Jesus Fucking Fuck, read this:

Hard lessons from poetry class: Speech is free unless it's critical


By BILL HILL

Last update: 15 May 2004


Bill Nevins, a New Mexico high school teacher and personal friend, was fired last year and classes in poetry and the poetry club at Rio Rancho High School were permanently terminated. It had nothing to do with obscenity, but it had everything to do with extremist politics.

The "Slam Team" was a group of teenage poets who asked Nevins to serve as faculty adviser to their club. The teens, mostly shy youngsters, were taught to read their poetry aloud and before audiences. Rio Rancho High School gave the Slam Team access to the school's closed-circuit television once a week and the poets thrived.

In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.

Bill Nevins was suspended for not censoring the poetry of his students. Remember, there is no obscenity to be found in any of the poetry. He was later fired by the principal.

After firing Nevins and terminating the teaching and reading of poetry in the school, the principal and the military liaison read a poem of their own as they raised the flag outside the school. When the principal had the flag at full staff, he applauded the action he'd taken in concert with the military liaison.

Then to all students and faculty who did not share his political opinions, the principal shouted: "Shut your faces." What a wonderful lesson he gave those 3,000 students at the largest public high school in New Mexico. In his mind, only certain opinions are to be allowed.

But more was to come. Posters done by art students were ordered torn down, even though none was termed obscene. Some were satirical, implicating a national policy that had led us into war. Art teachers who refused to rip down the posters on display in their classrooms were not given contracts to return to the school in this current school year.

The message is plain. Critical thinking, questioning of public policies and freedom of speech are not to be allowed to anyone who does not share the thinking of the school principal.

The teachers union has been joined in a legal action against the school by the National Writers Union, headquartered in New York City. NWU's at-large representative Samantha Clark lives and works in Albuquerque.








The American Civil Liberties Union has become the legal arm of the lawsuit pending in federal court.

Meanwhile, Nevins applied for a teaching post in another school and was offered the job but he can't go to work until Rio Rancho's principal sends the new school Nevins' credentials. The principal has refused to do so, and that adds yet another issue to the lawsuit, which is awaiting a trial date.

While students are denied poetry readings, poetry clubs and classes in poetry, Nevins works elsewhere and writes his own poetry.

Writers and editors who have spent years translating essays, films, poems, scientific articles and books by Iranian, North Korean and Sudanese authors have been warned not to do so by the U.S. Treasury Department under penalty of fine and imprisonment. Publishers and film producers are not allowed to edit works authored by writers in those nations. The Bush administration contends doing so has the effect of trading with the enemy, despite a 1988 law that exempts published materials from sanction under trade rules.

Robert Bovenschulte, president of the American Chemical Society, is challenging the rule interpretation by violating it to edit into English several scientific papers from Iran.

Are book burnings next?

Hill is a retired News-Journal reporter.

 

That's lousy. I can't stand the way things have been and are becoming.


Would someone please shoot me in the head???

 

My first reaction when I read things like that is, "they can't do that, this is America" ..but slowly, i'm learning that things like that can and do happen every day. our right to free speech is slowly being stripped away, and america's public school system is probably the leading establishment in doing this. Schools take young impressionable kids, force patriotism down their throat from kindergarden on up, and then if someone decides to rebel against that and do a little free thinking, they blatantly squelch any right the student might have to free speech. This is not the America the public school system taught (brainwashed) me to love.

 

I can't believe all these ridiculous stories I keep hearing! What's happening to us!? We definitely need to do something, NOW!

I'll be voting this year, yay! I feel a very great need to.

 

Seriously, this country is becoming the crumbles of a cookie. Our freedoms and liberties are being thrown away. This is not how this country is supposed to be. we should all be free to THINK. Damn, i'm so frustrated.

 

I'd like to see some of this poetry........

 

Here is a link to the poem..

http://www.livejournal.com/users/winnett/148064.html?mode=reply

 

I like the poem....it's kind of pushing it for a high school project, because they censor everything, but I don't think it was bad enough to cause all this. It's really just stating facts.... I guess we can't handle the truth...

 

Disgraceful, sickening, madness -- I am heartsick. I can't believe this is happening to our country. Every day, there is something new, either on the internet or t.v. or radio, that makes me bow my head in disbelief. God help us....God help our country.

If children are threatened and condemned in school, by authority figures, for reading personal poetry, their art, then we have really lost our minds. What's next? Swastika armbands for the kids, Bush/Hitler Youth Brigade? The children of our country are our hope....our future.....what the fuck are we doing???!!!!

 

poem was good. its a damn shame that students are being punished for speaking there minds. My class was censored in school when we spoke up against the administration kicking a kid out for something that he did not provoke. Another kid pulled him out of his car at a red light and it escalated from there. it was not even on school grounds, yet they kicked they kicked both kids out. we spoke up and they told us lies about what really happened even though the administration never saw what happened. they didn't even listen to the students that were actually there and they tried to shut us up. God damn, can't even speak up about anything anymore.

 

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL they got their panties tied up in a knot over THAT? I mean come on, I've heard worse Bush-bashing on CNN for Christ's sake. That must be one hella conservative school district.

 

This sort of thing has been happening for years. I have read at least five or six incidences on highschool and college campuses where conservative groups like Young Republicans were banned from campus or not allowed to be formed in the first place because their ideas were considered offensive.

This is the second time I've heard about it happening to a group on the left side of the spectrum. In both cases it's wrong. The school should be encouraging the free flow of ideas, not banning those ideas that some education beaureucrat finds uncomfortable.

This is political correctness in a nutshell though. The idea that people have a right to not be made uncomfortable.

 

yes, in america... we love freedom (as george bush would say)... and we value.... democracy (also as george bush would say, or any president for that matter)... and we must do our part to defend freedom... except we must understand... freedom comes with limitations in this country... in other words, we have no freedoms.

 

Well said sir.

"When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly ... When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it." -- Bill Clinton (April 19 1994, on MTV)

 

freedoms are not granted by the state, but by nature..

i think i like that quote... ferget who tho

 

ah, yes. bizarre that that should happen here in new mexico, which is overwhelmingly liberal democrats, most of whom greatly enjoy voting for themselves out of the treasury.

 

And the conservative media will not report things like these. There's never reports about this stuff when I watch the news. How convenient of them.

This is censorship at it's most disgusting.

How are we raising our children these days? To fear they're government rather than rely on them?

When a child can't express her thoughts through poetry, this has to be one fucked up world.

To risk sounding trite, this event is very Orwellian and a sure sign of what type of man we have in office.

 

Arguably, some fear of government is a healthy thing. Last century, governments killed about 100 million of their own people.

I disagree about this not getting reported though. I see stories like this on almost a daily basis on some of the more conservative sites. It's the liberal ones that seem to avoid these kinds of stories to me.

 

This is really frightening. I am glad our schools are not as bad. In my dd Sunshine's cartooning class (she is an 18 year old senior) they had to make a political cartoon. ALL the cartoons, were anti-Bush and anti-Iraq War. Most were shown at the Student Art Show. They were welcomed, although there were a few complaints from some staff and some parents. "TOO BAD, it is art." That was the Art Teacher's reply. Good for him!

Only thing is, they wouldn't publish one of the more radical ones in the school newspaper, but Sunshine and a few of her friends made copies of the cartoon and passed it out to everyone, anyway! That's my baby.

 

If a pissant school principal from Rio Rancho High School in New Mexico is ever allowed to rule america they just might be. GOD HELP US ALL!!!11

Good thing we have an ACLU though. I hate it when this shit happens.