The treason of the educational class
by Melanie Phillips:
Censorship of knowledge and ideas is now expanding from campus to schoolroom.
Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness.
The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument.
This closing of the western mind is now taking place inside schools too. In America, high-school officials are increasingly imposing censorship and speech regulation. A Vermont district has fired a school principal, Tiffany Riley, for writing on Facebook that she didn’t agree with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley writes:
Shortly after that posting, Mount Ascutney School Board held an emergency meeting to declare that it is “uniformly appalled” and that Riley was “tone deaf” for making such a statement. In what should now be a major free speech case, the Board unanimously voted to fire Riley, citing her “denigrating, derogatory, or contrary to the movement for social equity for African Americans, including the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The background to the affair is this. Before graduation at Riley’s school, an American flag was painted in the school grounds near to where the graduation ceremony was to be held. This was declared insulting or disturbing by a former pupil, Iyanna Williams. She expressed the view that “display of the flag is associated with exclusion of African American citizens from political considerations,” and wanted the addition of a painted statement representing Black Lives Matter or other associated ideas.
In other words, Williams was disrespecting the American flag because she was grossly disrespecting America as intrinsically racist, and she required the school to exhibit similar gross disrespect to its nation and its flag.
The graduation was held without painting over the American flag and there were no Black Lives Matter displays. The row, however, continued and provoked Riley’s remarks. And this was the“denigrating” and “derogatory” statement that she made:
I firmly believe that Black Lives Matter, but I DO NOT agree with the coercive measures taken to get to this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point. While I want to get behind BLM, I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race. While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement? What about all others who advocate for and demand equity for all? Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist.
For this entirely reasonable — indeed, anti-racist — point of view, Superintendent David Baker told Riley that her comments were “inflammatory, “incendiary” and “racist” — and then expressed shock that she took offence.
Now look at what’s going on in Britain.
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