When 16-year-old Sean Allen brought a tape recorder into his World Geography class in a Colorado high school he sparked an overdue debate about teachers pushing off their political beliefs onto their students. The tape recording, found here, exposed a 20-minute political diatribe of a Bush-hating, anti-capitalist teacher who was challenged by his student for espousing his opinions onto the class.
According to a local Denver news station, the teacher, Jay Bennish, was put on administrative leave pending an investigation.
Threatening a lawsuit, the teacher’s attorney, David Lane, stated that “Bennish has a right to put out his message.” Bennish himself reportedly warns his students in the beginning of the school year that “…you know, I’m going to be throwing out stuff that even I don’t believe in, ok? I’m just trying to provoke you guys into taking positions.”
This controversy caused students at the high school to respond. The day after the story made national headlines, students marched out of school in support of the teacher’s right to free speech. Other students, displeased with the political rhetoric they receive in their classes reported to a local news station that hearing anti-Bush comments from their teachers is common, the only difference here being that it was caught on tape. Despite criticism from his peers and other Allen told 9News, “I still feel like I am doing the right thing.”
This is not the first time that students have taken a stand to end political indoctrination at school. For example, one high-school student in Maryland, Andrew Saraf, argued that a Peace Studies course that was offered at his high school was headed by someone with a “political agenda.” He notes that the teacher “…wants to teach students the ‘right’ way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction…”
The teacher, a former Washington Post reporter and founder and president of the Center for Teaching Peace, Colman McCarthy, claims that he welcomes dissent from conservatives. However, according to the Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), when the school announced that the commencement speaker in May 2002 was going to be Condoleezza Rice, McCarthy could not hold back his disapproval. He was quoted in the student newspaper as saying, “Students deserve better than someone who advocates, as Rice does, sending U.S. pilots to kill human beings in Afghanistan.”
The SAF article also included an excerpt from Teacher magazine that described the reaction that teachers had after listening to McCarthy discuss his Peace Studies course: “When you close your classroom door, you’re in charge and there’s a lot you can get away with. The others [the teachers] nodded in agreement…Suddenly, the teacher registered with alarm that a reporter’s tape recorder was running. She declared that her comments were off the record and abruptly walked away from the group. Reconsidering their candor, one by one other teachers in the circle requested that their comments, too, be considered off the record.”
Saraf and Allen have bravely come forth to try and open up a dialogue between parents, students, and teachers about the power dynamic in classrooms and problems that could result from teachers frankly discussing their political opinions. This dialogue could lead to lasting solutions for students who feel like they are not getting the whole story when they enter their classrooms.
Rosemarie Capozzi is an intern at Accuracy in Academia.
