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Arizona Ponders FCC Decency Standards For the Classroom
einhverfr writes "Eugene Volokh has posted an interesting discussion of a bill that has been introduced in Arizona, which would tie public school educator conduct to the FCC standards for decency for radio and television. The bill is essentially a three strikes system, firing teachers if they violate FCC standards three times. While the goal of the bill may seem reasonable, the details strike me as silly."
There's no need to bring this puritanical nonsense into the classroom.
Any good high school teacher should be able to say "you guys need to get your shit together" in good conscience. If, on the other hand, a genuinely bad teacher is abusive towards students, this is a job for the parents and school administration to handle rationally.
There are already enough rules handed down to schools by politicized bureaucracies to make education a nightmare, why add to the burden with further insanity from the FCC?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Censorship must start early in life, that's the first rule of government running propag... education system.
You can't handle the truth.
... it's hard to know where to even start. But possibly the absolute worst is at the end of Paragraph B:
B. For the purposes of this section, "public school" means a public preschool program, a public elementary school, a public junior high school, a public middle school, a public high school, a public vocational education program, a public community college or a public university in this state.
(emphasis mine)
For K-12 teachers, okay, I can kind of see this, although the penalties seem Draconian and I'm willing to bet that they already have in-school codes of conducts that prohibit swearing in the classroom. But are they actually saying that this is going to apply to professors in a classroom full of people who are legally adults? To discussions of literature containing the word "fuck"? To research faculty in their labs? Seriously?
Apparently the bill's sponsor, Lori Klein, showed off her gun by aiming it at a reporter a while back. That tells you everything you need to know about the mentality of the people behind this. They're completely insane. Um, apeshit, if you will. And they're growing in power all over the country.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's actually very difficult to fire a public school teacher in the US. Take, for example, the case of Freshwater. Not only did he repeatly ignore the curriculum, but he used his position as a teacher to preach his religious views to the class, and then *repeatly burned students*. Yes, he actually branded them. Used the science equipment to physically injure them. You might think that if a teacher does that he'd be fired on the spot, but it actually took months of paperwork and reviews to get him fired - and then he appealed it in a legal battle that cost the school millions of dollars.
I picked him out because he should be well-known to the slashdot crowd, but this isn't a liberal-vs-conservative thing. There are plenty of teachers from both sides who like to use their position to advance their own agenda (It's why some of them become reachers) and a lot who are simply incompetant. They are just very difficult and very expensive to get rid of. Teachers have some very powerful unions, and have used that power to achieve incredible job security.
So think.. what would schools really like to help manage their teachers? How about some rule that is hard to obey, ideally so convoluted that you'd need a lawyer just to work out what it permits, and for which offenders can be promply sacked? The FCC standards are ideal. Hard to even figure out, and it only takes a momentary lapse of thought to violate them. The law appears to have no right of appeal, no board review. It's just written for selective enforcement. If the management wants to continue employing a teacher, they can just turn a blind eye to the occasional bit of mild profanity... but if they want rid of a teacher, all they need to do is wait. When the rules are so difficult to follow, everyone will slip up sooner or later. Indecency becomes the perfect excuse.
Exactly what that results in would just depend on the school. It might be used as a quick-and-sneaky way to fire inept teachers without having to go through years of reviews and appeals, which is good. But equally it might be used for ideological clensing, so management can more easily stock the school with a staff who will indoctrinate the students into their own political agenda.
Gonna skip showers after gym class ?
Sex ed ?
You can already say "Shit" on TV if I recall, ....
Not in the States.
Anyway, I can assure everyone that this will pass?
Why?
Think of the children! mentality.
All you need is one uptight parent who doesn't want their little snowflake exposed to those horrible words and they'll have the school administrators shaking in their boots.
... then they might end up with a lot of empty classrooms. Great for saving school system costs.
. . . the details strike me as silly . . ."
