Education

Here’s a New Way For a Public School Teacher to Be Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mario Perron, a middle school teacher at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Canada, has apparently been secretly selling his students’ art projects on the web for his own profit. A pupil stumbled across the teacher’s website with listings for drawings created by the student and fellow classmates in class, and reported the discovery to the school, according to CTV News. The usual investigation is ongoing, but how else would class art projects end up on line being sold for as much as $100? Here, for example, are some of the student drawings being sold on mugs…

Wow. People will buy anything online. The drawings also are being offered on T-shirts and phone cases.

The father of the student who made the discovery told reporters, “I’m extremely disgusted with [the teacher]. It’s extremely, you know, it’s unbelievable…Is this teacher asking for certain types of projects to be done to be able to sell them? Is he asking for these types of portraits to be done so it meets the market?…I’m not impressed with the school, or the school board.”

Perron’s LinkedIn profile says he has been a full-time teacher at Westwood Junior since September 2019 His profile also promotes his personal website, 1-mario-perron.pixels.com, which is where he offered his students’ artwork for sale without their permission or knowledge.

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Pointer: JutGory

Woke Kindergarten

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I honestly thought this story was a parody when I first read about it. Horrifyingly, Woke Kindergarten is real: a genuine dead canary in the mine of U.S. culture. On the company’s website, it boasts, “Woke kindergarten is a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem & visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-Black and queer and trans liberation.” The babber on that page shouts, “Power to the little people!”, a direct call-out to Marx, and what that really means is “Power to radical anti-American ideology through the programming of its children.”

Claiming that the schools are more dedicated to indoctrinating children than in educating them is another one of those conservative conspiracy theories people catch from Fox News like the flu, I keep reading. The next time someone tells you that, send them the Woke Kindergarten link right after you respond, “Bite me, you useful idiot.”

Wandering through the site is like visiting Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, early education version. “Woke Words of the day” include “Ceasefire,” “Protest,” Strike,” “Abolish” and “Anti-Racist.” The kids are introduced to the wonders of censorship. How are children introduced to poetry, its meter, its rhyme schemes, its beauty? Here’s one of Woke Kindergarten’s “teachable poems”:

Sure, it doesn’t doesn’t scan and is incomprehensible, but there’s a leftist message in there somewhere. On most of the site, the communist aspirations are hardly hidden. “Lil’ Comrade Convos” is one section. Under “Woke Wonderings”, described as “unconventional questions rooted in liberatory thought” that teachers and parents are supposed to pose to 4 and 5-year olds, who, as we all know, are well equipped with the experience and critical thinking skills to evaluate them, we have these loaded queries…

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Flat Learning Curve at Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Two depressing items to diges in the apparently unstoppable decline of Harvard University: the headline was composed based on the first, but the second may be even more disturbing. (Incidentally, I feel I should apologize for presenting so many EA posts involving my alma mater —and that of my sister and father, and where my mother was briefly a dean. However, its decay and current crisis mode would be ethics fodder of the same import if I had matriculated from Podunk U.)

First, here is the main substance of the proud announcement I was gifted with over the weekend from Harvard’s interim president. Recall that Harvard’s recent fiasco was seeded by a leadership group and campus culture that prioritized “diversity, equity and inclusion” to such an extent that it elevated an under-qualified, academically devious dean who had been involved in woke debacles during her tenure to be the new university president, primarily on the basis of her career-long obsession with “diversity” (and her color and gender, naturally). Coming under just and vituperative criticism for both engineering Claudine Gay’s ascent and later, after she had proven herself unfit for the job, acting to cover-up the scandal until the pressure by donors and students became too intense, was the Harvard Corporation, an all-Democrat and progressive woke cabal that ironically lacked diversity itself in the areas of world view and thought. Behold the two new members of that body selected in the wake of the criticism:

“…We write to let you know that two accomplished alumni will join the Harvard Corporation in the coming months…

Ken Frazier, a 1978 graduate of Harvard Law School, is former chairman and CEO of Merck & Co… he has had a distinguished career as a practicing lawyer, first in private practice and later as Merck’s general counsel. Known for his dedication to expanding opportunity for others, he recently co-founded OneTen, a nonprofit coalition focused on expanding family-sustaining employment opportunities for people lacking a four-year degree with an emphasis on Black Americans....

