Tennessee Principal on Leave After Warning Kids about Twitter Censorship

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Despotism (Encyclopedia Britannica film, circa 1946)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaWSqboZr1w
“A community is low on a ‘Respect’ scale if common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes.”

“...in a downright despotism opposition is dangerous whether the despotism is official or whether it is unofficial...”

“A community rates low on the ‘Information’ scale when the press, radio, and other channels of communication are controlled by only a few people and when citizens have to accept what they are told.”

“See how a community trains its teachers”
“...these students are being taught to accept uncritically whatever they are told. Questions are not encouraged.”

“And if books and newspapers and the radio [and facebook and youtube and...] are officially controlled the people will read and accept exactly what the few in control want them to. Government censorship is one form of control. The newspaper that breaks the government censorship rule can be suspended. It is also possible for newspapers and other lines of communication to be controlled by private interests...”

Democracy (Encyclopedia Britannica film, circa 1946)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx25aMPvbJo

“The newspapers of a real democracy meet these tests...”

Newspaper checks.
1. Balance of coverage
2. Disclosure of source
3. Competence of staff

1946; eh?

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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