Education

What’s Wrong With The Florida Cyber-Bullying Arrests? Everything.

/ Jack Marshall / 193 Comments

“Bullying, as they are supposed to teach you in school, is when someone uses their superior power to subordinate and humiliate someone weaker than themselves. This is wrong, and it is always wrong.”

The Sheriff of Polk County...wait, no, that's Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in "Minority Report." Well, close enough.

The Sheriff of Polk County…wait, no, that’s Tom Cruise, searching for pre-criminals in “Minority Report.” Well, close enough.

This is a quote from an Ethics Alarms post earlier this year, about a school that forced students to do embarrassing things in a warped effort to discourage bullying. There is a disturbing societal consensus brewing that opposition to bullying justifies all sorts of extra-legal, unethical, excessive, abusive and unconstitutional measures, and there are a dearth of persuasive voices point out that this consensus is dangerous and wrong. Those potential voices are being stilled by a kind of cultural bullying. How can you defend bullies! Look at the victims! Think of the children! What a horrible, unfeeling person you are!

This is the only explanation I can generate for the fact that none of the commentary and media coverage regarding the Florida arrests of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl on trumped-up charges of “stalking” following the suicide of Rebecca Ann Sedwick pointed out that the arrests were a travesty of the justice system, an abuse of power, child abuse, legally and constitutionally offensive, and, yes, bullying of a different kind. Continue reading →

Annals Of The Ethics Incompleteness Theorem: The Snuggle House And “The Dress Code Effect”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Awww! Who could object to a little snuggle?

Awww! Who could object to a little snuggle?

Almost any rule, low or ethical principle can be deconstructed using what I call border anomalies. The first time I was aware of it was as a Harvard freshman in the late Sixties, when all assumptions, good and bad, useful and not, were considered inherently suspect. The college required all students to wear jackets and ties to meals at the student union, and up until my first year, nobody objected. But that fall, my classmates set out to crack the dress code, so they showed up for meals with ties, jackets, and no pants, or wearing belts as ties, or barefoot. (Yes, there were a lot of future lawyers in that class.) Pretty soon Harvard gave up, because litigating what constitutes ties, jackets and “proper dress” became ridiculously time-consuming and made the administration look petty and stupid. Of course, there are good reasons for dress codes—they are called respect, dignity, community and civility—-but never mind: the dress code couldn’t stand against those determined to destroy them by sending them down the slippery slope.

If any rules are to survive to assist society in maintaining important behavioral standards, we have to determine how we want to handle the  effects described by  the Ethics Incompleteness Theory, which holds that even the best rules and laws will be inevitably subjected to anomalous situations on their borders, regarding which strict enforcement will result in absurd or unjust results. The conservative approach to this dilemma is to strictly apply the law, rule or principle anyway, and accept the resulting bad result as a price for having consistent standards. The liberal approach is no better: it demands amending  rules to deal with the anomalies, leading to vague rules with no integrity—and even more anomalies. The best solution, in my view, is to regard the anomalies as exceptions, and to handle them fairly, reasonably and justly using basic principles of ethics, not strictly applying  the rule or law alone while leaving it intact. Continue reading →

The Naked Teacher Principle Strikes In Texas: The Playboy Variation

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
"Miss DEWEESE?? Ay Caramba!!!"

“Miss DEWEESE?? Ay Caramba!!!”

This version of the NTP is not especially close to the gray area of ethics, nor is the result surprising, though I expect a lot of teeth gnashing about it because the naked teacher in question will attract a lot of, uh, sympathy.

Dallas’s school district has apparently fired Cristy Nicole Deweese, 21, a Spanish teacher for the city’s Townview Magnet High School. Less than three years ago she posed in various provocative positions and states of undress for Playboy, in its February 2011 issue. That magazine is still available, but more to the point, the photos are easily available online. Naturally some students found them, and the core tenets of the Naked Teacher Principle had been triggered.

The Naked Teacher Principle states:

“A secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.”

