News stories are rife with lurid tales of the dangers of the Internet for unsupervised kids (and naive women). Cathy Seipp, on the other hand, has observed first-hand the power of the Internet to free independent teenagers from the bonds of PC-addled teachers.
Backstory: Cathy's teenage daughter is blogging under the name of Cecile DuBois, and used one post to vent about a particularly idiotarian teacher of hers. It seems Cecile suffered some humiliation after writing a paper in which she theorized that women have achieved the rights that suffragists fought for so many decades ago, and that these suffragists would have been appalled by separate Women's Studies programs. The teacher disagreed; using the classic hostile argumentative mode of bait-and-switch, she did her damndest to make Cecile seem like a KKK member:
And yes I did, I poured it all out, given the opportunity because the discussion was on womens rights and for some reason my teacher asked me if I agreed with affirmative action. Does affirmative action relate to womens rights? Not in my world it does. I guess in her world where being against illegal immigration and calling African-Americans "black" are racist, it does. Well, if asked a question, I am compelled to answer honestly. My mother suggested I could have asked her what it had to with Mary Wollstonecraft, but I was so flustered by her laughter at me, I replied. I said "No". And did that cause commotion!...
"Do you believe in socio-economic affirmative action where poor kids get into college?" she asked.
"Um, yeah I suppose so since I support people like that girl from Homeless to Harvard!"
"Well, what kind of people live in poor areas?" she asked with a superior tone.
"Hispanics, blacks..."
"Well--those are the groups that you are against if you disagree with affirmative action!"
"Yes, but I don't agree illegal immigrants should be given priority. I don't believe colleges should have to accept them just because of their race or part of town they live in".
She interpreted my "illegal immigrants" referring to the Hispanics and assumed I was racist, again.
Then a Hispanic girl next to me started giggling as if everything were cool and I was stupid and ignorant and should be excused. The class chimed in I was ignorant and narrow-minded and had no valid arguments. But the teacher questioned my sentence in which modern feminists are overly concerned with their uteruses. When I read it aloud, she doubled up in her plastic chair, laughing like I was too stupid to be taken seriously.
Since I was stuck on the spot with my futile attempts to convince the class I was not racist and mentally sane, I moved on to the second paragraph of my "paper" that even my mother said had weak arguments. I claimed that since women have the capability to earn more than their husbands and thus have equal rights, modern feminists standpoint is unnecessary in today's society. If women are equal to men now, would more "rights" enable them to have more power over men? The response from the class was that I was sexist...
After periods of my teacher talking all about me, I heard from a friend most of the English class hated me for being racist and someone thought I was in the KKK...
Instapundit wasn't any more impressed with the teacher's comments than Cecile was:
MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, this time involving Cecile Dubois, whose teachers are stigmatizing her for being an individual, and trying to get her to adopt their rigid middle-class code of denial and conformity.
The "Instalanche" resulted in an outpouring of support for Cecile, and today Cathy Seipp is celebrating the blogosphere's power to give her daughter a much more open view of the world:
Blogging is essentially an unregulated, free-agent activity, and that can drive people who prefer rules and regulations and decision-by-committee crazy. From its earliest days, I noticed a tone of disapproval towards bloggers that reminded me of school, what with all the carping from magazines like The Nation and The American Prospect about the blogging world's sorry lack of supervision. The tongue-clucking made me think of the teacher's pet constantly raising a hand to protest: "Miss Jones! Miss Jones! Johnny's reading ahead again! Unsupervised!"...
...even if she hadn't received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile's regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she's not and here's why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.
Amen.
Posted by kswygert at February 13, 2004 08:14 AM