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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class

On Thursday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the principal of a local charter school, the Tallahassee Classical School, was forced to resign after three parents complained about an art teacher showing a picture of Michelangelo’s 16th-century sculpture of David.

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:

based on counsel from our employment lawyer, I’m not going to get into the reasons.

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 teacher mentioned that this was a nonpornographic picture, No. 1. The teacher said, “Don’t tell your parents,” No. 2. (...) Three parents objected. Two objected simply because they weren’t told in advance. One objected because the teacher said nonpornography. Nonpornography—that’s a red flag. And of course telling the students, “Don’t tell your parents”—that’s a huge red flag!

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":

98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice. (...) This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice.

Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":

Well, we’re Florida, OK? Parents will decide. Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor. Parents don’t decide what is taught. But parents know what that curriculum is. And parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture.

Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.

The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:

We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.

And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.

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:

We don’t use pronouns.

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.

"Don't tell your parents."

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 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.

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.

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?

More comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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