton Thorne, the principal of Cordova High School, told students during morning announcements that they needed to be aware of the censorship happening on social media.
“I’m not going to tell you what to think, I just want to help you think,” he told students on a video that was later posted on YouTube.
“This isn’t about Trump,” he said. “This is about speech.”
Principal Thorne asked the young people to consider what happens when other groups filter and decide what you can hear and know about.
“There have been times even in American history when a small group of people decided what you can hear,” he said. “Think about totalitarian government. Think about North Korea. Think about China. What makes those types of systems possible is the restriction and elimination of the free exchange of ideas.”
Imagine that – a public school administrator who is teaching kids to think for themselves.
“What happens when the marketplace of ideas becomes a forced monopoly? What happens when you do not have dissenting opinions, when you do not have an exchange of competing ideas?” he told students.
Apparently, defending free speech is a big no-no in Shelby County Schools.
“The principal at Cordova High School has been placed on paid administrative leave, pending the outcome of the review of the comments that were made,” spokesperson Jerrica Phillips told television station WREG.
The school district’s Office of Equity and Access (whatever the heck that is) also weighed in on the situation.
“Emotionally charged situations, we have to sometimes temper back, recalibrate, think about the message we’re sending to our student,” spokesman Michael Lowe told the television station. “Because Cordova is like the City of Memphis, it’s made up of a salad bowl of many different students of all areas of Memphis.”
What sort of fruit salad nonsense is the Office of Equity and Access? Lowe seems to believe it’s a crime to encourage young people to think critically about the big issues of the day.
“We have to be aware and at a heightened sense. We have to be culturally aware and also have our students have an outlet so they can express themselves and feel value,” Lowe told the Fox 13 in Memphis.
Culturally aware? I think we all know what that’s code for.
Instead of punishing Principal Thorne he should be given a pay raise and a certificate of merit. He should be saluted for educating the kids at Cordova High School instead of indoctrinating them.
The taxpayers and parents in Memphis should be celebrating the fact that Principal Thorne is running Cordova High School as a place to educate kids, not indoctrinate kids.
We need more principals like that in America.
Oh, dear. It sounds like Klannish Inquisition has declared that this teacher is a Blasphemer and a Heretic.
The Memphis area is a lot more liberal than you might think. The nut job Rep Cohen is from Memphis.
And I’m sure the conservative and moderate parents immediately pulled their kids from school or at least called en masse and threatened to do so thus forcing an immediate reversal of the decision. Just kidding. That’s actually standing up to the tyrants and the right doesn’t do that.
I guess we should just shelve the old saying, “We will agree to disagree,” then, huh?
It’s the new revised Hitler Youth Curriculum
Your job depends on your ideology, not your competence.
Somebody turn him in, their system is working
This school is a:
A.) Gun Free Zone
B.) Speech Free Zone
C.) Pronoun Free Zone
D.) Communist Indoctrination Zone
E.) All the Above
They are thought control commissars, we must now call each other comrade
We have to be culturally aware and also have our students have an outlet so they can express themselves and feel value,
What the hell kind of stupid is that? They Don’t express themselves or feel value because....???
We are freaking doomed with idiots like the speaker on the payroll.
I hope that Principal vigorously defends himself with a lawyer at the tip of his spear.
He made the fatal mistake of trying to teach rather than indoctrinate.
Consider that Tennessee is one of the reddest of the Red States.
Memphis is a monstrous place that no one outside of Memphis is willing to claim, however.
But, it’s very concerning when the Thought Police are this active in Tennessee.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after Marsha Blackburn and Bill Haggarty shived the President.
And the students should be terrified that they just got a real life lesson about what happens when the Nazi’s take away your free speech. But many of them are too brainwashed to even figure it out.
He will win the lawsuit and be paid a lot of money. The admins will keep their jobs and stifle free speech.
He challenged them to think about free speech in reference to Twitter and got suspended for using his free speech. Sounds about right in the tyranny we now live in. I hope he fights it.
Speak out against fascist censorship and you are censored by the fascists.
What a bunch of utter Marxists chumps (trying not to use the more definitive qualifier that starts with a ‘p’ and ends with a ‘y’):
I was working w/ a high school kid just two days ago whose teacher assigned him a typical argumentative essay in which the student is to “Defend, Challenge, or Qualify” a reading.
But, instead of a full reading, this teacher gave the kids a quote from the Atlantic Monthly article by Ta-Nehisi Coates arguing for slavery reparations, and with no context:
“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”
I asked the kid if he was going to defend, challenge or qualify. He replied. “Oh, we’re not allowed to challenge.”
Working w/ high school and college kids across the country, I see this kind of crap all the time.
“I’m not going to tell you what to think, I just want to help you think,”
“That is a high crime in the leftist world.”
The school is just helping the principal to think by giving him more free time for thought. If necessary they may give him an unlimited amount of free time. Isn’t that thoughtful of them?
Oh well...Tennessee is off my list for new home searches. I thought Tennessee was very ConservatIve.
Barton Thorne, the principal of Cordova High School, told students during morning announcements that they needed to be aware of the censorship happening on social media.As a high school teacher, I've seen this game played out so many times by leftists teachers and administrators. Principal Thorne's "mistake" was to pose the idea of censorship as dangerous as a statement and not as a question. It's better done by isolating the facts from the judgment, at which point you can guide the students towards reasonable analysis rather than their own immediate judgment.
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