I won’t keep you in unnecessary suspense. Deweese is almost dead center in the middle of the NTP. Continue reading →

Cautionary Tales: When The Law Protects Unethical Creeps

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Chaney_Chelsea

Two recent court rulings demonstrate how the law often cannot punish purely unethical conduct if it falls in the cracks of legal language and definitions. When that happens, however, it is incumbent upon the rest of the culture not to allow an Ethics Dunce, or worse,to escape without proper identification and condemnation.

Case A: Curtis Cearley

Director of technology services for the Fayette County (GA) school district.

Fayette County high school student Chelsea Chaney used her Facebook page to post a photo of herself wearing a bikini and standing next to a life-size cardboard cut-out of rapper Snoop Dogg holding a can of Blast, the caffeinated alcoholic beverage he promotes. Although it was posted for the student’s friends, Cearley saw it, and used the comely photo in a  presentation at a public forum on the risks of sharing potentially embarrassing personal information on social media. He also used her name, identifying Chaney at the forum which was attended by parents, faculty and  students who attended school with her. He never alerted her, or asked her permission to use her photo as a “Don’t be like Chelsea!” example. The forum was titled “Once It’s There, It’s There to Stay.”

Horrible. This is a pure Golden Rule violation by Cearley, unfair, cruel, thoughtless, mean and intentionally  harmful to a minor, no less: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Matt Labrum, Union High (Roosevelt, Utah) Football Coach

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Six Pillars

Matt Labrum, head coach of Union High School in Roosevelt, Utah, suspended all 80 of his players, citing  a lack of character. He instructed them all to turn in their jerseys and their equipment, and announced that there would be no football until they earned the privilege to play. Labrum gave his shocked players a letter titled “Union Football Character” which declared in part,

“The lack of character we are showing off the field is outshining what we are achieving on the field. It is a privilege to play this wonderful game! We must earn the opportunity to have the honor to put on our high school jerseys each Thursday and Friday night!”

Instead of practicing during the days leading up to this weekend’s game, the students were ordered to perform community service, to attend study hall and go to a class on character development. They were also required to perform service for their own families, and write a report about their actions. Academically, the players were told to be on time for classes, and to improve their grades.

It is unclear what prompted the coach’s action, though some of the players, he felt, had engaged in cyber bullying, and he was aware of other instances in which various players had not, in his view, lived up to exemplary standards of behavior. Several of them had been rude and obnoxious, he had learned to other students and teachers—in other words, they were behaving like high school football players. Rather than punish individual students, Coach Labrum decided to impose team wide measures designed to foster good character. His theory, clearly, was to encourage a team culture of ethical conduct, strengthened  by group encouragement and enforcement of shared values. Labrum is also a gifted salesman, since it appears that opposition from students, their parents and the school administration has been minimal.

In many schools, including colleges, football players are the biggest jerks on campus: the culture of school sports too often nurtures entitlement and arrogance. Imagine a school athletic culture in which the athletes were expected to embody the best of ethical values both on and off the field.

The implications are staggering.

_________________________

Pointer: Lianne Best

Sources: Yard Barker,  Deseret News

Why Are The Core American Rights Ethics Alarms Malfunctioning?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The spark for this post is the recent fiasco engineered by Modesto Junior College in California, which told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013, which happens to be Constitution Day. College police and administrators demanded that student Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college’s tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time. Fortunately, as is almost always the case in such campus outrages, The Fire, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (and what does it tell us that this indispensable champion of individual rights is widely regarded as a “conservative” organization?) was at the ready, and ripped off a letter to the school administrators that served the dual purpose of warning it to back off and holding it up to national ridicule. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Prof. David Guth

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Guth Tweet

With this brain-jarring twitter offal from University of Kansas journalism professor David Guth—and if you marvel at the abysmal quality of today’s journalists, there’s a big clue right there—Ethics Alarms launches a new category, the Unethical Tweet of the Week. Clearly, Twitter has a magic ability to make even reasonable public figures and professionals engage in irresponsible, hateful and idiotic discourse, though I seriously doubt that this particular tweet’s author needed much of a shove.

