Posted by Ir (Helen) on: 06.26.2006 /
I’ve been meaning to ask about this for a while…
I’ve heard Hemant comment a couple of times that he is not going to talk about his volunteer atheist activities with potential employers. His concern is that they might negatively affect his job prospects.
For example, Hemant said this on the Weekend America interview:
“I can’t say the ‘A-word’ in front of [the job interviewers], because you’re afraid of what’s going to happen. But if I said I volunteer with my church, [that's] not a problem anywhere you go (I would think)”
I understand Hemant’s concern. The U of M study showing atheists are America’s most distrusted minority has already been mentioned and discussed in this blog.
In addition, I recently happened to run across some online articles about how just one year ago, in the Chicagoland area (Hemant’s area), a teaching position job offer was withdrawn from Richard Sherman, apparently because his father (Rob Sherman) is a well-known atheist activist. Here’s a news article about it: Son Of Well-Known Atheist Says Name Got Him Un-Hired
That seems to be a clear example of discrimination based on perceptions of atheists. I was glad to read, in this update, that Richard Sherman was offered a job at another school and is now teaching there.
Assuming all goes well with the hiring process (I certainly hope so) and Hemant starts teaching students, I wonder if he will be up against prejudice from parents, if they find out he’s an atheist?
I know several of the people who read this blog have children.
Also, regarding the hiring process and Hemant’s concerns:
Comment by: Julie Marie
1Beliefs in and of themselves are not important to me. How people act based upon their beliefs does. Using the children captive in a classroom as an audience for lobbying social and political views would irritate me. Just as As don’t want “under God” I don’t want my child to hear you might as well believe in Santa, unicorns, or the tooth fairy as God, from their teacher who has, at the very least, position power. Now I know, that probably wouldn’t happen. But that is the fear, I think.
As have made a careful distinction between lack of respect for beliefs and respect for a person. What I think they miss is that for a C, beliefs are so tightly wound with identity that a disparaging attack on beliefs might as well be a disparaging attack on the person. There is a cost to using inflammatory words.
Although I haven’t ever had concern that my beliefs would make it hard for me to find or keep a job, in my primary education days, my family didn’t go to church. I learned to finesse that question with a “well, we haven’t found one yet” pretty quickly when we moved south. So I understand the dicey position.
Comment by: Siamang
2Allow me to frame this question just a bit larger….
Julie Marie’s quote helped me think of this:
Here’s the problem. It’s not an atheist problem, or a political problem. It’s:
“The children are captive to this teacher with views (s)he may wrongly promote upon the impressionable.”
During the cold war, schoolteachers and college professors were required as a term of their employment, to sign “loyalty oaths” promising not to teach or advocate the forcable overthrow of the government and affirming that they were not members of the Communist party.
In 1978 in California the Briggs Initiative was put on the ballot. Briggs would have barred gay teachers from the public schools. The gay republican (!) group “Log Cabin Republicans” was formed to fight it. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, suprisingly fought against the Briggs Initiative, which was defeated.
Currently rightwing activist David Horowitz has written a book called “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.” It’s his list of professors (all liberals) who he believes are indoctrinating our youth in the liberal political worldview.
This is about politics. It’s about religion. It’s about evolution. It’s about homosexuality. It’s about communism.
But really, it’s about parents and teachers. It’s about the idea that we don’t want “them,” the distrusted other, teaching OUR impressionables.
Comment by: Ir
3Thanks for reframing the question larger, Siamang. I agree with you that “really, it’s about parents and teachers. It’s about the idea that we don’t want “them,” the distrusted other, teaching OUR impressionables.”
I feel sorry for husbands and wives who strongly disagree about how to raise their children because they have to deal with the issue right in their own home of another adult wanting to teach things to their children they’d rather not have taught to them.
Comment by: Ir
4Yes indeed.
Good example of a ROAA situation ;)
Comment by: Mike C
5I would think that the higher the level of education, the more freedom a teacher/professor could have to talk about his or her religious or political beliefs without unduly influencing the “children”. For the most part one can expect high schoolers and college students to think for themselves. But an elementary student has less capacity to separate what a teacher tells them from the truth (whatever you happen to think the “truth” is).
Comment by: Eliza
6Personal beliefs around religion (A/C/etc) have not, to my knowledge, ever been brought up by my son’s teachers. His preschool teacher was Christian, but that only came up in friendly conversation outside of class time, between adults. I have no idea about his kindergarten or 1st grade teachers - it’s my impression they don’t bring it up. And that’s just fine with me. In a secular school, it’s not clear to me why it should come up. The point is to get the kids learning and thinking, not to have them hear the teacher’s personal beliefs, whether A or C.
On the other hand, there was a student teacher in my son’s K classroom for a few months who gave each of the kids a present on his last day…a card with an interesting but not-too-valuable coin taped to it, and a personal message for the child. My son’s card gave the Biblical meaning of his first name, and had a religious (Christian) statement which was well meaning (God be with you - it was more involved than that but similar tone; it wasn’t about trying to convert the kid). I tried to appreciate the sentiment, & what a personal thing it was for this student teacher to make these for the kids…but it did not sit well with me. My son thought the coin was neat but kind of shrugged at the message, which didn’t mean much to him. Anyway, this guy was just a student teacher; I wonder if he’s going to be told somewhere down the line to stop doing stuff like those cards. (That, or he might be planning to work in religious private schools, perhaps a good fit!)
Comment by: Mike C
7Most public school teachers and administrators that I’ve encountered are pretty paranoid about referring to religion at all in their classes. They are so afraid of lawsuits these days that they avoid the topic altogether. Which is fine by me on the elementary level, though I would hope that by the time a student reaches high school they should be able to talk about religion in class as an academic topic (e.g. how it relates to literature, history, sociology, etc.). A teacher doesn’t have to proselytize for his/her personal beliefs simply in order to bring up religion as a topic of study, and I would hope most teachers would feel the freedom to do so, though sadly this was not usually the case in my own public school experience. In my experience reference to religious beliefs of any sort were avoided like the plague. But maybe that was just my school.