Tag: freedom of expression

Chase Culpepper is a 16-year-old resident of South Carolina.  Like 16-year-olds all over the country, Chase applied for his drivers’ license this past March.  Unlike most 16-year-olds. DMV officials forced Chase to change his appearance before they would take his license picture.

Chase prefers male pronouns at this point, but wears girl’s clothing and make-up.  DMV workers accused him of not looking the way “a boy should.”  They refused to take his picture as long as he was “in disguise.”  

CNN’s video is not embeddable

The government should not be in the business of telling men and women how we are supposed to look as men and women.

–Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF)

Another semester begins, to yet one more time drain the life out of multitudes of college teachers and their students.  This year begins with the periodic political campaign speech which, if it addresses education at all, displays no knowledge of life from the perspective of a college teacher.

One of the problems with being a college professor is that one is likely to be swamped with many ideas at once from time to time, which causes them not only to divide one’s time in an often futile attempt to resolve the different issues but also to consider how those issues might overlap…and why they happen to come up now, at this point in the life of a person or the history of the world.

So I’m going to carefully unwrap the twines of my reaction to the acceptance speech vis-a-vis education from another event that occurred yesterday.  More time and more thought need to go into any tirade about students who would be better served not going to college and the rest of us remodeling society so that such people could have their own form of a better life through a different vehicle than attending school not because they want to do so but because they are told to do so.  And about the amount of destruction done to educational realms when people think that the point of an education is to get a better job instead of, you know, learning something.

More time and more thought also need to go into anything written about the effects of that destruction and the destruction caused by No Child Left Behind…which has been every bit the storm Katrina was and is ongoing…on any effort to create an army of new teachers who actually have the skills and passion to teach.  The infrastructure of our education system has been neglected just as much as the infrastructure of our highways and byways…and surely for just as long, if not longer.