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An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class
Reading the entire interview, the school board comes out looking only slightly more reasonable than was portrayed in the "mainstream media".
The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says:
To me, the overall tone of Bishop's statements suggests that the David incident was in fact a major reason, if not the sole reason, for the firing (sorry, "resignation under pressure"). Bishop says:
The interview doesn't say in what context the teacher told the students not to tell their parents or that the images were not pornographic. (Maybe the original article does? I haven't read it because it's paywalled.) Out of context, it does sound suspicious. I suppose the first could have been a joke. As for the second, I'm not sure why the teacher would need to tell the students in the classroom that the images were not pornographic. In any case, my priors are that it is extremely unlikely that the teacher was a "groomer" trying to sexualize the kids.
The year before, the school had notified the parents that their children, who are 11 and 12 years old, were going to be exposed to the horror of a statue depicting a human. This year, the teacher teaching the class told the principal (the one who was later fired) to send out a similar notice, but the principal apparently forgot. This is an "egregious mistake":
Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":
The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:
An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill. Personally, I think it's just typical American prudishness. In other Western countries, it is perfectly normal and unremarkable for statues with exposed penises and breasts (non-pornographic, of course) to be displayed in public, where they are easily seen by children of all ages.
At one point, in describing the school, Bishop says:
Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.
Feels like this could easily be an off-hand gag in the genre of the chemistry teacher telling her class "We're going to be playing with fire today. Don't rat me out!" Such quotes, said every day, can look monstrous in print when a personnel decision needs to be justified.
If we found out that high school chemistry teachers were frequently enlisting their students to cook meth in the school labs, it might be a good idea for the ones not doing that to that stop making the joke.
The reality is that some teachers are bad actors. So when a kid comes home and says “mommy today teacher has having us look at photos of naked men. He told us not to tell you, but you always taught me not to keep secrets from you” it has kind of a different timbre than it might have 20 years ago.
I expressed a similar sentiment elsewhere ITT, but the good actors here need to be calling out the bad ones the loudest, not making cheeky jokes. “Your teacher might be sexually abusing your child” is not a joke most parents are going to like.
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If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight. Teachers that undermine parental relationships with their children are abusing both their own authority and their students.
As an isolated incident, that sort of "off-hand gag" is in poor taste. If it becomes time-worn, it is abusive.
It can be humor and text doesn't work very well at capturing this.
No, it does not matter if they are intended as jokes or not, it still builds the same meme. Especially when the schools are also rife with sincere and unironic efforts to undermine parental authority, the "joke" actually plays out as "haha, only serious."
Good god, do you only allow pro-social humor in your world? There's almost always a force threatening to destabilize someone's authority.
Wait, edgy humor is OK again? When are we unbanning all the shitlords?
In what way is this an edgy joke?
Aren't edgy jokes a subset of non-pro-social humor?
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They're said every day by different teachers across the globe, not the same teacher or even the same school repeating it every day.
As an isolated gag, it's funny. Because the teacher I'm sure had 0 actual fear of getting fired for showing his students Michaelengo and was perfectly fine with them showing their parents, and thought that was common knowledge for everyone listening, until he actually was fired.
If the teacher "had 0 actual fear of getting fired" why would the joke ever occur to them? It's the joke of someone who is aware of the hazard, or there is no joke. Now, it may be that a teacher in an urban Portland Oregon school full of good little liberals might make that joke as an outgroup dig, but a teacher at a Florida school where "we don't use pronouns" is surely aware that he is operating in a different environment.
My chemistry teacher made the same joke a couple decades ago about not telling our parents we were playing with fire when we first got to use Bunsen burners. I guess I can't entirely rule out that she genuinely thought there was a .0000000001% chance of her getting fired for having us use them, but come on.
I'll grant that in his current environment he would have a better idea of things on the ground, but prior to this I really thought the level of antagonism towards teachers was mostly just getting played up by teachers who were pushing borderline pornographic shit in the name of inclusivity (and God knows this place opened my eyes up to some of the things some teachers were putting in their curriculums) and they were bullshitting about the degree to which they were constrained in terms of teaching normal stuff to get other teachers and average people to fall in line on their side.
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Was the teacher fired? The top level post here talks about the principal being fired, but I haven't seen any specific news about the teacher.
It's not clear. I think the principal is fired because they were responsible for sending out the notice and because (as with most cancellations) the Board was already unhappy with them and this was just a politically palatable pretext to do something they already wanted to do.
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This has nothing to do with the law.
It's not a direct result of that law - it's not like the law required this firing, or anything like that. But do you really doubt that's a significant part of what set the context for this incident?
it has nothing at all to do with the law
the law was a response to the context of school teachers using public institutions and their authority over other people's children to groom children and normalize behavior and gender ideologies they know full-well their parents find at the least objectionable for children and engaging in various acts to hide that from parents
the law didn't cause school teachers to do that, it was a response to them doing it
the context is the reason this happened, too, and it has nothing at all to do with the law
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School parents upset with their kids seeing nudity? No, I don't think the law was part of it. It might have set the context for the coverage, at most, but that's a separate issue.
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They even showed it in years past with a permission slip and just forgot to send out the slip this year. It's a paperwork mishap elevated to a firing offense because of the ongoing culture war over parental rights.
failing to get permission to show potentially sexual content to other people's children isn't merely a "paperwork mishap" and trying to downplay it to that characterization looks like agenda
What precisely do you mean by this term?
something which can be viewed as sexual content by a reasonable person
not interested in playing these games where you pretend you don't understand what that phrase means when the reality is you simply disagree a reasonable person would view showing penises on the statue of David to children is potentially sexual content
Why put it in terms of perception or the display to children? A penis is a sexual organ. Is there a context where you wouldn't regard a representation of a penis as sexual content?
Equivocation fallacies are a dirty trick.
"Sexual content" = "Pornographic content"
"Sexual organ" = "Reproductive organ"
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I'm just trying to say it's incompetence not malice, their policy was to send out a notice to parents, they had sent that out in the past when they showed the same images. They just didn't this year and the principal blames miscommunication. This wasn't a malicious conspiracy to sneak nudity into schools without parents permission, they had been showing this stuff and getting permission for a while they just messed up this year and didn't send out the notice.
You can say that's a really severe a form of incompetence and we can disagree about that, but it's not malice.
causing an accident and killing someone may not be malice, but the person is dead all the same
if this "paperwork mishap" was failing to send homework home, no one would care
you don't think there is even a reasonable argument for there to be harm (or even justifiable suspicion) in this scenario which sets the context for the strategy of downplaying anything you cannot look past through benefit of the doubt
Yes there are forms of incompetence that have severe consequences and which people need to be fired for. I don't think this is such a case, you may think it is, but it's still not a conspiracy to corrupt the youth.
What is the harm done to a 12 year old when they see Michelangelo's David? Are the 49/50 parents who said they're totally fine with their kids seeing this sculpture abusive parents authorizing the school to harm their child?
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I'm not one for blaming people for the over-reactions of others.
But...perhaps one should show some judgment about saying such things right before showing nudity (which some Americans will view as introducing their kids to sexual material).
Like...even if LibsofTikTok has everyone on their guard about overreaching teachers there's a reason this is seen as sketchy.
You'd think teachers of all people would know this.
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