Tyranny Rarely Announces Itself

"Usurpers always choose troubled times to enact, in the atmosphere of general panic, laws which the public would never adopt when passions were cool. One of the surest ways of distinguishing the work of a law giver from that of a tyrant is to note the moment he chooses to give a people its constitution."

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Free Speech and Education

To insist that I must be denied the venue to question someone else's beliefs is an infringement of my rights to free speech. To demand that I refrain from asking questions - however challenging or vexing - in my own classroom demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of education.

The teacher's job is not to tell the student how to see the world. The teacher's job is to stimulate the student to question how she sees the world.

Balance and Fairness

Let us, for a moment, pull back and consider what fairness and balance might actually involve.
BALANCE requires patience, as any acrobat - or server waiting tables - will tell you.
FAIRNESS requires completeness; "equal time" is only fair if each side's argument is equally simple.
Are either of these to be found in current news coverage? If so, where?