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Arizona Ponders FCC Decency Standards For the Classroom

Posted by timothy on from the state-schools-state-rules dept.

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."

8 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Our repressed media is bad enough by pegasustonans · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Our repressed media is bad enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You can already say "Shit" on TV if I recall, this sounds more like a back door attempt to stop proper sex education in favor of abstinence only propaganda.

      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?

    2. Re:Our repressed media is bad enough by purpledinoz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The FCC should just stay out of the censoring business and just manage the RF spectrum. Look at the Howard Stern show. Why was he not allowed to talk about sexual topics that Oprah was allowed to talk about? The rules were not clear, and were selectively enforced because the guy at the top didn't like him. Why was Janet Jackson's boob accidentally popping out such a big deal for the FCC? Putting the FCC in the classroom is the worst possible idea ever.

    3. Re:Our repressed media is bad enough by roman_mir · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's very important to raise generations of people incapable of distilling the real message out of the myriad pieces of nonsense that are bombarding an average person from all the MSM outlets.

      There is a very important reason to do this - running a totalitarian war machine is made much easier with a complacent population, it's much easier when the population believes everything it is told.

      For example: Iraq was not a threat to USA at any time, nor were they linked to 9/11, but majority of people (70% in that poll) were brainwashed by the politicians and the MSM enough to believe it.

      Right now every MSM channel in US is pushing Iran war, it's not even a question that the political mind is made up, the MSM system is in all gears to push that nonsense (and of-course US has a 'standing army', so there is nothing really that Congress or POTUS need to do to run that war, there is no need to search for more money, it's all already 'budgeted in'.)

      But how do you start, how do you create this insane mind control over the population? Well, you start young. You start with small type of censorship and then you go from there. Thus my previous comment (that was moded 'funny' but also a 'troll' as well) stands.

      --
      You can't handle the truth.
  2. Censorship by roman_mir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Censorship must start early in life, that's the first rule of government running propag... education system.

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
  3. There are so many things wrong with this ... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.
    1. Re:There are so many things wrong with this ... by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good luck teaching sex ed or even physiology. The good news is that using the FCC guidelines teachers will be able to cover anything that is extremely violent.

      I think this is still push back for declaring "Make Love, Not War".

  4. "Reasonable"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How are these goals in any way reasonable?