07 November 2006
trump this-
Meanwhile, a colleague of mine has been officially reprimanded for posting that he's pro-gay rights and various and sundry other socially liberal things on a school message board about religion and politics.
On some level, I realize that there's no such thing as free speech in China. But every time the school newspaper (which I oversee) gets censored or some administrator debates firing one of us peons because we don't go to Thanksgiving Church, I remember all over again.
This is what happens when schools hire trained, professional teachers---they get people who can think for themselves. My school, as it turns out, recruits heavily from missionfinder.org and Dallas Baptist University. What this means is that if they accidentally hire someone who doesn't sing in a church choir or at least teach Sunday school, then the guilty teacher is called into meeting after meeting in which he or she must "chat" about his or her personal beliefs.
This poses many difficulties for those un-Christian teachers, at least the first time around, because all the Christian teachers knew they were coming into a private school that teaches fundamentalist evangelical Christianity to the students (and keeps many of parents in the dark about this), but none of the non-Christian teachers were aware of this. The non-Christian teachers come from schools like Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia; they were recruited for school prestige, but they're given the boot once their names are recorded on the official personnel forms.
That is, if they make noise.
I keep my thoughts and opinions to myself, mostly. The middle schoolers think I'm Jewish; the high schoolers think I'm too apathetic to have an opinion.
But they skipped on my promised raise, the office wall of my apartment is crumbling down (built on sand?), and I'm sick of informal "chats" which result in harmless student work being censored. I'm not doing anything controversial with my classes, but I wonder how long till the administration trumps up charges because maybe I'm a Jew and maybe I'm apathetic and maybe they don't know what to make of me, so it's best to just be rid of me.
betholindo at 19:14