So, just to clarify, were you just making a general comment about what laws shouldn't be passed, or did you intend to imply that SB 148 'vaguely protects students from having to "feel bad about their religious background"'? If it was the latter, can you point out the provision that does this?
No, they do the same kind of vague <expletive deleted>, just with the race concept instead of the religious concept.
Well then, can you point out the provision of SB 148 that vaguely protects students from having to feel bad about their racial background?
Regardless of the target, the point is that censorship neither truly protects anyone from discrimination nor is conducive to any honest study of the hman condition.
Do you regard the fact that public school teachers are no longer allowed to teach their students Christianity is the One True Faith to be "censorship"? Do you believe that back when public school teachers taught that, it was not discrimination? Do you believe teaching them that Christianity is the One True Faith was conducive to honest study of the human condition?
If something is untrue, demonstrate that it is untrue and scientific consensus (and therefore scientifically informed pedagogy) will gradually move away from it.
If you mean to be suggesting that telling children they're the beneficiaries of "white privilege" and color-blind laws are "systemic racism" is
scientific, show your work.
This won't happen because Congress passes a law against talking about things that "distress" students, and the costs of such a paradigm therefore swiftly outweigh any benefits.
Did you have a point? Was your point to insinuate that SB 148 is a law against talking about things that distress students? If that was your point, did you make that point because you sincerely believe that's what SB 148 is? If you sincerely believe that's what it is, why do you believe that? Did you read the bill? Did you even read the thread? See post #15.
Schools, whether public or private, do not enjoy the Constitutional protections of free speech in the first place.
Public schools don't enjoy the Constitutional protections of free speech in the first place because they're an arm of the state and the state does not have free speech rights. What makes you think private schools don't have Constitutional protections of free speech?
I am accusing censorship of being bad social policy.
Is public school teachers no longer being allowed to teach their students Christianity is the One True Faith "bad social policy"?
When legislators play at being scientists, what you get is politicized science and very little learning at all.
In what way are the Florida legislators playing at being scientists? Which of the concepts that SB 148 prohibits teachers from endorsing is a scientific concept?
If the argument is that a teacher would win a court case on the basis that they never literally instructed anyone to feel anguish, that's likely true, but that doesn't make this good law.
We're already in agreement that it's a bad law; the issue at hand is whether the specific charges people in this thread have made against it are correct.
I also don't think it's a given that this would be the case in the biased context of a courtroom populated by people inherently prejudiced against the defendant, nor that holding such a case in the first place would be valid.
If a school was being sued because of a false charge that a Muslim teacher had been preaching Islam at the children, the school might lose anyway in a courtroom populated by people inherently prejudiced against the defendant. Do you think that's a good reason to make it legal for public schools to preach Islam?
If a teacher is causing measurable harm to the mental wellbeing of their students, no censorship laws are required to dismiss them from their post anyway, a school district already has the power to dismiss an employee if they are demonstrably harming their students.
That's scant protection if the school administrators share the teacher's faith in the teacher's religion and are every bit as in favor of telling white children they're oppressors as the teacher is.
This law is about politics, not the protection of children.
Certainly. A government attempting to have an established religion is an irreducibly political matter. Parents have an interest in not having their children indoctrinated in somebody else's religion regardless of whether being raised in the new faith would hurt the children or not. Children are not the property of the state or of any religion it establishes; the state has no right to bring up children in its own faith; when it tries to do so parents have every right to push back against it politically.
If it's actually about protecting children, it's redundant and far too extreme. Because "feeling shame" is not a good, neutral measure of whether someone is being harmed by an instructor in the first place.
Good thing then that SB 148 doesn't prohibit causing children to "feel shame".
