Kieffer… the major problem as I see it with expecting the students to pick up on the homophobic hypocritical behavior of the school board members is that THE most important value in their lives is to be accepted by the majority… to fit in… to, above all NOT do or say anything that goes against the “group think” of the hour.

The school board members are representative of the entire cohort of over-the-hill adults and therefore are summarily dismissed as valid human beings to begin with. What they “demonstrate” would be irrelevant to the vast majority of students.

Something happens on the way to becoming an adult in our society. Many kids see being gay or lesbian as no big deal UNTIL some “adult” or institution teaches them to hate or at least to discriminate. It’s all downhill from there.

One of my fondest memories is of the response to me by a fellow I came onto during my brash teenage “sewing of wild oats” days. I told him I found him attractive and would love to go to bed with him (or words to that effect). He replied: THANK YOU FOR THE COMPLIMENT. I APPRECIATE THAT YOU FIND ME ATTRACTIVE BUT I AM NOT A GAY MAN AND MUST DECLINE YOUR OFFER (or words to that effect). That was the end of it. I didn’t feel less a person for trying. He and I carried on our friendship for a long time on a strictly platonic basis.

Now THAT is the behavior of a true, mature ADULT and one the school board should be modeling… a win/win attitude. Instead, what we get is that it’s OK to discriminate or more likely to outright shun and/or persecute (disguised by some other hypocritical pretext, of course). So in place of harmony and mutual support where everybody wins we get gay bashing where everybody loses.

Yup… you gotta be taught to hate… it doesn’t come naturally.

re: RAE

Thank you for your insights. I agree that national service can be a good thing provided that those in charge do not use those folks as an instrument to implement their twisted vision of hegemony. As far as the legal age, it is terribly disturbing that an 18 year old, who is not even old enough to legally drink a beer, is given a loaded automatic weapon and sent into the desert…

To Beer…

re “stint in the army”...
Back when I was a confused and aimless teenager (as opposed to now as a confused and aimless senior citizen) my father suggested I go “regular” since I was already in the RCAF reserves (Canada). Since I had just declared I wasn’t going back to high school and since I didn’t have a job,... well, the long story short is I became a member of the armed forces. Luckily we weren’t at war. I left the care of my parents and went straight into the care/discipline of my government… all expenses paid plus a paycheque & travel & status! Gave me a few years to figure out my next move.

I go through all that to suggest that for some young people a “stint” in the armed forces may not be such a bad thing… PROVIDED… NO ONE UNDER AGE 21 YEARS IS ACTUALLY SENT INTO COMBAT. If by that age you still want to “serve your country” by getting yourself potentially blown to smithereens, then so be it. But until that age, since in many places you can’t even drink or vote, you must be deemed not fully mentally competent (true enough, eh?). The training and discipline is great for many of the 18-20 years, but no way should they be in harm’s way for political reasons.

re “college as a prerequisite for a high paying job” - that used to be truer in the past than today. I made more money as a high school dropout than I made with a Master’s degree. I was informed by several millionaires that MOST people with lots of money are NOT college educated. A prerequisite to easy street these days is… WITS… CLEVERNESS… HARD WORK… and a bit of RUTHLESSNESS. You don’t get taught much about those subjects in school. You either learn how to play the money game or you don’t. I also helps if your parents are loaded… doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at making money but at least you might have a few doors of opportunity opened for you.

and Cynthia… I love your expression “untrue myths” - it’s such a politically correct way of saying OUTRIGHT LIES. But lies about gays and lesbians is only the beginning of the lies our culture feeds us in order to achieve a controlled and compliant CONSUMER. We are fed lots of lies of commission and omission by parents, churches and schools. By the time most of us sort the wheat from the chaff, it’s too late to do anything about it.

re: RAE

Concerning parents, they do stamp their impressions on the young, often to tragic results. As John Lennon once said: “keep you doped with religion, sex and TV”. It is amazing that so many people, are able to, almost miraculously, to one day realize that nearly all of the assumed programming is false. But of course this realization is deemed a threat to the existing order, because the ultimate goal is not control but compliance. Talk of ethics, morality, etc., are merely propaganda tools to keep the vast number of the unwashed from questioning their true status. Faux patriotism is trotted out whenever the body supply for armed service starts to get low. Whether it is a President Clinton, Bush or Obama, the chief executive always puts forth the idea that a stint in the army/navy/marines/air force is a way to pay your college tuition. This is always couched in reasonable civic language. It is not. It is actually a form of citizen slavery, but very few citizens acknowledge this fact. On the other side, many use this voluntary armed force as a way to refuse empathy for those in its service. “If they were dumb enough to sign up, they get what they deserve.”
Never mind that the economic circumstances of the human condition may nearly necessitate this enrollment. Day after day, are not the people told that in order to obtain a high paying job, college is a prerequisite? The tragedy is that misguided parents actually believe that putting their children in harm’s way is civic and proper.