…His many honors include the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage Against Hate Award (2020) “for using his platform to speak out on behalf of marginalized communities and serving as an exemplary role model for corporate leadership.”

…Joe Bae, a 1994 graduate of Harvard College, is co-CEO of KKR, a global investment firm…he has served on numerous boards, including institutions such as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (current vice chair), Phillips Academy Andover (former trustee and chair of nominating and governance committee), the Asia Society, the Hong Kong Ballet, and the Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific Council. He is also a co-founder and board member of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), which was established in 2021 to serve the Asian American and Pacific Islander community….Along with his wife, the novelist Janice Y. K. Lee ’94, he led a recent philanthropic drive to support an FAS initiative to expand education and scholarship in Asian American studies.

Frazier is black, and has concentrated on programs and initiatives assisting African Americans. Bae is Asian, and his focus has been substantially in the area of advancing the interests of Asian-Americans. Bae’s appointment is a pretty transparent reaction to Harvard’s losing the lawsuit by Asian-Americans who claimed they had been discriminated against by the school’s affirmative action policies, recent ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

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“Civility Update” Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The social media wag who posted this wrote, “And just like that, I’m a vegan!”

A true typo doesn’t count as incivility. This one just adds to the long indictments of our crumbling educational system and the cratering quality control in U.S. industries from aircraft manufacturing to health care services. It may well be that this label appeared because of a combination of both: someone in a position to prevent the label from being used thought the typo was funny, and let it go.

The Drag Queen School Principal Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was going to make this tale an ethics quiz, but decided that we’ve settled this issue before.

Dr. Shane Murnan had been the principal at John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City since June. After he was hired, The Libs of TikTok revealed last September that he was an extracurricular drag queen, and placed photos of him as “Shantel Mandalay” on social media. Predictably, conservatives pounced and demanded that he be fired, while the school defended him. The uproar intensified, however, and Shantel was eventually placed on administrative leave.

Now he has resigned, finding that the scrutiny and criticism from social media and elsewhere is too much to bear.

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Year: Harvard Divinity School

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well, this is an upset. I would have bet almost anything that Kamala Harris or Joe Biden would eventually nail down the 2024 Ethics Alarms Authentic Frontier Gibberish Award, but no. A dark horse has grabbed the award, and with eleven full months to go! But no one can compete with this.

The Harvard Divinity School’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging hosted a head-exploding “Gathering to Breathe and Heal” event this week to—are you ready?— help students grieve over the resignation of former President Claudine Gay, who was, in reality, fired, and who richly deserved to be. Moreover, the justification for her removal was irrefutable and beyond debate. “Grieving” for the exit of any incompetent occupant in any job is proof of warped values. “Grieving” for for a cheating and dishonest occupant of any position of leadership demonstrates astounding ignorance of the essentials of being a leader and role model. “Grieving” for the appropriately rapid demise of an incompetent leader and dishonest scholar as the head of a prestigious university is deranged. The exitance of this event on campus is almost as humiliating for Harvard as the debacle of Gay’s short-lived presidency.

I’m saving the spectacular gibberish announcing this loony “Gathering to Breathe and Heal” event until last, because nothing could follow it. Trying to write anything after this is like being next on the program after Houdini, Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Jerry Lee Lewis or Ray Charles. Submit your favorite babble: I’m leaning toward “it is a container for holding emotions in community knowing that the circle holds us all.” Rarit!

Here it is…

UPenn’s Anti-Semitic Lecturer

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That cartoon above, showing apparent Zionists (as in “Jews”) sipping Gazan blood like wine, is probably the most outrageous of political cartoonist Dwayne Booth’s works…I don’t know, maybe this one is..

