Do you really think that the teachers were concerned over "violence" contained in a web address on the poster?
Do you think that Stapelfeld, the principal, recieved compaints from "concerned parents and other community members"?
It must be noted that Lindsay Corcoran is a student at HHS, not a professional journalist. It is also to be noted that the issue was given a half page with eighth page photo of the conservative club at a meeting.
My cousin tells me that they use Howard Zinn's "history" book as a textbook, to show how openminded and unbiased that are.
They merely feel that "as social studies teachers, part of our job is to question students' ideas in order to force them to support their claims with evidence." Do the teachers support their own claims with evidence, and allow students to challenge them?
Bob, what has happened to that old Alma Matre?
Imagine what would have happened if freerepublic.com was at the bottom of the posters!!!
Conservative club meets opposition at Hudson High
http://www.hscca.org/mediaarticles/mwdndec12.html
By Carolyn Kessel Stewart / News Staff Writer
Sunday, December 12, 2004
HUDSON -- As a conservative in what he calls a liberal-filled high school, senior Chris Bowler felt like a meat-eater surrounded by judgmental vegetarians during this year's contentious presidential election season.
Bowler's said his frustration grew as teachers mocked Bush or praised "Fahrenheit 9/11" and classmates loudly proclaimed their liberal opinions in class or in the school newspaper.
"We felt ashamed to express our views," Bowler said.
To challenge the paradigm at his high school, Bowler and a friend created the school's first "conservative club," which met for the first time this week.
But as soon as Bowler and friend James Mellilo hung posters for their new after school group, school officials removed the posters because they referred to a conservative Web site they said promotes violence.
"What started out as a great idea drifted from true conservative values to reactionary," said Principal John Stapelfeld.
The Web site, www.hscca.org, was built and is maintained by a 17-year-old from California and his classmates, who started the High School Conservative Clubs of America.
The home page links to videos of recent beheadings in the Middle East and advocates "taking down the rainbow flag," a reference to homosexuals, and gun ownership for all.
Bowler said he has no violent intentions.
"I do not see anything on the Web site that promotes violence, but it does expose Islamic terrorist violence," he wrote in an e-mail. "I chose www.hscca.org so the Hudson High School Conservative Club could have credibility and a resource. I have seen their club advertised on Fox News and they have many connections to talk show hosts and could get them to come to our school."
Bowler said he had a hard time finding a teacher to sponsor his club, which he found ironic given the fact that Hudson High School was named a "First Amendment School" by the First Amendment Center in Alexandria, Va.
"I believe the teachers used (the Web site) as a red herring to tear down our posters," he said. Bowler was later told he could rehang the posters without reference to the Web site, then told he could reference the Web site.
Librarian Kathy Somerville volunteered to act as adviser to the Conservative Club and said she and other faculty were truly concerned by the mix of violence and assertion of personal opinion as fact on the Web site.
"It was disturbing to everybody," she said. "I think they have to be careful of that on this Web site.
Bowler wanted to start a conservative club instead of a young Republicans' club because he thought it would be more inclusive, he said. "The conservative view to me embraces the idea that family, faith and friendship are the strongest bonds in society and that any changes to those should be thoughtfully examined."
Stephen Bowler, Chris's father, has supported his son in challenging the school.
"I can't do anything but encourage him to stand by his convictions," he said.
Social Studies Teacher Beth Ferns is a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat teacher with a poster that drew Bowler's ire. In her classroom hangs a poster of President George W. Bush quotes such as, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier -- just so long as I'm the dictator."
Ferns has told her students she would display other political posters if they bring them in, but so far her Bush quotes have generated more interest in politics than anything else in her class.
"It's basically to spark discussion," she said. "Who is it that leads our country? What makes them a great leader?"
Ferns said she tells students her political leanings, but also listens and provides time to discuss all sides.
"I'm not trying to tell you my way is the only way to think, your way is wrong," she said. "I think the one thing we pride ourselves in this school is teaching students to have an opinion, but have an informed opinion."
