Letters the week of 3/9/06

Free speech in the classroom

It has come to my attention that a school teacher named Jay Bennish of Overland High School/Cherry Creek School district has been put on unpaid leave because he compared what George Bush said to what Adolf Hitler said. Mr. Bennish also questioned and criticized our foreign policy in Colombia, the Middle East and Cuba.

I used to be a history/social studies teacher. Sometimes a teacher has to say some radical, provocative and/or unpopular ideas in order to spark a debate or a discussion. Mr. Bennish did not curse or slander anyone; therefore, he is protected by the Bill of Rights. It is simply freedom of speech, and if you do not like it you do not have to listen. Apparently, Mr. Bennish has a lot of support because more than 150 students walked out of school when they heard he was suspended. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Mr. Bennish, teachers and students should have academic freedom. He did not yell fire in a crowded theater; therefore, his rights should be protected and he should get his job back. It sounds to me as if he was getting students interested in learning.

Neil Harry Lori/via Internet

More human misery and concomitant denials of dignity, freedom and self-expression have been suffered under various socialist and other systems than ever under capitalism, which requires political and personal freedom for entrepreneurship and risk-taking to flourish.

The most violent and repressive societies on earth can be found and numbers counted from bodies crunched in parts of Africa, the Middle East, China and the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Saddamite Iraq before the United States defeated and freed them respectively.

Israel would have suffered a finished genocide by now from Arab states, which have launched at least five formal wars in the country's six decades of existence, if the United States hadn't "intervened" where the rest of the world wouldn't.

And a "teacher" who can't tell a terrorist from a "freedom fighter" shouldn't be allowed any closer to a school than a crack dealer. (Here's a clue, Teach—do they TARGET the innocent, or do they hide among them with rockets, bombs and Kalashnikovs?)

So how does Jay Bennish realistically expect high schoolers captive to his class by law to notice these not-so-subtle facts when he's too stupid to know them himself?

Just as it's been stated that the Constitution isn't a suicide pact, the First Amendment shouldn't be a mandate for agenda-driven mediocrities to establish themselves invulnerable from any of the consequences that reality and performance impose on the rest of us!

For I would be as adamantly opposed to an Aryan Nation advocate or Flat-Earther or any other instructor who skews and eschews facts in their presentations as I am to Mr. Bennish. They are all kindred in their obeisance to their own world views and should not be paid or tolerated by we who entrust them with the sacred trust of our children and their education.

Jeffrey H. Miller/Boulder

We all have opinions, some more rooted in truth than others. And while we like to think that our beliefs are always justified, when challenged, they oftentimes can meet up with much opposition, as was the case following a recent classroom discussion at Overland High School.

After using the President's State of the Union Address as a springboard for discussion on capitalism and national policy, Jay Bennish (Overland's geography/social studies teacher) encouraged his students to become "critical thinkers" lest they would become proponents or ignorant of views that support double standards. While welcoming opposing viewpoints and qualifying his own position, the teacher's comments were nonetheless deemed "inappropriate" enough to merit an investigation by the Cherry Creek School District.

In light of this incident, I can't help but first wonder whether or not Mr. Bennish would find himself in this same situation had he, instead, opted to align his comments in favor of the Bush administration. Second, I wonder what exactly would constitute a "balanced" viewpoint in a school that, if it patterns itself after its secular counterparts, rejects creationism, endorses literature like Inherit the Wind, and subscribes to "progressive sex education" through condom distribution. Clearly, if a standard by which one determines what is or is not appropriate is based upon subjectivity or political correctness, then truth, particularly when it exposes error, must be subsequently avoided at all cost.

More crucially important are the ramifications for a country that, for the sake of "patriotism" (an oftentimes used euphemism for "pride"), declines to assess national policies/social issues, and in so doing, places itself in a most precarious position. In failing to acknowledge or address our problems, we run the risk of not only deluding ourselves into thinking that we are equipped to handle the affairs of other countries (or set the precedence thereof), but of becoming ultimately what is the proverbial plank in the eye that sees the speck in another's—a condition which could aptly be referred to as "optical delusion."

Sunny Cornett/Dayton, Ohio

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