Boy, everybody's pretty doggone glad that Mr. Jay Bennish has been reprieved for his prescient and pungent remarks comparing President George Bush to adolf Hitler, his deep and meaningful critique of american foreign policy and his specious imputations that capitalism "is at odds with human rights." and being a teacher in a classroom full of impressionable kids, Mr. Bennish, luckily for all involved, including the poor wretched "journalists" writing the unadulterated pap in Bennish's defense, needed to provide no concrete evidence for of all these imputations and slurs other than really serious feelings of wrong doings and of scholarly discussions overheard in teachers lounges and locker rooms.
Luckily, at least in aurora, Colorado, the teachers of any particular subject can talk about whatever the hell they want in any class they teach. So with Mr. Bennish critiquing capitalism and foreign policy in geography class, it should come as no surprise that chemistry teachers are belittling Chaucer, English teachers are discoursing on Maxwell's theories, while gym teachers are holding fevered investigations into the past participle and the plu-perfect tense and driver's education instructors are busily critiquing both the terrors of tensor calculus and aiding in the explanation of linear programming. Man, my kind of high school--a real free for all. Imagine keeping your notes and teachers straight. Oops, I mean in order.
The actual class schedules in aurora mean absolutely nothing until you actually get into class and find out who is teaching what and what get up you need to sport. In gym class you wear suits and ties and sit at desks. In driver's ed you spend a lot of time at the chalk board working on theorems. While in Spanish class you dress in gym clothes and flounce around playing indoor softball.
Thank heavens a top shelf attorney was brought in to both defend Mr. Bennish's right to do whatever he wants to do in what ever class he teaches at the moment and to try and sort out the whole sorry mess in the school system for the people and teachers in aurora. attempts are now being made to get teachers assigned to specific disciplines to teach that particular course of study on a daily, and it at all possible, a weekly basis.
Students and parents have been assured that achievement tests in a subject will consider a student's work in the listed subject as well as his classroom discussions and antics in the teacher's free thought process, his rote memorization of the teacher's hate speech, his participation in the teacher's pet anti-american projects, and his ongoing attempts to sway his family from their old time and simple american values.
The grading process alone will shorten an already pressed school year by some few weeks, to the utter delight of Mr. Bennish, who is said to be taking his award winning and now famous geography class to that paragon of honest programming--Public Television. There, all thought of geography is being tossed aside and his intellectually honest and cutting critique of america and capitalism will be featured in a seven-hour segment on that award winning Frontline program, where the top liberal foundations will bankroll his ideas, illustrate his wilder flights of fancy with a bus trip to the homes of Hollywood stars and show dramatic overviews of Hitler and Bush to the booming words of his finest poetry.
It just goes to show you how far out of the mainstream I've been. I can actually remember when geography had something to do countries, natural resources, boundaries, topography, and their changes over time. What a hoot a class like that would be in today's aurora. Kids would see, hear and read lessons in the class advertised. Imagine the shock, the ambulance calls and the parental notifications associated with such a travesty.
The tragi-comedic value of this whole sad mélange is the fact that in Hitler's Germany the idea that any middling geography teacher could drag a soap box into a classroom, climb to its dizzying height, pull himself to full imposing stature, puff himself up like a shiny blow fish and deliver a stinging rebuke to the Fuhrer is utterly preposterous. and that this same rambling pedagogue could blather on for an entire class and accuse him of resembling Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be the height of lunacy.
You see, in Hitler's realm, unlike Bush's, there was no free speech, no chance to stray from the curriculum and no ability whatsoever to accuse the top man of anything. and the liberties enjoyed in america--where simple Marx-inspired geography teachers are free to natter on at length about whatever fragmented thoughts course through their tepid and empty craniums regardless of the amount of time lost to the instruction in a particular curriculum--insure that Mr. Bennish will sleep soundly, stay clear of corrective labor and the rubber truncheons swung by the happy go lucky enforcers from the local Security Police office or the local brownshirts, to say nothing of avoiding that problematic bullet so often issued to the rabble rousers.
The differences, when it comes to schools, are more succinct. Nazi education had a clear and concise purpose--the inculcation of Kadavergehorsam, obedience to death in the service of the Fuhrer and the State.
american schools are a bit more iffy. They seem to be all about insuring the survival of the Democratic party, the educational unions and the pushing of an agenda featuring the most base features of the liberal agenda, as well as providing the numbers for the local bail bond offices for those teachers caught practicing those oft described sexual peccadilloes currently in national vogue. and very little, indeed, about education, which is where Mr. Bennish seems to fit right in.
Nope, you'd have no half-witted overly emotive geographer maligning adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937, in or out of class, which, of course is totally lost on Mr. Bennish, even as he compares Mr. Bush to Mr. Hitler.
Imagine the cheek of this clown hiding behind free speech to cloak his refusal to actually expend the effort to teach a class and his blatant efforts at liberal propaganda in class at the expense of actual teaching time. and at the same time, look at a school system so devoid of backbone that they find no problem with any of this lunacy and forget that a teacher has an actual duty to teach a particular curriculum in a certain class rather than merely acting as a poorly turned out side show barker for a peculiar crie de coeur.
With nuts like Mr. Bennish occupying a classroom and fools running the local boards of education, it's no wonder that american kids are losing the international war on knowledge to other kids from South Korea, Japan and China.
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