Posted on 08/25/2010 3:20:38 AM PDT by markomalley
A high school teacher who assigned her class to plan a terrorist attack that would kill as many innocent Australians as possible had no intent to promote terrorism, education officials said Wednesday.
The Year 10 students at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School in the state of Western Australia were given the assignment last week in a class on contemporary conflict and terrorism.
Principal Terry Martino said he withdrew the assignment as soon as he heard of it.
But after news of the assignment was published in Wednesday's West Australian newspaper, talk radio and online forums began a busy debate and some survivors of terror attacks across Australia — which has been a target of terror campaigns at home and abroad — came forward to express their outrage.
"It's extremely offensive if you've ever been involved in it," said Peter Hughes, who was burned over half of his body in the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, on the Indonesian resort island.
"It's something they would probably do in some radical school in Indonesia. For it to be done in the state education system is mind-blowing," he told the newspaper.
The students were asked to pretend they were terrorists making a political statement by releasing a chemical or biological agent on "an unsuspecting Australian community," according to a copy of the assignment received by the West Australian newspaper.
The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims and what effects the attack would have on a human body.
"Your goal is to kill the MOST innocent civilians in order to get your message across," the assignment read.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Being at war with murderous but stupid terrorists is bad enough. Do not do their thinking for them.
“The teacher, with every best intention, was attempting to have the students think through someone else’s eyes about conflict,”
Actually, I think that’s a good teaching tool - though maybe to teach law-enforcement and other emergency responders, not school kids.
A quiet campaign among the students to have all of the terrorist attacks take place in the teachers’ lounge — “killing as many as possible” — might have been a decent countermeasure.
Only an observation...but this assignment doesn’t sound like something that you’d hand out to students to prove anything. It sounds more like a wannabe instructor with no real reason for existence in the school atmosphere, and simply doing this for entertainment purposes.
I’m also going to guess that the local board will examine the instructor’s credentials and evaluate them a bit closer.
Actually, not a bad idea. Once the students started the project they’d understand just how easily such an attack could be carried out. It would raise their awareness, maybe raise their parent’s awareness too.
Too many people feel “it can’t happen here” or “it’s too complicated”. It can happen here - or there. It would be relatively easy.
The Torah, not so much a litigious book of order, as much as it is God’s guide on how to have life through Him, is focused on how man should think in order to have life with God. Since all humans are born initially as unbelievers, that method of thinking had to be taught to younger generations. The Hebrew nation founded organized education as a method to teach their younger generations how to think in order to live by God’s provision. His method is that morality comes from within, not from the outside in to the righteous man.
There was a time when education focused on training younger generations on how to think, instead of academics.
While the teacher might have been considering how to encourage the students to think, its foolish and criminal to encourage evil thinking, especially in newly forming minds.
How would she teach the evils of drug addiction? Giving her classes a regimen of steadily increasing heroin fixes? /s
Starting with the teacher, I presume.
This ‘teacher’ needs to find another line of work. Community organizing might be a better fit.
My wife and I had a similar conversation after going to the circus with our children and a nephew recently. No security at all. When I mentioned that during the last intifada in Israel they targeted just about any group with more than 10 people in it she was a little worried. When I rambled off the names of such places like Starbucks, the local Pizza joint etc etc and there is no way they could all have metal detectors and pat downs it really sinks in how vulnerable we are.
Oh well, off to get some coffee. Got a big Pizza dinner tonight after a trip to the sports game ;)
I agree. This was a class on "contemporary conflict and terrorism". The whole point is to get students to think about how vulnerable western countries are to an attack designed to kill innocent people.
This was an assignment for high school students. By that age, they should be able to distinguish between right and wrong, and understand that the assignment was not to promote terrorism.
I cannot get to the site from where I am located (military installation). What is the name of the teacher in Australia? That might lend a clue as to why this particular classroom topic.
“A quiet campaign among the students to have all of the terrorist attacks take place in the teachers’ lounge — “killing as many as possible” — might have been a decent countermeasure.”
Does Australia have an NEA?
The school declined to identify the teacher, citing her privacy, and her name also was not given in the newspaper report. She was in her mid-20s and had been teaching for three years, O’Neill said.I believe them. I guess it was just bad taste. She shouldn’t be fired for this.“I think it was well-intentioned but she has made a mistake, and she’s very remorseful for not thinking this task through,” O’Neill said.
Do you really mean to tell me that you think that that teacher wouldn't have been fired immediately?
"Well-intentioned" my @$$. She's either too stupid to be a teacher or trolling for ideas for herself or her "group" on how to go about doing it but too lazy to do it herself.
I think this class and this line of thinking should be taught in an American High School. It seems that everyone is having a knee jerk reaction thinking that this teacher was “training” these kids not educating them.... an uninformed populace is a weak populace.
Try thinking like a terrorist the next time you go to a ballgame, mall, college campus, elementary school, hospital, etc. It will open your mind as to the ease of an attack on American Soil.
Would they get a failing grade if a mosque was used as their target?
“Try thinking like a terrorist the next time”
I don’t see that assignment as being much use, except to make the kids paranoid. I would rather have seen the assignment where the kids had to write a paper pretending to be a member of some extremist group and justifying why his or her group should use the tactic of killing as many innocent people as possible to convey its message. Let them think through the moral implications, not the tactical ones.
Oh, no doubt about that!
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