"Oh, what sad times are these when ruffian teachers are allowed by FCC regulations to say 'Ni!' at will to school children!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This law would, of course, effectively give the ability to fire any public school teacher at any time, given that it doesn't limit itself to conduct in the classroom, or in public, and thus would disallow urination and defecation on the teachers' part.
How are these goals in any way reasonable?
While the goal of the bill may seem reasonable,
This is the Arizona Republican Party we are talking about here. Of course the goals of this Bill are not reasonable.
Do you think maybe the reason why it was so hard to get him thrown out was BECAUSE he was preaching religion?
Will they get someone in the classrom with a beeper who will beep over those words? That would be awsome!
I'm glad this doesn't apply to college. The first day of the capstone class of my major, our assignment was "I want two pages on the following topic: Why the fuck are you guys here?"
Of course, that was the sixth class I had with that particular professor, so things were a little more laid back.
"If a person who provides classroom instruction in a public school engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards..." The way this is worded makes it sound as if public school teachers risk being fired for violating FCC standards at any time -- even outside of the classroom, away from school or at home. Like, they could fire you for cussing at the bar after work, or stepping out to grab your paper without making sure all your bits were properly covered.
The FCC doesn't even know how to interpret its own indecency laws themselves and they are before the Supreme Court on this very issue this term. So now we are going to get third parties to interpret it for fourth parties? With something that has nothing to do with Federal or Communications? Yea. Ok.
I'm guessing Howard Stern won't be a substitute teacher any time soon.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Yet another chunk of government that needs 90% less power than it has.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Teachers' Unions.
Firing a teacher for anything short of driving their car into the school while drunk and getting a hummer from the head cheerleader is nearly impossible because of them.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
The FCC is great because when I worked as a radio DJ, I couldn't play music that had swears, but the track "Christraping Black Metal" by Marduk doesn't have any swears, and you can't make the case that it appeals to the prurient interest unless you're a rape fetishist. It just really doesn't work the way they intend it to.
"Decency" is a subjective thing. What's not decent in the US, may be perfectly decent, or even boring, in most EU countries. What's not decent in the US, like showing a nipple, is prime time TV in the Netherlands. I want my kids to have a free mind and a fair amount of knowledge about sex, so they don't get a girl pregnant and they don't catch diseases. Puritanism causes teen pregnancies, so let's not introduce this bs into the class room. It's bad enough as it is.
no, I don't have a sig
In northern Norway, crude words is considered a natural part of the language. I can literally go out and call a police officer hestkuk (horse cock) or hvalfætt (whale pussy), and nobody would fucking care.
Regards from Tromsø, Norway.
I can only guess that teachers in Arizona are not in the habit of ripping off nipple shields... so what is this really guarding against? Bad language? Most teachers have to look up the curse words of kids.
No, this isn't about teachers mis-behaving. This is about art, sexual education and the "wrong" kind of books. There are plenty of parents who want to sanitize all education so that little Timmy doesn't learn anything that might upset his parents and this is the way to do it. Don't bother banning books, art or subjects, simply say that undecent things are not allowed and then watch teachers censor themselves to not loose their jobs.
Real nice.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There go all the best teachers I had in public school. And let us not forget that these "curse words" are nothing more than a nearly thousand year old class war dating back to William the Bastard (or, as he's sometimes known by those less hostile toward him and his legacy, William the Conqueror). Almost the entirety of our profanities are made up of normal Anglo-Saxon words which were discriminated against by the conquerors to put the conquered in their place (for instance, "fuck" means "to strike"). Same time we got words like "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow" at the dinner table. And it's a good fucking thing this kind of law wasn't in place, or this important history lesson might not have been imparted to me by one of my more "foul-mouthed" teachers.
http://studentactivism.net/2012/02/09/arizona-law-sb-1467-would-make-it-illegal-to-teach-law-history-or-literature/
If you ever so anything that wasn't broadcast safe, even in the privacy of your own home, you're violating the law. So no more showering, changing clothes, or using the toilet teachers!