All a matter of taste, I guess. The ethics question is, now what, if anything?

Booth is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication having joined the school as an adjunct faculty member in 2015. Political cartooning is certainly a valid courss of study. He currently teaches two classes, but since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack, his off-campus cartooning has become especially controversial.

Booth publishes political cartoons under the pen name “Mr. Fish.” One of his classes teaches students the political cartooning art by exploring “the purpose and significance of image-based communication as an unparalleled propagator of both noble and nefarious ideas,” according to Penn’s website. “Work presented will be chosen for its unique ability to demonstrate the inflammatory effect of weaponized visual jokes, uncensored commentary, and critical thinking on a society so often perplexed by artistic free expression and radicalized creative candor.”

You can see more of Booth’s anti-Israel cartoons here. As far as I can determine, there is not sufficient basis for disciplining him or ending his association with the school. Political cartooning, though I personally view it as a crude, over-rated and deceitful form of editorial, is by nature extreme in device and approach. Booth’s own political opinions and obvious anger at Israel that he expresses as “Mr. Fish” or on social media are not relevant to his value teaching the political cartooning craft, and would seem to be squarely within the margins of both academic freedom and the first Amendment, provided that his commentary in class and on campus are not directed at Jewish students.

However, if a school, like the University of Pennsylvania, decided that, at a time when there are unusual tensions around the Gaza-Israel conflict its lecturer should cool his public fervor or consider another teaching position elsewhere, that would be a fully ethically defensible position. He’s right at the line now.

He might even have crossed it.

KABOOM! Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Is a Worse Plagiarist Than Even Claudine Gay!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.

Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s Sherri Ann Charleston appears to have “plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks” and even taking credit for a study done by her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!

Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:

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Ethics Quiz: The Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty College Basketball Star

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Illinois guard Terrence Shannon Jr. 23, was arrested in Lawrence, Kansas on Dec. 28 and charged with rape. While he visited Lawrence last September, he grabbed a woman and sexually assaulted her at a bar, or so the woman claimed to police. The Illini suspended Shannon following his arrest, but the player’s attorney requested a temporary restraining order against the school this month to force Illinois to let him resume playing basketball. A federal judge granted the request on January 19.

Shannon has been playing with the basketball team ever since. Last week, playing against Northwestern in his first road game since the arrest, he was taunted by fans chanting “No means no!” and “Guilty!”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this: Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Maybe there is some hope for the tarnished Ivy League progenitor after all. Maybe.

I cite as the evidence for this the near unanimous beat-down a Harvard Crimson editor received from the presumably Harvard community commenters on an arrogant screed called “I’m Trans, and I’m Not up for Debate.” If there ever was smoking gun evidence of the political Left’s attitude toward opposing views, unwelcome speech and “offensive” ideas, this is it.

The essay, posted in the venerable Harvard student-run daily newspaper, begins, “For a community that represents such a small percentage of the population – less than one percent – trans people have occupied a strikingly large portion of public and political discourse.” Why yes, and whose fault is that? Who decided that public school teachers had any business delving into the problems of that tiny percentage of the population, or that the sliver would decide to assert imaginary rights, like being able to crush women in athletic competitions?

“As a transgender person, it has been exhausting to watch my community’s basic rights put into jeopardy and framed as subjects for debate,” undergrad E. Matteo Diaz ’27 writes. “Should trans people be allowed in public bathrooms? Should we be allowed to play sports? Should we be included in school curricula? Should we have access to healthcare? We are treated like a question to be answered, a problem to be solved,” he (She? Readers are never ordered to use specific pronouns) continues. “To cast trans rights as a “debate” suggests that the opinions of all parties — however ignorant of the reality of trans existence — are equally deserving of merit and consideration,” we are told.

Well all righty, then! No debate! What trans activists say must be accepted as revealed truth! How typical of the 21st century Left: challenging the cant is blasphemy. More:

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