Oct. 22 2010
An epic and somewhat disturbing ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati states that Teachers while in the classroom are exempted from the rights and privileges afforded citizens under the First Amendment of the Constitution concerning free speech.
Teachers have no First Amendment free-speech protection for curricular decisions they make in the classroom, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday.
"Only the school board has ultimate responsibility for what goes on in the classroom, legitimately giving it a say over what teachers may (or may not) teach in the classroom," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, said in its opinion.
The decision came in the case of an Ohio teacher whose contract was not renewed in 2002 after community controversy over reading selections she assigned to her high school English classes. These included Siddhartha , by Herman Hesse, and a unit on book censorship in which the teacher allowed students to pick books from a list of frequently challenged works, and some students chose Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman.
This begs a question on how the ruling could be applied in cases where a school district decides to teach Intelligent Design as being an alternate theory beside Darwins' Origin of the Species more commonly referred to the Theory of Evolution.
Will the teacher have the right to actually state that Intelligent Design is not based on proven scientific principals? Or will it also lend a district the right to censor the teaching of credible scientific principles like Evolution and and make the teachers advocate dogma over science?
This Damocleasean ruling sets the stage for even broader range of debate where we denigrate the role of the teacher to an automaton rather than an individual with wide ranging ideals to teach our kids that might not be found in the particular book the school district decides to use or how they decide to approach science vs dogma.
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