What’s the matter with the tweet? Well, how long have you got? Let’s see: Continue reading →

The Authority Trap: Elizabeth O’Bagey’s Three Ethics Strikes

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Woman-pulling-off-a-mask

It is not, you see, enough to have a good idea, an original argument, or a brilliant solution.There must be reason for important people, people who make decisions that affect lives, to pay any more attention to you than they do anyone else who claims to have such things, because its is often difficult for even intelligent and experienced individuals to distinguish genius from well-expressed garbage. There must be something that elevates that unique and valuable perspective you bring to a problem above the swirling mess and noise generated by the blabbering and shouting competition, and the thing is, if you really have a valuable perspective to contribute, you owe it to not just yourself, but to your country, even humanity.

There is one asset, if you are otherwise unknown, that will provide that elevation besides the inherent virtues of your brilliant idea, and that is authority...a book, a connection everybody knows and respects, or, perhaps most of all, academic credentials. And there are two things that will make it impossible to raise your special contribution above the throng, and they are a conflict of interest, and a reputation for hiding the truth. These are the murderers of trust.

This brings us to the strange case of Elizabeth O’Bagy, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, who managed to get the Wall Street Journal to publish her analysis of the civil war in Syria, and her conclusions, based, we were to assume, on her study, analysis and time in the country, regarding the benefits of U.S. employment of military force in the region. Continue reading →

Regarding the New, Improved Second Amendment, Indoctrination and Hanlon’s Razor

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Just in time for the latest round of political exploitation of a gun-related tragedy, it has been discovered that a school history textbook used in some Texas  high schools (and probably others) mis-states the meaning of the Second Amendment, neatly editing away the part that all the controversy is about.

In fact, John J. Newman’s “United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination,” rewrites the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. On page 102 of Newman’s book (page 134 of the PDF version), the author summarizes the amendment in a way that distorts its meaning:

newman-book-1

Could this be intentional? Well, it is certainly wrong, and one is not being conspiratorial to wonder how such a blatant error 1) got into a history text in the first place , 2) passed any review process, and 3) lasted this long.

It is well-established that the Second Amendment  guarantees the individual’s right to keep and bear arms, and not only in a militia. How far that guarantee extends is indeed a matter of intense debate, but Newman has misleadingly limited that right only to those who are members of a government militia, essentially editing the amendment right into obsolescence.  Though that is clearly where many anti-gun zealots, including Senator Diane Fienstein, CNN talk-meister Piers Morgan, and many others would like to see it go, it is not the current state of the law, and never has been.The Supreme Court opinion in  District of Columbia vs Heller (2008), which is not mentioned in the textbook, held that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

There is no defending Newman’s textbook, except as a justifiable attempt to destroy the Second Amendment by teaching students that the right to bear arms doesn’t exist in the modern world—in other words, by using deception and indoctrination. Continue reading →

Rejecting Mob Justice Even When The Mob Is Right: Ethical And Necessary

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
The Taco Bell employee-to-be,

The Taco Bell employee-to-be,

Prediction: Those who don’t comprehend the George Zimmerman verdict will never understand this one. Yet it is absolutely right and necessary in every way.

Summary: The Montana Supreme Court blocked an incompetent judge from changing an offensive and inexcusably inadequate sentence for a serious crime, because he was trying to do so as the result of public criticism.

Background: Judge G. Todd Baugh, an elected district judge in Montana’s Yellowstone County, sentenced  former high school teacher Stacey Dean Rambold to 15 years in prison with all but 31 days suspended—that’s one lousy month, friends— for having sexual intercourse without consent, also known as rape, with a 14-year-old female student (the teacher was 49 at the time) who later committed suicide while the case was pending. The judge, who appears to be an idiot (he later said that he can’t imagine what came over him) explained his decision at the time by saying that the underaged victim of the statutory rape was “older than her chronological age” and had “as much control of the situation” as the teacher.

Beginning with the late student’s mother, who reacted to the absurd sentence by screaming “You suck!” at the judge (Excellent diagnosis, by the way) and storming out of the courtroom, the ridiculous verdict caused an overwhelming backlash of negative public sentiment that spread nationwide. There was so much wrong with the sentence and the way it was arrived at that the mind, and conscience, boggles: Continue reading →