Last year on the Nick Ferrari programme, someone called in to say that their teenage son had been given detention, along with classmates for saying they’d vote UKIP during an election. The teacher reacted to the pupils by saying “All UKIP voters were racists” and then handed out detention for their remarks.
The boy’s father couldn’t believe this had happened at his son’s school, and Nick Ferrari described the episode as outrageous and absurd, and politics should be kept out of the classroom, and it doesn’t matter what party this teenager supports because like adults, children have diverse views too which they’re entitled to have, and this singular teacher needs to do the detention himself for being such an idiot.
Telling people who they can and can’t support is similar to a dictatorship, and the teacher should have been dismissed and the head should have been punished, this is the United Kingdom, not North Korea.
Children should be free to explore their own political interests as they grow into adults, and it’s no different from a student in a class idolising Donald Trump, bet they wouldn’t get detention for that, and like the USA, hysterics appears to have infiltrated our education system.
Perhaps we should award these boys with MBE medals for displaying courage for their fair and honest beliefs, it’s called free speech, and teachers should be encouraging open and free discussion, not closing it down.
So, a couple of children have a discussion, and then when one person objects to their beliefs, the teacher, in this case, the kids are excluded. This is was a discussion, but then it became authoritarian when the teacher didn’t agree. “At the end of the day, you can believe whatever you want, as long as I believe it!” Of course, the teacher didn’t say this, but he may as well have.
The problem is, our education system has become an indoctrination platform, and it’s a national disgrace that teachers are persecuting their students for their political beliefs.
At the end of the day, teachers should be doing what they’re paid for, teaching, and they shouldn’t be getting involved in politics, the same as celebrities meddling in politics, and if these teachers can’t teach without intervening, then they shouldn’t teach at all.
On the other hand, if these children want to get politically involved, then they have to understand that sometimes this is the consequence of their beliefs and that not everyone is going to agree.
The problem with numerous schools, kids appear to be taught what to think, rather than how to think, but schools should be supportive of debate and respect democratic freedom of expression to their students, along with their political beliefs.
And if these boys are getting detention for defending UKIP, then those who promote Labour, should they be publicly whipped?
Once teaching was seen as a vocation, now they’ve turned it into a profession, and they don’t teach children these days, they instruct them, without any freedom of speech, and teachers shouldn’t be telling these children what to believe, they should be teaching them how to think for themselves, it’s not only freedom of speech, but it’s problem-solving as well.
And if the teacher wasn’t at fault, why did the school apologise?
