VLVL II: "What is Fascism?" (fwd)

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 12:54, Terrance wrote:
>  > How the West should deal with Muslim fundamentalism and the head-scarf
> > (or other religious symbols) in public classrooms is a conundrum.
> 
> I let students wear Ché T-shirts and doo-rags, colors, bandanas, met
> hats, yankee hats, rangers suck hats, whatever. I wear a Baltimore
> Orioles hat with my Long Island Duck's sweater vest (both orange on
> black) and on halloween I just strap on a pair of black pumps and carry
> a matching purse. I teach for the State and the City of NY. At the City
> school, where the kids are our best and brightest ("Gifted") a seventh
> grader sat up and looked serious for a week after I saw the Ramones at
> CBGBs a few times. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt, black with the band
> ironed on to the front, a safety pin in a small tear. Another kid has
> "Hip-Hop Sucks" magic-markered on his back pack. I asked him about it
> and he dais it was a phaze he was sure to get over soon. Of course
> adults can wear head gear to school and lots of them do. Some because
> their hair is a mess. Some because they have no hair. We let our kids
> and adults wear religious head coverings and other religious stuff. But
> some schools don't. Like everything else in school in NYC, we try to
> make the policy that makes the most sense for out students. Students
> change ge so fast it's mind-blowing. One day your school is called Bread
> and Roses and the next day its a new comers school cause 40% of the
> students just arrived from The Dominican Republic.

And woe betide any governmental jurisdiction to set the standards for
you the teacher or for the school. The contrast between the U.S. and
France, where government actually seems to have the power to influence
behavior, is very marked.  On this side of the Atlantic the influence
resides elsewhere.


>  Out in the real
> world, we wore hard hats that told everyone who we were and what we were
> supposed to believe in, but that didn't prevent a pissed off carpenter
> from flinging a hammer at an electrician every now and then.

Sounds exciting.