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Teachers, Students Fight To Be Facebook Friends
An anonymous reader writes "State Governor Jay Nixon recently signed Senate Bill 54, making it illegal for students and teachers to be friends online as of later this month. Now, a Missouri teachers group is fighting the state's new law that prohibits them from being Facebook friends with their students by filing a lawsuit. From the article: 'The Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) filed a lawsuit on Friday, challenging a new law. MSTA is specifically asking the Circuit Court of Cole County to determine the constitutionality of the law’s social media portion.'"
Also what's the proposed legal situation if a student and/or the teacher uses a psedonym and is unaware that their friend is a teacher/pupil?
Now who's picking and choosing?
Out of 7,200,000 teachers (US Census 2008), you come up with a list of a couple hundred bad people and declare all of them "state sanctioned child molesters" who "spend their days preying on" their students?
The only possible compelling interest the state could claim would be protecting children from the likes of people on the list you linked, yet it's completely impossible to show how this law accomplishes that. If the law is an utter failure at preventing undesirable contact between teachers and students (and it is), then it loses the one compelling reason to even consider allowing its complete and utter disregard for the first amendment. Teachers aren't limited to Facebook and MySpace to meet and seduce their students. Believe it or not, they actually sit just a few feet apart for much of the year and nearly all of them have absolutely no interest in molesting anyone.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Aside from that, I can't help but wonder who in the hell wants to friend their teachers on a social network.
You might not, but it's still important to defend your freedoms.
Even if I can tolerate you until the school bell rings at 3pm or 4pm, that doesn't mean I ever want to have anything to do with you outside of class. You're a teacher; not my buddy.
Facebook didn't exist when I was at school, but there were several adults I knew that I might have added on Facebook. Some of them happened to be teachers -- parents of my friends. They were much more friendly towards me outside school.
Actually i'm torn on this. Yes freedom of speech is great but as someone who was hit on by a not very attractive female teacher at 14 as well as watched a friend trade sex for grades with said teacher there is actually sometimes where you DO need to "think of the children" because one forgets how much power a teacher can wield over a student.
So lets not lose sight of the fact WHY bans like this have been put it place. it isn't like these school boards have gone "Oh its Tuesday, we need to be douchebags" it is because time and time again we have seen both male and female teachers use their position to have sex with their underage students.
While there are plenty of truly awesome teachers out there (Thanks Ms Edwards for being a great teacher that inspired my lifelong love of science!) there are also some VERY sick puppies out there that are using the profession for their own sexual gratification. So I'd say this is one of the VERY few cases where one actually does need to "think of the children" when weighing and deciding this.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.