Lets see how the students, parents, and legislators prefer your new FCC-safe stench.
...the mines and the teachers. This is a swift kick to the latter's. Unions are only as strong as their cash boxes are deep. Force the Arizona teacher's unions to start defending members in court against something as wide open to interpretation as FCC decency standards, and that will drain the cashbox very quickly. A brilliant tactic on the part of the union busters; Arizona has long been a "right-to-work" state (read: anti-union) and this will effectively take the teacher's union out of the game if it gets through the legislature.
One of the best teachers I ever had called a student a dumbass once, as a joke. I like to think that I came out alright, nobody took it seriously. The country didn't devolve into horrible uncivilized masses, the Earth didn't fall into the sun, the universe didn't implode. It's not like students don't here a lot worse things at lunch anyway. Who are we really protecting, and to what extent? To the extent that it requires legislation? I think not.
And I say that as a Republican. Just recently we had a group of them go after our University funding, claiming that if tuition is higher then the students will benefit because they'll value their educations more. The moron pushing this had a degree from the University of Pheonix.
They all get elected on a mix of religious social issues and their oppositions refusal to admit that illegal immigration is a problem(even though Arizona is now the kidnapping capital of the country and there are entire sections of the desert near Tucson where you just can't go anymore thanks to the smugglers, including national parks).
I guess that all you can say is most of them aren't corrupt. They're generally too stupid to be corrupt.
It's interesting how this sort of situation works out at my school. I don't mean to offend anyone but a 9th grade english teacher is much easier to replace than a multivariable calculus teacher, the result being that the 9th grade english teacher follows every rule to the word, and the multivariable teacher just doesn't give a fuck. Which is fair enough because the kids in that class are mature enough to understand what's okay and what's not, the teacher occasionally cursing and not paying attention to attendance isn't going to have some huge impact on the students' life. Contrary to popular stereotypes, the kids I've been with in higher level classes are way better off socially than kids in easier ones. They also know whether or not they need to go to class, and have already figured out when cursing is okay and when it's not, so this kind of thing isn't a huge deal.
...I do remember there was one episode where the FCC decided censorship of the TV and radio wasn't enough and began to bleep out the characters' words and stuff. Is this a case of life imitating art?
Some panty waisted recruit complained about a RDC (recruit division commander) dropping JFCs at us when the division was fucking up. So, since today's Navy is the kinder, gentler Navy, the RDC got written up and chewed out for it. I mean damn, this is boot camp, RDCs are suppose to curse at you and drop JFCs, etcs. I'm not saying that this type of behaviour is appropriate for K-12, but in a college environment, I enjoy having an animated Prof who will drop an F bomb now and then to make his point.
Two free naked days!
This is just stupid.
The goal only seems reasonable if you're an ultra-rightist, paleoconservative, Evangelical super-Christian nutjob. This is asinine and should be treated as such.
Literature, even classic literature contains profanity, sex, and violence that would make the FCC rules nazis cringe. Does it really make sense to limit a child's education by omitting it? Figures though, schools in America are already among the worst in the world. Why not go just that little extra distance to seal that worst in the world title?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
The probably don't have a lot of experience with this education thing. Change can be unsettling; they're probably uncertain what goes on in these new-fangled "classrooms". Under the circumstances it's quite understandable that they'd turn to the comfort of something more familiar to them, like broadcast television.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and make it impossible for teachers to their jobs, teach.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
When you have no clue hook on to another with no clue.
I think the cat will do it to the pooch when the courts
force the FCC to scrap it's standards. The only thing
funnier was a company that requires employees to abide
by the Geneva Conventions... I asked for a copy... and
did not get one.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
And your kids are kicked out of school for swearing ?
You have to be remarkably incompetent and oblivious to think that the teachers are making schools unbearable.
It's your kids, people, not the teachers.