Jay Bennish Update

Fortunately, it appears cooler heads have prevailed. I always suspected school admistrators, who knew Bennish had done nothing wrong, would let him back into the classroom with no discipline whatsoever. And he won't apologize. And he has nothing to apologize for. Bennish was engaging in the most time-proven learning technique ever deployed by good teachers: He was generating controversy in order to make students think.

He's not completely out of the woods...Republican members of Colorado's state board of education want his head. But they won't get it. Disciplining teachers is the province of local administrators. And Bennish hasn't violated any policies.

The warborgs who called for Bennish's lynching (and pretty much all of them did) kept repeating the extremely ignorant argument that what Bennish said had nothing to do with geography. Not so, I kept screaming. But this excellent editorial puts it better than I did:

This was the most common attack across the right-wing blogosphere and radio world—-that Bennish had no right to discuss geopolitics in a class on geopolitics.
After elementary school, geography moves beyond “name that country” map study. Geography is multidisciplinary. It explores, among other things, how and why countries came into existence, and it studies the continuing evolution of the earth’s political geography. Scholars earn doctorates in geography, not because they are extremely proficient with colored crayons or have memorized all of the world’s capitol cities but because they have endeavored to explain how we got to where we are and where, perhaps, we’re going.
Bennish teaches Accelerated World Geography, an honors class designed to prepare students for college. In his course syllabus, Bennish explains that his course will “look into the geographical—or spatial—relationships between human societies and cultures, the natural environment, and historical changes that have shaped the contemporary world. More than answering the question ‘what is where,’ this course adopts a conceptual approach to understanding and explaining the dynamic human and natural features of the earth’s surface.” Themes covered during the semester, he explains, include “population, religion, human rights, notions of development and underdevelopment, impact of colonialism historically and currently, sustainability, impacts of modernization on developing countries, globalization of economy and culture, political and international conflict, cultural diversity, and global environmental concerns.” In order to effectively teach this stuff, he explains, “A deeper understanding of current events from a historical and geographical perspective is imperative. Thus, timely issues and events in the news will be tied into the overall framework of the course.”

The thing is, I'd go to the wall to defend this guy if he had been "guilty" of expressing leftist opinions in the classroom. As I opined earlier this week, right now there is absolutely no check on unfiltered super-pro-Bushite-patriotism in public school classrooms. There is no "balance" to restore, and I've yet to hear any conservatives with the proverbial walnuts to offer some argument saying that it's okay to shove rightist opinions down students' throats without allowing them to hear the other side (I have no doubt that's what most of them believe, but that lack of walnuts hinders their honesty on this point).

But the thing really is, I don't have to go to the wall to defend Jay Bennish. He wasn't doing what the warborgs said he was doing. He was, in fact, teaching. God bless him, and may he return to the classroom more enthusiastic and emboldened than ever.