A high school social studies teacher who was put on leave after comparing President Bush's State of the Union address to speeches made by Adolf Hitler defended his lecture on Tuesday, saying he was trying to encourage students to think.*I think it's mostly a mistake to make comparisons between Hitler/Nazis and a modern U.S. politician because the magnitude of Hitler's/Nazi's evilness is so incredibly great. However, this particular case seems to be an exception, as the teacher focused on the language of their respective speeches rather than on the men themselves.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Something Said. Something Not Good
Why doesn't this surprise me?*
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6 comments:
Yes, Thrillhouse, but you burn American Flags to keep warm in the winter.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Yeah, but I make sure the flags are made in America. They burn so much better than those ones made in China.
The comparison is ludicrous...Bush doesn't even have a funny little mustache.
There was a graduation speaker at Harvard in the late '60s who based his speech on the need for law and order. He talked about how the unruly students were making things unsafe, how the dangerous minorities were rioting, how the military needed to be respected and civilian leaders given greater power. The crowd of moms and dads applauds him, and then he lets them know it was a speech given by one of Hitler's henchmen in 1930s Germany. (Marilyn Young's The Vietnam Wars has the full story in it. Pretty good.)
Next time, the teacher should just read a Nazi address with the key words switched, and ask his students who it sounds like. Let them connect the dots.
I would rather have my kid's teacher compare the President (any President, not just W) to Hitler than compare him to Jesus, as other teachers have done (I don't have all the relevant info on that, and it's too late to do research, but I have heard of such a thing...pinky swear!).
I teach my kid that the default setting on politicians is "scoundrel", and it's up to a politician to prove him- or herself otherwise.
Sideshow, I love your line about "default settings". Sounds like my commodore 64.
I think it's pretty hard to make a convincing point by comparing someone to Hitler. Someone's bound to miss whatever point you're making and fixate on the invalidity of the Hitler comparison. Probably best to just compare Bush to the stuffy dean from Animal House. I
I do like OM's idea about speeches. The teacher could have read Hitler's speeches and some of W's, and maybe throw in a couple other historical figure's speeches, and let the kids figure out whose was whose.
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