Expected, Inspected, & Respected.
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
Yesterday, one of my professors told a story today about how one of his teachers came to him as an administrator with a problem: he had a student who considered himself a neo-Nazi and the teacher wanted to know what he should do about that. Should he let the student share his views in class or should he shut him down and not allow the debate to happen at all? My professor said that as long as the student was being respectful, he should be allowed to say what he believed. The teacher should model democracy in the classroom through free speech, letting reasoned debate reveal the ignorance of the student's position. One problem with this stance is that it defeats itself. It is not possible for someone to espouse Nazi doctrine and remain respectful. Just because you can avoid using the N-word while saying people of African descent should be enslaved or slaughtered, does not mean it should be allowed in class. Another problem is that free speech only applies to relations between citizens and their government. It means you can't be prosecuted for things you say in public (within limits), it does not mean that you, or the rest of your students have an obligation to listen to hateful rhetoric. I wouldn't tolerate intolerance in my classroom and lend legitimacy to a student with alt-right arguments by giving them a platform, no matter how small that stage might be. Instead, I would talk with them one-on-one, maybe discuss with their parents (as long as I was fairly certain that's not where the student was getting it from), or get in touch with a former neo-Nazi like Maxime Fiset to correspond with the student directly. I didn't say any of this to my professor because it was 5:00pm, class was almost over, and I'd been at the University since 8:00am. I was half hoping that one of my classmates would do the dirty work of challenging the professor - it would prolong the class, perhaps, but we would have the opportunity to find out if there was more to the story and to hear from other perspectives in the class as to what the best approach may be. It might be worthwhile bringing it up again because there's a good chance this professor would be willing to have an open and honest discussion about it. Update:I raised the issue yesterday in class and we all had a good discussion about it. It became clear that my classmates agreed with me about not letting hate have a platform (at least the ones who spoke up). However, it became less clear as to what the situation in the teacher's classroom really was. He said that maybe the student in question was making a presentation about Nazi motivations during WWII without saying that was how things ought to be. In that case, I could see the value in allowing the student to present. If you simply demonize the people who believed (and continue to believe) in Nazi propaganda without looking at their motivations and underlying beliefs, it's difficult to understand why the war happened at all.
Our professor wanted to make the point that if we ever have to teach family studies, there will be sensitive subjects that come up and we will have students who have opinions on things like homosexuality and abortion that we won't agree with and we need to have a plan in place for how to handle those things when the time comes. Message received.
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David Wiebe
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