Schools have to walk a fine line, though, between allowing students expression of their beliefs and protecting the rights of a minority group.
If a club discriminates against any students, it does not have a place in the schools, she said.
"We have to be careful, speech can promote hate or ill-feelings," she said. "It's a tough line schools have to walk."
The Supreme Court limited student free speech in the Tinker v. Des Moines case in 1969 to speech that causes substantial interference with the discipline required for the operation of the school.
"Our measuring stick is whether (speech) is disruptive," Stapelfeld said. What has happened with the conservative club was confusion that quickly snowballed, he said. Ultimately, giving students more of a voice and discussion of civics, is what the school has been trying to promote.
"You can't beat the learning experience," he said.
Tim Morel said he has had a harder time finding people in his school who have what he calls "southern" values, such as being pro-war, pro-death penalty and anti-gay marriage.
"I think our school's too liberal," he said during lunch last week. "Being in Massachusetts, it's hard to find conservatives."
Lindsay Corcoran, editor of the student newspaper, "Hawk Talk," used President Bush's dictator quote in her newspaper, and then apologized for it.
She said she can understand how students like Bowler and Morel feel like minorities in the school.
"The liberal students are very outspoken. It's easy (for a liberal) to voice opinions because everyone agrees with you," she said.
If this teach was serious about TEACHING students to support their arguments with facts or supporting evidence, then the teach has to have the mental capacity to take the student's position and guide them through building arguments IN THE STUDENTS FAVOR.
It seems this teacher is engaging in BS of saying by beating up on conservative values she is teaching something. Executions will continue until moral improves.
Someone should get a list of all the political contributions made by these teachers and administrators.
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teacher Katy Field explained that "as social studies teachers, part of our job is to question students' ideas in order to force them to support their claims with evidence."
I'm sure that liberal students opinions ideas are questioned...
These Conservative students are raising serious questions over the professionalism of teachers without any real evidence to support that teachers are biased in their classroom.
And putting up ant-Bush posters is not evidence of bias?
Well that's bogus! Most high school students, when challenged by a teacher, will just shut up for fear of being penalized when grading time comes along. It's a rare student who will stand up against a teacher. So what these teachers are practicing probably seems more like intimidation to the kids. And if the teacher comes down hard on one student, how likely would it be that another student has the will to contradict the teacher.
Hudson High School is a First Amendment School!
http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/
Location: Hudson, MA
Enrollment: 980
Grades: 8-12
Type of School: Public
Hudson High School is a large suburban public school that began its work as a First Amendment project school by launching an innovative experiment in school governance. “This past year,” says school Principal John Stapelfeld, “the entire Hudson High School community implemented a new governance model based on democratic town meetings.”
To facilitate the meetings, Hudson first unveiled a new school building, the design of which reflects the school community’s belief in two concepts: First, that a cluster model of organization (approximately 125-150 students per cluster) will engender closer connections among both the students and the staff; and second, that the cluster model will provide an ideal democratic governance structure, and involve more students in the daily life of the school’s operation.
How does it work? The clusters are organized thematically around broad areas of student academic interest. Clusters do not restrict students academically and students still have full access to the school’s curriculum. Weekly cluster meetings, however, provide time for students to develop service projects, hear from guest speakers, attend workshops relative to their cluster themes, and participate in school-wide governance meetings. At the same time, the clusters are meant to be places where a real democratic community can be built, one that affirms First Amendment rights within the context of a larger, expanding school population.
And how has it worked? Teacher Brian Daniels admits that “at times it’s been hard, but it’s hard to be counter-cultural. At first, the kids didn’t really know how to act, and neither did the teachers.”
Student Rita Paulino agreed. “A part of the reason for this is our conditioning in school up to this point,” she said. “We’ve always been taught that what the teachers says goes – so when you’re suddenly given power, you don’t really know what to do with it.”
But as the year progressed, Hudson’s experiment in liberty started to yield some positive results. “And,” Brian added, “the growth of the leadership among students has been amazing. Kids who would have never done so in the past have stepped forward. And four of the six clusters decided on their own to take the time to build in some leadership training.