The shame of it all is that much of the homophobia in the United States is based on untrue myths about homosexuals (pedophiles are homosexual, etc.) and only education can correct those myths. 

Approximately 10% of all students will self-identify as gay.  75% of teenage suicides are in homosexual teenagers; 40% of homeless teenagers are homosexual. How are those Oklahoma parents going to feel when their narrow-mindedness results in their child ending up as one of those statistics?

Good going, Beerdoctor! I completely agree that what is passed off as “education” in Grades 1-12 is today little more than conditioning. At university level it’s not much better. I don’t have experience outside the humanities, but I can attest to the fact that most Social Work courses are geared towards manufacturing AGENTS OF THE STATE whose philosophies of life and values must be deemed acceptable by whatever “authority” is currently in charge. Only woe will befall any social worker who acts on the belief that his/her primary concern is for the client’s welfare. Social workers within the system are there solely to enforce the rules and regulations of the system. Should these fly in the face of what the client actually needs, too bad (for the client.)

Much of the problem must be owned by parents who, in our society, have been given some inalienable right to screw up their children in any way they choose short of physical/sexual abuse. The fact that MUCH more damage can be done psychologically is completely ignored by the system. You can mess with their heads but don’t touch lower down!

Some day we might grow up.

This is somewhat difficult, but I will try to work through this. Education is a shambles because very few want to admit that what so many think of as schooling has become a mechanism to reinforce the social order that never stops claiming that the ownership class deserves all the privileges and that the myriad number found in the lower order, should be grateful for whatever they are able to scrape together in this existence.
It is not surprising that expenses for a “higher” education continue to increase. Capitalist requirements act as a convenient vaccine to stave off any lower class attacks on these higher institutions of advanced thought. A system needs the myth of expertise to convince those on the outside that if they can not get in, they will at least admit that those finished products of the educational system are indeed experts… experts who will be immediately called upon to solve problems for the government, as either a cabinet appointee or paid consultant.
But hardly anyone wants to admit that much of the genius in America is done by people thinking for themselves. Independent thinking is not encouraged by either the government or the corporations. Free thinking is a conduit to freedom, which the status quo rightfully feel threatened by.
In less sophisticated societies, censorship would be brutally overt. But in the United States where marketing has been raised to an exact science, there are many subtle ways to keep certain ideas away from the main stage.
I suspect the canceling of this homophobic awareness project is, despite all the protests here, a typical OK state reaction. A state built up on the myth of the cowboy and the oil wildcat does not like to be reminded of its own brutality; whether its a rodeo, or a group who decided to kill someone to assuage their own homophobic uncertainties.

Ron, I looked through some of the writing of Gatto a few years ago. At first I thought he was saying something quite valid, helpful, revolutionary. He may be. But I doubt that there are many teachers who will pay attention to him for long. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but he does rant far too much to be taken seriously by enough people. I wish he was taken seriously.

Ron wrote: ” I did a stint as a substitute teacher and lasted one semester before I was terminated for not being a babysitter and really trying to make a difference.”

I too was invited/enticed into teaching Health 101 for a provincial university. That class hated me… I didn’t see their feedback at the end of the course but I didn’t need to. There were 25 of them and all but one or two expected me to “babysit” - they wanted me to feed them the information, one line at a time, exactly as it would be asked on tests and exams. I refused to “teach” - I expected students at this level to know how to learn and to want to do so… I saw my role mainly as a resource to explain concepts and provide guidance when asked or I thought it might be necessary to save them time.

Other than that each student had a textbook, a list of resources, and a schedule. I told them that many of the questions on tests and exams would be found ONLY in their materials, not from class notes.
I couldn’t believe the stuff I got on tests - I wouldn’t have expected that garbage from 6th graders let alone 1st year University students.

From that experience I concluded that students coming from public education today are being TRAINED not educated. Considering how the “approved” educational materials are edited and expurgated, that “training” is clearly focused on maintaining status quo - including on topics such as human sexualities. Students are really getting short changed by the system. Most of them never realize it their whole lives. Luckily some do… but it often takes a decade or two for them to realized how badly they’ve been duped/used/abused.

We’ve got a long way to go.

I grew up mostly in several red states in the South and the so-called heartland. All I can say is this reminds me of how glad I am that I got out of there.

God, it’s depressing. And each one of these sh*tholes has two senators.

“How to think got replaced with what to think…” writes Ron Ranft.

I completely agree… except in the cases of teachers who haven’t become agents of the state.

