Why Teachers Need Tenure. And Unions.

Teachers who are passionate about teaching, who instill a passion for learning in their students, are rare enough without being hounded out of the profession.

From PZ Myers:

You may have noticed one thing about our so-called free society: there is one group of professional, well-educated, articulate people who have been de facto forbidden to speak aloud about their views. Those people are our teachers. In particular, if they dare to express liberal, socially conscious views in ways that risk a difference of opinion getting back to parents or, jebus forbid, donors and community activists, we all know what will happen: they will be fired. The teachers know this, too — almost all of them willingly self-muzzle, because it has been repeated over and over to them that actually having a social conscience will damage their relationship to their students.

It's all a big lie.

It's really an attempt — and so far, a very effective attempt — to silence a whole class of people who might say something enlightened about society and teaching. It's disgusting to see how often it works.

Here's a perfect example: Elizabeth Collins was a liberal, concerned teacher who created a blog to express her views about stuff she cared very much about, such as writing, teaching, and activism. Read it, it's good stuff, and it's obvious she cares passionately about those subjects. She also wrote about her experiences as a teacher, taking care to avoid naming the school or any individuals by name, but still being free about criticism and praise while protecting people's privacy.

SNIP

Yes, Elizabeth Collins was fired.

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We need to do more to protect teachers from this kind of bullying, this policy of silencing their contributions to society; actually, though, it's an asymmetric silencing, because teachers who express conservative views, who echo the dogmatic stupidity of their communities, do not experience this kind of oppression (unless they cross the line into physically injuring students, and even then the community tends to rally around them). You can be an openly Republican gay-hating commie-bashing environment-trashing teacher, but if you're a lesbian socialist civil rights activist in most parts of the country, you know what you have to do: you have to be very quiet and not raise a fuss if you want to keep your job.

Read the whole thing.