<p>Half full? Half empty? That’s easy. It’s the wrong size glass.</p>
<p>Wow. Just looked back in. This thread has LEGS!</p>
<p>agree or disagree with geeps s/he has given birth to quite a lively discussion.</p>
<p>"First of all, winchester, let me apologize for taking shots at geeps. I am really tired of him or her</p>
<p>Believe me, the feeling is mutual…I despise spin, and you are quite good at it.</p>
<p>“agree or disagree with geeps s/he has given birth to quite a lively discussion.”</p>
<p>I’m just hoping for 1,000 posts at this point…lol</p>
<p>“.in other words, it’s not a coincidence that the best universities in the united states are overwhelmingly socially liberal”</p>
<p>most of the youth are socially liberal…true…then they grow up</p>
<p>then they grow up</p>
<p>I don’t really understand this phrase- I have heard it before- usually by parents yelling at their kids when they are embarrassed by their whining or crying in public.</p>
<p>But as others have pointed out- that growing older and gaining a broader perspective means many things.</p>
<p>I’m just hoping for 1,000 posts at this point…lol</p>
<p>I hate to tell you, but posts in the parents forum ** don’t count**</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>I’m just hoping for 1,000 posts at this point…lol</p>
<p>I hate to tell you, but posts in the parents forum ** don’t count**</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>1,000 posts in this thread</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>the administrators and faculty are mostly socially liberal as well.</p>
<p>“the administrators and faculty are mostly socially liberal as well.”</p>
<p>of course they are…they never “grew up”…nice to live in a bubble…I guess</p>
<p>I just have to say that post #832 by winchester was really good. I’m impressed. I wish I had the time and energy to refute wrongheaded thinking that well.</p>
<p>how do you live in a bubble and where can I get one?</p>
<p>Senior’s Dad, you mention a teacher your daughter had, who ranted constantly about George Bush and how he deserved to die. Your daughter, suspecting the teacher might be an unfair grader, chose paper topics she thought the teacher would like. You cite this as an example of liberal bias, which it is, but wouldn’t the teacher be equally as bad if he/she was a conservative, constantly deifying Ronald Reagan or something like that? A ranting ideologue is a bad teacher no matter what the politics.</p>
<p>The problem with that teacher is not his/her politics, but that he or she is a ranting ideologue. The teacher is a bad teacher-- bad for conservative students, bad for liberal students, bad for all students. </p>
<p>Fang Jr took a government class with a woman who, it turned out, was a conservative Christian. Fang Jr, a liberal, is stubborn and not as savvy as your daughter; he was not strategic choosing his paper topic. He discussed an Establishment Clause case in the Supreme Court where an atheist father sued to force a school district to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance his daughter said in school every morning. Fang Jr looked at previous church-state cases and concluded that if the court followed its previous reasoning, the atheist father would prevail. </p>
<p>The teacher gave the paper a barely passing grade, not because it was poorly written or poorly argued, but because she said his conclusion was ridiculous and no one believed it. Clearly she was allowing her religious beliefs to overwhelm her judgement-- when a case comes before the Supreme Court, <em>somebody</em> believes it ought to prevail and is making good legal arguments to support it. I was so mad.</p>
<p>Both my son’s teacher and your daughter’s teacher were <em>bad teachers</em>. I don’t imagine you would be any happier having your daughter in this Christian fundamentalist’s class than I was having my son there-- what benefit would she get if she could put any shoddy argument before the teacher and have it accepted as long as it accorded with the teacher’s beliefs? And I wouldn’t be happy with my son in the ranting ideologue’s class-- he wouldn’t learn anything if he didn’t have to justify his beliefs with solid evidence.</p>
<p>Since more college professors are liberal, more bad college professors are liberal. But liberal or conservative, those professors are to be avoided. What in your view would be the problem with a good professor who was a liberal?</p>
<p>Fang’s story reminds me of a counterexample. My son is a died-in-the-wool liberal, at least so far. (Too liberal for me; I tend to lecture him on why making clothes in China isn’t necessarily bad.) Anyway, he was also a Latin student, and his high school only had one Latin teacher – who happened to be (a) a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, and (b) a former conservative politician in his country of origin, and still involved in politics there. He was my son’s teacher for four years, and he was a wonderful teacher – not only about Latin, but also about religion, and ethics, and politics in the third world, and why conservative solutions are no less moral and humane than liberal ones (sometimes more). He and my son argued all the time, and adored each other. A great teacher, and all the greater for bringing his passion about all sorts of things into a class to which they had practically no relevance whatsoever. But of course, everything is connected, and his politics and religion definitely played in to why he loved Latin – including his break with the Catholic Church where he learned it. Every class with him was mind-expanding for my son.</p>
