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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Presumably those schools have fewer people trying to push the limits of the policy.

You can't assume that teachers are going to follow these policies in good faith, which is why we can't have nice things.

Fewer than what? When I said "thousands of schools manage to negotiate that ostensible labyrinth with little trouble," I meant virtually every school allows teachers to decorate their rooms as they see fit, as long as they don't violate controversial issues policies or include decorations that are inappropriate for children somehow. You are making a claim based on zero evidence of what constitutes the norm.

How do you know the schools are successfully navigating it, rather than the controversial nature of said decorations just being hidden from parents, or schools just ignoring complaints?

Experience.

More importantly, the burden of proof is on schools to justify limitations on the personal liberty of their employees. So the burden lies on OP to show that the problem exists, not on me or anyone else to show that the problem does not exist.

Wait, how'd we get to civil liberties? We're talking about decorations on public property. As far as I know there is no such liberty and demanding the walls be painted blank white would violate no actual rights.

We are talking about limiting the free expression rights of public employees in the workplace. That might not be the most weighty of civil liberties, but it is not zero. Whether the First Amendment protects that right under current jurisprudence is separate question.

Public employees already have very controlled expression rights on the job. This argument seems really silly. Public employees are entrusted with unusual power and those powers come with limitations on speech while wielding that power. You would not be confused about this if cop cars were decked out in trump gear. They're decorating public property.

You would not be confused about this if cop cars were decked out in trump gear.

That is a strawman. I already noted that schools do, and obviously should, forbid teachers from prosthletizing on controversial issues. OP is proposing going far beyond that, to banning ALL decorations -- that means family photos, sports and alumni banners, references to hobbies, you name it.

And, again, the issue is not whether a school that banned all decoratiin would be held to have violated the First Amendment. It is whether they should enact such a policy, regardless if whether they can get away with it.

What does a "civil liberty" mean to you?

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