“The process of democratizing a whole school carries with it the requisite time required for real change to occur,” Daniels added. “And our community is committed to do exactly that.”
Learn more about Hudson High School:
Visit their Web site.
Read this recent article about the school.
PING
I went to this high school, see my remarks below. Thanks for posting this.
The psychological blocks, I believe, are erected through years of being brainwashed by liberal public schools and liberal mainstream media.
Thus, in high school, one is observing behaviors which have already been molded years before that time, on almost all sides.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1332291/posts
Related thread PING
I've heard this from various radical leftist college profs: if you give them a liberally slanted opinion, almost no matter how ill-justified, they will give you a pass. However, if you give them a well-supported conservatively slanted opinion, they will hand it back to you with a poor grade and questions up the wazoo, such as "what is the defininition of this?" (for some number of common terms) and so on, until you give up and change your opinion, or take the flunking grade.
In other words, the proper job of a radical leftist teacher is to harass any conservative students and modify their behavior to that of an incipient radical leftist. Only incipient radical leftists-- or those who behave like incipient radical leftists-- are permitted to graduate from these kinds of classes.
Of course, Skinnerian behavior modification is frowned upon as being obsolete in regards to any other educational context (eg, science and math "drill and kill"). And of course, the US as shown by TIMSS has fallen to 12th place or worse in math and science among the industrialized countries of the world when ed school research is actually put into practice in these subjects in today's US public schools. (But that's OK, since many US public school teachers and education researchers have science-phobia and math-phobia to begin with, and could not affect this particular side effect even if they wanted to...)
I haven't seen a poster, but I went to the site, and the violence must be a group of links to the videos of beheadings by Muslims. I can see how some parents would be concerned, and I can also see that it is necessary for these links to be made available nonetheless.
"Service Learning" is making kids do community service projects for school credit.
We hear about Cambridge in the news once and a while. Is it as wacky as it sounds? The radio talk guy I listen to usually prefaces the name with "The People's Republic of".
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Children's Social Consciousness Sheldon Berman This book breaks new ground in our understanding of the development of social consciousness and social responsibility in young people and the educational practices that promote this development. Berman shows that children's awareness of the social and political world emerges far earlier and their moral abilities are more advanced than we thought. Berman provides educators and researchers with the developmental understandings and instructional strategies necessary to enable students to become active, caring, and responsible members of our social and political community. |
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Promising Practices in Sheldon Berman and Phyllis La Farge, editors This book is about teachers -- how they build social responsibility into the curriculum and day-to-day life in schools. It showcases the innovative practices of a number of teachers in diverse settings across the country and offers rare discussion on their insights and actual classroom practices. Each chapter focuses on integrating the skills and issues of social responsibility into K-12 classrooms and schools. William Kreidler and Sara Goodman discuss how elementary educators teach basic conflict resolution skills and train students to be mediators. Seth Kreisberg describes one teacher's efforts to democratize his high school classroom. Beth Wilson Fultz discusses how science teachers are addressing science-related social issues, and more. Promising Practices also includes chapters on community service, multicultural education, and global education. Promising Practices is a mosaic of the varied ways that educators teach social responsibility. But it goes further. It gives the reader an opportunity to hear, first hand, about the issues and struggles that teachers confront. It reveals the strength and commitment these teachers have to helping students understand that they make a difference to the world. |
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FYI, here is a response a friend of mine received from Sheldon Berman:
(My take: canned response, no truth here, trying to wallpaper over cracks in wall)
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to inform you that you have been seriously misinformed. The school administration supports the development of political clubs and has supported the Conservative Club. We know of no harassment that has taken place based on a student's political view.