<p>I have absolutely no problem with passionate, skilled conservative teachers bringing that into class. Of course, like everyone else, I have a problem with any teacher who downgrades students for disagreeing with him.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That case was ridiculous for several reasons not the least of which is that saying the pledge is not complusory and that the father did not have custody of the child. The latter was why that case was dismissed.</p>
<p>I am not going to read 58 pages of posts on this but just want to tell the OP that my conservative son is at a top LAC that is quite liberal – and he is as happy as can possibly be.</p>
<p>^^ Cardinal Fang, very good post and good questions. Thank you!</p>
<p>No, I wouldn’t equate a professor “who ranted constantly about George Bush and how he deserved to die” with one who was “constantly deifying Ronald Reagan or something like that.” I would, however, equate with the former a professor who rants, for example, that President Obama should die. I doubt there is even a single professor anywhere so ranting about Obama.</p>
<p>Having said that, I agree with you when you say “A ranting ideologue is a bad teacher no matter what the politics.” I would also assert that an ideologue can be a very good teacher if willing to be honest.</p>
<p>Ideological professors is an interesting subject to me on several levels. My daughter is in the midst of choosing colleges (she presently is dual-enrolled at a local state college where the George Bush thing happened). I want my daughter to be afforded the best education available. I want her to be challenged. But I do not want her to be berated for her beliefs.</p>
<p>My wife studied socialist legal systems at University College London in London and in Moscow. Her professor was a card-carrying Communist. She reports that the professor never once criticized communism, but he did take leave from class for a few days to permit Soviet dissidents to present their cases to the class (significantly, this happened in London, not in Moscow).</p>
<p>I had my own Communist professor at my state university from whom I took Russian, Soviet, and eastern European history classes. This professor assigned One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to my Soviet Union Since 1927 course. He abruptly canceled Ivan Denisovich and removed it from the reading list.</p>
<p>You see, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had just then been published in English, and my professor substituted Gulag for Ivan Denisovich. As you may know, while Ivan Denisovich criticizes Soviet work camps, Gulag is a systemic and crushing condemnation of Soviet-style communism.</p>
<p>I cite these as examples of how ideologues can effectively teach without ranting. But, of course, they have to want to.</p>
<p>I am not Catholic, but if I were Catholic, I would have been greatly offended by much of what was presented in history classes I took in undergraduate school. Of course the Catholic Church IS to be blamed for all sorts of sins, but the constant barrage of anti-Catholicism to which I was exposed seemed excessive and out-of-balance, even then. It’s not like the Catholic Church has gone without censure until scholars of this era suddenly discovered its faults.</p>
<p>It just seems to me from what I’ve seen in the culture (and what I read on College Confidential) that Christianity in general and Catholicism and “fundamental” protestantism in particular, together with conservatives, may just be the only “safe” targets of excoriation in the public square, including, the college classroom.</p>
<p>“Fundamentalists” are caricatured as uniformly uneducated, ignorant, and likely-stupid devotees of Bob Jones. [I acknowledge here the kind words JHS has for at least one “fundamentalist evangelical Christian.”] Conservatives are stereotyped as xenophobic fanatic supporters of the “haves” over the “have-nots” and of the “status quo.” One is derided as “blind” when one points out factual errors in the received wisdom of academia’s aristocracy.</p>
<p>So please excuse us if we conservatives seem somewhat on edge when it comes to what is taught in college classes.</p>
<p>Returning to your post: You SHOULD be angry if your son’s grades were reduced because of his point-of-view. I would be too.</p>
<p>But no, admiring Ronald Reagan and saying so in class is not the same thing as ranting that George W. Bush should die.</p>
<p>For my example, I didn’t mean a professor who admired Reagan and said so, but a professor who constantly ranted about Reagan and his wonderfulness and the current administration and its socialistic commie pinko ■■■ policies. There are such professors. I suspect, but do not know, that a trip through a few Liberty classrooms would unearth one.</p>
<p>As for me, I would sooner see my son with JHS’s Latin teacher than with an average teacher with liberal political views.</p>
<p>Good luck to your daughter in choosing colleges. In my experience, colleges love homeschoolers.</p>
<p>Thanks, Cardinal Fang!</p>