Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic

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.
"My job as a teacher is to challenge students to think critically about issues that are affecting our world and our society," Jay Bennish said on NBC's "Today" show.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/3/7/125421.shtml?s=ic

I am not a teacher, but after graduating college I went back to take a semester of teacher's training... for two reasons: 1) I had absolutely no idea what to do next... and, 2) there was a girl that was still at my college who had become a habit of mine. She was a lovely girl from Wheaton, Maryland who claimed to have had the highest kick on her high school pom pom squad... which she demonstrated and I can tell you it was amazing. Her legs and that kick were the things stalkers are made of, but I digress.

After having studied Chemistry and Biology, the Education classes that I took were a complete joke... and every useful thing I learned that semester could have been related to me over a lunch at Burger King. The worst teachers I ever had were the ones who taught me how to teach.
As I recall, the goal of the classes was to train me how to take a group of kids and educate them in a particular subject. Thinking back on that semester I'm almost positive that Political Indoctrination 101 was not on my class schedule.

His politics aside, Mr Bennish was caught wasting everyone's time and money.

Public Schools have a great many problems, not the least of which is the fact that the extracurricular has become the curriculum. What Bennish was spewing is a kind of extracurricular activity because very few of his sudents will go on to make a living at being left-wing activists and Marxists. It's like the teaching of young men to be football players... Only a few of the very best will make a career of it in the NFL. Same with pom pom girls... Only a few of the very best will become strippers and showgirls.

I'm sure teachers get bored and prefer to talk about things that interest them, voice their opinions about these matters, and pontificate in general. But that's not what we taxpayers have hired them to do. One hundred years ago when the public schools produced a better product, the emphasis was on the three R's. Today public education is more sophisticated and much less effective.