General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Junior high teacher tells kid to remove Marines t-shirt or get suspended (has guns on it) [View all]Nine
(1,741 posts)I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
I guess we'll also have to disagree about the need for discipline in schools or in the military. When my son's teacher asks him to do something, I expect him to do it. I expect this of all students except in the most extreme cases, like a teacher demanding sexual favors or a teacher instructing a student to hurt someone else. I never said the military wanted automatons, but don't tell me they don't expect soldiers to follow orders except, as I said, in rare cases. When a student defies a teacher or a soldier defies a superior, of course I expect them to receive warnings about the disciplinary consequences of their actions. Even toddlers get warned about time-outs. You think protesting an order while failing to comply is not insubordination? That's exactly what insubordination is.
I don't understand your fixation on the fact that the teacher threatened suspension if the kid refused to comply. Every command or order inherently contains the threat of discipline if you fail to comply. That's what an order is. Otherwise it's just a request. You seem to be arguing that it was not so bad for the teacher to ask the kid to turn the shirt inside out, but it was just dreadful and "unnecessarily aggressive" that he insisted on it, even threatening disciplinary action if the kid continued to refuse. By that logic when a student protests an order, teachers are supposed to just say, well ok, and walk away.
And we'll have to agree to disagree on the reasonableness of going to the media with this complaint without talking to a single adult at the school - not the teacher, not the principal, not the superintendent, not even someone on the board of education. I call that a jerk move by people with an agenda. You seem to think all those people couldn't be trusted to handle the situation without retaliating against the kid or staging a massive coverup and that there would be no way to possibly protect against such an occurrence. I find that ridiculous and paranoid.
You say you have no agenda. I believe otherwise. I think the pro-gun forces were hoping this would be a great example of "anti-gun hysteria" and the superintendent took the wind out of their sails by saying the shirt was fine and the parents would have known that if they had bothered to ask. So now the story is changing to... uh, well, maybe the dress code needs to be designed so that it can't be reasonably interpreted in more than one way. And maybe this school isn't anti-gun, but the teacher certainly is!!
It's all so ridiculous.