The warning that Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas recently issued to teachers against posting anything negative about Charlie Kirk is not only troubling, it is deeply un-American. In Tinker vs. Des Moines, the Supreme Court famously ruled, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Besides being against the law, stripping teachers of their free speech rights also defies common sense. Although we often try to deny it, there is no such thing as a neutral teacher. Someone in the school system must choose the material, and teachers must choose how to present it.
Randy Fair taught English in Fulton County, Georgia schools for 31 years.
When teachers try to present an image of neutrality, what they are more often doing is quietly, and sometimes unintentionally, indoctrinating students to their point of view.
For years, I taught AP Language, a course that involves the teaching of rhetoric and focuses on looking at persuasive techniques used in speeches and writing. At the beginning of each school year, I started the class by telling students that I was a very left-wing liberal, and said, “I’m telling you this so that you can evaluate everything I say and look for bias on my part.”
I think that was much more honest than many of my colleagues who were deeply conservative but pretended they were neutral. The students were rarely fooled. They picked up on the signals these teachers were sending: the wearing of Christian crosses, the clubs the teacher sponsored, the posters decorating the classroom, etc.
When I was teaching, the teacher who taught AP U.S. History next door to me, and with whom I became friends, was deeply conservative and, although he didn’t tell the students his political affiliation, they quickly suspected it when he told them that he was a devout Catholic and a former Marine. He even went as far as displaying a Confederate flag on his classroom ceiling.
Since this teacher and I shared most of the same students, I thought it was great that the students were getting two radically different viewpoints. Of course, we both gave students frequent opportunities to share their own opinions and didn’t hold it against them if they varied from ours.
One of the letters that I am proudest of came from a professor from the Christian conservative Wheaton College. After asking students to describe their most important teacher, one of his students chose me and said, “Even though he was a liberal teacher, he encouraged me to express my conservative views. I became more comfortable speaking out because of him.”
This idea of teachers as real humans might make some uncomfortable, but the truth is that teaching is messy and imperfect. But what makes the current edict even more concerning is it doesn’t involve speech in the classroom. It involves personal speech outside the classroom.
It’s also hypocritical. While the education department intends to monitor speech that criticizes Charlie Kirk, will it also monitor and warn against teachers’ posts that praise Kirk? Of course the answer is no.
But shouldn’t it be expected that many will be offended by posts that praise Kirk? After all, this was a man who was notoriously anti-LGBTQ, claimed that “Blacks go around for fun to target white people,” said that “Islam is the sword of the left to slit the throat of America,” and stated that “abortion was worse than the Holocaust.”
Kirk certainly had the right to hold those views and air those views and most definitely should not have been murdered for them, but people, even if they happen to be teachers, have a right to disagree with his views.
Perhaps it is disrespectful for the Department of Education to use Kirk’s death to oppose what he advocated for in life when he said, “If you believe in something, you need to have the courage to fight for those ideas — not run away from them or try to silence them.”
Randy Fair is the author of “Southern. Gay. Teacher.” and “Gay Arab American and Middle Eastern Men.” He resides in Wilton Manors.
