A teacher at a “posh” private school in British Columbia, Canada has been fired for expressing his personal opinion about abortion.
According to the National Post, the unidentified teacher was teaching “a lesson on vice, ethics, morality and the law” when he told the class “I find abortion to be wrong, but the law is often different from our personal opinions.”
“That was it, the teacher said. ‘It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.’”
But that wasn’t it. After a brief break, a few students did not return to class, “among them a popular young woman who had gone to an administrator to complain that what the teacher said had ‘triggered’ her such that she felt ‘unsafe.’”
She also said the teacher “had no right to an opinion” on abortion — because he is a man.
What happened to the teacher over the ensuing few days sounds like something out of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where people were subjected to what were known as ideological struggle sessions, forced to “confess” to various imagined sins before large crowds, and roundly denounced.
Immediately after the student complained to the administrator, the teenager came, with a teacher at her side as support, to confront him in a public area of the school.
She pressed for an apology, but the teacher resisted, because, he said, it would set a dangerous precedent for a teacher to be reamed out in the presence of a colleague.
“When I didn’t show contrition,” he said, “I was summoned upstairs and grilled by two administrators who told me my job was on the line.”
Now panicking — he has a family to support and had just recently returned to teaching after several years in business with a relative — he apologized profusely and promised to apologize the next day to the offended student.
Instead, the school had an administrator take over the class for a day, whereupon, he was told, they would all discuss what went wrong in his absence. He would be invited back to “hear the grievances and offer an apology. It was clear I must do this successfully or I would be terminated.”
And that’s just what he did. But it went awry: The teacher’s contrition allegedly was “too personal” for the girl as he informed her that he “liked her,” and that she was “a bright and engaging student.”
The girl “stormed out of the class in tears” … and the teacher was reprimanded (again). Then he was informed he would not be continuing at the school.
Seriously.
A spokeswoman for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation told the NP that no one in that 60,000 member group is “aware of anyone being fired” (in that province) under similar circumstances.
Although private schools in British Columbia are regulated by the province, there is no First Amendment in Canada.
I’m all in favor of teachers keeping their personal views out of classroom, but although I probably would not have offered my views on the issue, the way this teacher followed up on his comments appears to be entirely appropriate.
Dave has been writing about education, politics, and entertainment for over 20 years, including a stint at the popular media bias site Newsbusters. He is a retired educator with over 25 years of service and is a member of the National Association of Scholars. Dave holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware.
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