Some days I read the news and think, “They just make it far too easy.” Take the case of the first grade teacher in Lexington County School District Three in Lexington, South Carolina, who was accused of making her students rub her bare feet in class. The school district claims they took appropriate action when they disciplined the teacher, but the parents are furious that the teacher hasn’t been fired. I’m curious about how bad her corns were. The answer to that question might be the difference between poor judgment on her part or cruel and unusual punishment.
Then I discovered that a teacher in a suburban Chicago Christian school has been charged with masturbating behind a podium while teaching his math class. I tried to write a couple of math jokes about poles for this story but the obscenity is simply too great for humor. Police believe that he may have been doing this on and off for the past ten years. Ten years!
While I was reading through these stories I discovered a story about a teacher who was arrested for having sex with one her 14 year old students. I lost the link when I went shut down the computer to make dinner. Later, when I searched for the story, I typed the words “teacher” and “sex” and “14-year-old” into a Google search engine. I received 32,800,000 results in 0.24 seconds. I decided at that point that I didn’t want to read anymore. 32,800,000 hits about teachers having sex with 14-year-olds is 32,800,000 hits too many.
Homeschooling critics may believe that we are harming our children by keeping them out of the halls of public academia, but I am 100% certain that as long as my children are homeschooled their teacher will never ask them to rub his feet. He will never practice self-gratification during math class, or conduct himself in a manner that will garner 32.8 million hits on Google. While I still believe that the perpetrators of these incidents are in the vast minority of professional teachers, that’s little consolation for the students involved. Quite frankly, I’m not willing to gamble my children’s health and safety on the hope that their public or private school teacher is one of the good ones. They are far too valuable to me.
That's just creepy.
ReplyDeleteI'm always amazed that people send their children off to be taught by people they don't know and then accuse homeschoolers of being too sheltering. With schools consolidated into large, central locations, there's no community in schools. How can you trust people with your children when you don't even know them? And really, what percentage of parents knows anything about the people teaching their children? It's been many a decade since parents and teachers routinely met in the community or had dinner together. They just assume the state licensing is enough to protect their kids. As if pedophiles weren't capable of passing tests?
ReplyDeleteIt's not like the culture enforces some moral standards the way it used to, so you could be reasonably sure that the schools enforced some standard of decency. When I was in high school, there were no fewer than 3 teachers accused doing things with students in our very small school. One of them seemed to be a case of lying teenage girls, but two of them certainly weren't. Only one of whom went to jail. The other confirmed case just waited for the girl to reach 18, got divorced, and married her. He's still teaching. The schools don't even enforce a proper distance between teachers and students, let alone anything like a moral code, or he'd have been out on his butt.
This is not the kind of "authority" I'm willing to submit my kids to.