Sheldon H. Berman
Superintendent of Schools
Arrogant censorship David Limbaugh February 11, 2005 An incident at Hudson High School in Massachusetts provides an object lesson in the occasional arrogance of liberal bias. A group of students decided to form a conservative club as "a counterweight" to the majority political viewpoint at the school. Student Chris Bowler put up posters to publicize the club's first meeting in December. Within hours, school administrators reportedly removed the posters because they contained a link to the Website of High School Conservative Clubs of America (HSCCA), a national organization for high school conservative clubs. HSCCA's Website included links to videos of beheadings by Iraqi insurgents, and the high school would not allow even an indirect reference to those links. It also blocked access to the HSCCA's Website on school computers. "The material was way beyond what I believe the school should be advertising," said Principal John Stapelfeld. What? Just because the school permits students to use its facilities to promote something doesn't mean the school itself is endorsing it. In fact, just because the local club listed the HSCCA's Web address doesn't mean it endorses everything HSCCA endorses. But for the sake of discussion, let's concede that the school's club was encouraging the viewing of those videos. What in the world is wrong with that, and what business was it of the principal's to censor the posters? Principal Stapelfeld insists his political bias didn't enter into his decision. According to the Boston Globe, he was initially "thrilled" about the idea of a conservative club that would spark political discussions. So, what's his beef with the video links? The Globe reports that he "said the brutal images implicitly condoned violence as a way of 'solving problems' and did not reflect 'mainstream conservatism'" -- as if this liberal were an authority on mainstream conservatism and as if it's fine to censor farther-right conservatism. When I first read this I did a double take, thinking I'd misunderstood. How can links to videos of beheadings of innocent people by terrorists -- unless shown by terrorists to potential recruits -- be construed as condoning violence, much less as a means of solving problems? It doesn't take a genius to understand that the HSCCA was linking to those horrendous videos to show how evil the terrorists are and how they use violence purely for the sake of violence and terror, without provocation and certainly not as a means of "solving problems." Let's give Stapelfeld the benefit of the doubt and assume he got himself confused on that one. Perhaps his other statements express his concerns more clearly. According to the Globe, he felt that showcasing these violent acts "did not address the more central problem of growing anti-Americanism abroad." "Unfortunately, said Stapelfeld, "we really haven't dealt with the fact that we're not well received in the world anywhere." In this revealing utterance, we have the principal's naked liberal mindset on full display. What he is really saying is that he -- like so many other liberals -- believes the Bush Administration has alienated the rest of the world because of its "unwarranted" military action against Iraq. And by promoting the viewing of these videos, his students would be engaging in offensive behavior that will further alienate other nations. But on what remotely legitimate basis would other nations have to be offended by American students encouraging Americans and other peoples to view videos the terrorists themselves produced and distributed, advertising their own violence? How could genuinely civilized human beings of other nations take issue with civilized Americans for reminding the world, via unedited terrorist-produced videos, of the abject depravity and brutality of the terrorists? Indeed, isn't it necessary for us to focus on their inhumanity from time to time to avoid becoming desensitized to it? Perhaps what really bothers the principal (and other liberals) deep down is that by showing the terrorists in their true element the videos demonstrate how utterly justified our cause in Iraq is -- a reality that liberals simply cannot abide. How dare we use the terrorists' own videos to turn people against them? I suppose that instead, we should be trying to negotiate with the sweethearts. In short, the principal is betraying his own transparent political prejudices. But what alarms me significantly more than his bias or even the high-handed censorship it produced is his arrogant obliviousness to it. This absence of individual and collective self-reflection is all too often the signature of today's liberal, who apparently believes his positions are so pure that his motives are beyond scrutiny. Memo to Principal Stapelfeld: Your wrongful removal of the posters is only exceeded by your refusal to own up to your reasons for doing it. |
So the kids have "right wing lawyer" help now? Heck, they must be Right Wing themselves! Sounds much worse than conservative!
Lawyer joins fray in Hudson poster snit
By Carolyn Kessel Stewart / News Staff Writer Metrowest Daily News
Friday, February 11, 2005
HUDSON -- A legal team known for supporting right wing causes is working to lift the high school's ban of a controversial Web site launched by the recently formed student conservative club.