Public education’s unstated but underlying purpose/agenda is to turn out (condition) raw humans into law-abiding (Kowtow-ing) CONSUMERS who do as they’re told, work their asses into the ground to earn as much as they can so they can own as much as they can and pay as much as they have to the state in taxes as is possible, without complaint, uprising or insurrection.

It’s a delicate balancing job.

True “Socratic” teachers soon become dispirited with the system and leave it. True “agents of the state” - those who just love to push the BS-of-the-day into young minds and get their gold stars for doing so, abound ad nauseum.

The Cree, I believe, do not have a word for “why?” The Cree children learn by listening to stories and watching… mostly watching. There is no why? asked. The “why” they must discover for themselves. Their teacher is life itself. THAT is respect. Almost everything else is ABUSE.

Why no “why?” answers. Because most of the answers given by adults come with an agenda… like predigested food (whether the adult in question actually realizes it or not). The learner is not allowed to discover - only to parrot. Too bad.

I suspect Taylor was fired for insubordination. She probably completely disagreed with some narrow-minded attitude displayed by a “superior” and wasn’t prepared to just shut down the class project as commanded because of the ignorance and fear on the part of the school board/superintendent/parents etc.

I applaud her for sticking to her guns in spite of the result. Always remember to pick your battles, folks. Sometimes to win the war you need to sucker the opposition by letting them win a battle or two first.

... and NEVER FORGET that you make a FUNDAMENTAL ERROR when you assume that those set in authority over you know what the hell they are doing. It’s better to get fired than to cave when you know you’re right (unless you have hungry mouths to feed and even then just find another job before quitting).

Homophobes get so hot and bothered so quickly over nothing. OVER 90% OF ALL INDIVIDUALS PREFER HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS - always have, always will. Even if society APPROVED, PROMOTED and TAUGHT homosexual relationships there would be no more and no fewer homosexuals than there are now. Homophobes can huff and puff and turn cartwheels until they turn blue and they won’t change one damn thing.

As any educated person knows - sooner or later any individual will follow his/her inclinations despite society’s rules, regulations and condemnations. All society’s repression accomplishes is to create more problems for themselves and the individuals repressed (more mental disorders than need be).

All we can do is wait for the “majority” to mature enough to realize this whole thing is a complete non-issue. Just another century or two should do it!

Tolerance. Now there’s a million dollar word treated like a penny.

I loved the teacher’s explanation: I’m not asking that they change their belief system, I’m asking if they are capable of tolerating other’s.

Those few words speaks volumes. But don’t speak too loudly.

“Value systems” and “community standards” have no commanding rights over the right of Free Speech.

Oklahoma has an average IQ in the double digits.

The values that we all have are not so much taught, as they are adopted over time. Most modern public schools do not intend, at least explicitly, to force values upon students or teach values to them. Exercises or activities such as student production of this play are intended to allow participants and the audience the opportunity to observe and then examine values from different sources. It is supposed to be up to the individual whether or not they wish to agree or disagree with these new values.

The means by which the teacher chose to present this new information, that particular play, is probably as valid as any.

Historically, school boards and their administrations have based their permissions or refusals of such activities upon the extent to which those activities cause a relative degree of disruption of the daily functions of teaching and learning. Of course, any such judgments are affected to a large degree by subjectivity.

Hopefully the teacher involved has landed a much better position, with higher salary and benefits, with a school district that practices something closer to democracy.

I don’t know exactly what “Confluent Education” is, but apparently it piously validates “value systems” that include hysterical homophobia.

I have to wonder if their school agricultural program prohibits the cultivation of wavin’ wheat that smells too sweet.

Forget it, Debra… it’s Oklahoma.

Are you kidding? Tolerance and diversity ARE “values spelled out by the board of education in the curriculum.” To teach the violent histories of the African Americans, the American Indians, etc, but to leave out the plight of the homosexuals is a double standard. If one accepts that homosexuality is a part of the human condition, then one cannot justify this double standard.

Homosexuality is a hot button topic and if not handled properly will cause a firestorm of reaction. Homosexuality is a dangerous subject for a teacher to address as was evidenced by the resignation of this teacher.

That’s the point isn’t it? The boundaries of ignorance are once again being pushed and a “firestorm of reaction” is great. People are discussing this. This teacher should be commended.

It is not the teacher’s job in public school to teach values other than those spelled out by the board of education in the curriculum.  There are methods of teaching that allow students to value a topic according to their own value system.  Confluent Education teaches students to value according to their own value systems.  It is a system that allows diversity of thought.  Homosexuality is a hot button topic and if not handled properly will cause a firestorm of reaction. Homosexuality is a dangerous subject for a teacher to address as was evidenced by the resignation of this teacher.

Hey, at least it wasn’t the “Senator Craig Project.”