No! I'm not a Liberal!
A lot of bloggers like to write about bias in the classroom. High school teachers and University/College professors are usually hardcore socialists and many of them make no effort to hide their anti-American or anti-capitalist biases.
I've learnt to accept and expect such biases from my teachers, yet there's one thing that continues to annoy me, and that's when my professors ASSUME that because I look like a fairly devout Sikh that I must be a pretty devout Liberal as well. This really, REALLY annoys me.
I remember History 12, when we had an open marxist as our teacher. There were so many instances in which my teacher baselessly assumed that I was some militant liberal. I remember him showing the movie Malcolm X to the entire class (in order to showcase how horrible America is/was) and in the middle of the movie, the teacher pressed pause and asked me what I thought about a speech that Denzel Washington/Malcolm X had just made. He assumed that because I would probably be in favour of a Sikh homeland in Punjab (which in theory I definitely am), that I would definitely condone and endorse the words of Malcolm X (before he was reformed into a more moderate thinker). I responded right away that his rhetoric, and the rhetoric of other "Nation of Islam" leaders sounded just as bad as the rhetoric of fascists from the 1930s. The teacher was horrified and quickly made some argument about how they were in the minority, and thus they were able and justified in making racist remarks - or something like that.
A few weeks later we went to a Holocaust symposium hosted at UBC. We talked to some survivors, we heard some academics talk about the scale of genocide, and then there was a Q and A session. During the Q and A, I asked the panel what "lessons" could be learnt from the Holocaust in order to prevent future genocide, and after I asked the question, my teacher ran right up to me and said "Good question Japnaam! These people need to know that Jewish nationalism isn't the only lesson of the Holocaust!" And I was just confused, "But my question had nothing to do with Jewish nationalism?" And my teacher was dissapointed one more time.
I've disappointed several professors and TAs since High School as well. I remember the January to March 2003 lead up to the Iraq War clearly and I actually made an impact by convincing my first year Political Science tutorial of all the pro-war arguments. They were shocked and had no rebuttals whatsoever - even the TA. "Wow, you're the first pro-war Canadian we've ever met, and we would've never expected those arguments from you!" and even on the substantive issues like the possiblity of WMD, the idea of "sovereignty" being silly and immoral in relation to bands of dictatorial thugs like Saddam, and on the idea of how Iraq would almost certainly be better off within a few years after the war - everyone sort of "agreed" with my points.
Conservative students simply need to grow the courage to share their points of view. When that happens, professors will be less likely to assume that the entire class is filled with Bush-hating liberals, and the equal flow of ideas will become more and more common.
I've learnt to accept and expect such biases from my teachers, yet there's one thing that continues to annoy me, and that's when my professors ASSUME that because I look like a fairly devout Sikh that I must be a pretty devout Liberal as well. This really, REALLY annoys me.
I remember History 12, when we had an open marxist as our teacher. There were so many instances in which my teacher baselessly assumed that I was some militant liberal. I remember him showing the movie Malcolm X to the entire class (in order to showcase how horrible America is/was) and in the middle of the movie, the teacher pressed pause and asked me what I thought about a speech that Denzel Washington/Malcolm X had just made. He assumed that because I would probably be in favour of a Sikh homeland in Punjab (which in theory I definitely am), that I would definitely condone and endorse the words of Malcolm X (before he was reformed into a more moderate thinker). I responded right away that his rhetoric, and the rhetoric of other "Nation of Islam" leaders sounded just as bad as the rhetoric of fascists from the 1930s. The teacher was horrified and quickly made some argument about how they were in the minority, and thus they were able and justified in making racist remarks - or something like that.
A few weeks later we went to a Holocaust symposium hosted at UBC. We talked to some survivors, we heard some academics talk about the scale of genocide, and then there was a Q and A session. During the Q and A, I asked the panel what "lessons" could be learnt from the Holocaust in order to prevent future genocide, and after I asked the question, my teacher ran right up to me and said "Good question Japnaam! These people need to know that Jewish nationalism isn't the only lesson of the Holocaust!" And I was just confused, "But my question had nothing to do with Jewish nationalism?" And my teacher was dissapointed one more time.
I've disappointed several professors and TAs since High School as well. I remember the January to March 2003 lead up to the Iraq War clearly and I actually made an impact by convincing my first year Political Science tutorial of all the pro-war arguments. They were shocked and had no rebuttals whatsoever - even the TA. "Wow, you're the first pro-war Canadian we've ever met, and we would've never expected those arguments from you!" and even on the substantive issues like the possiblity of WMD, the idea of "sovereignty" being silly and immoral in relation to bands of dictatorial thugs like Saddam, and on the idea of how Iraq would almost certainly be better off within a few years after the war - everyone sort of "agreed" with my points.
Conservative students simply need to grow the courage to share their points of view. When that happens, professors will be less likely to assume that the entire class is filled with Bush-hating liberals, and the equal flow of ideas will become more and more common.
posted by Japnaam Singh at
8:06 PM
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