Let me second Reihan and say that while I enjoyed Gabriel Sherman's New York piece on Facebook-abetted teacher-bashing at Manhattan's Horace Mann School, the piece could have done with a bit more of the students' point of view - particularly "Jeffrey Robbins" (a pseudonym), the conservative teen accused of menacing his lefty history teacher - and a bit less self-dramatizing self-pity from the faculty. No doubt the kids weren't allowed to talk to Sherman, whereas the lefty teacher in question was more than happy to describe, doubtless with perfect evenhandedness, how Robbins liked to "storm" into her office and "rail" against her politics - and how his claim that she called him a "Nazi" in class made her sob into her pillow at night. (Did she actually call him a Nazi? The story doesn't say.) And perhaps Robbins is just as much of a trust-fund brat and right-wing creep as his teacher's account makes him out to be. (The fact that he was later elected student-body president could be accounted as evidence for the defense or the prosecution, depending on one's opinion of the Horace Mann student body as a whole.) But having found myself in minor ideological scrapes with my own high school teachers from time to time, I left the piece harboring a lot more sympathy for young Robbins - and a lot more curiosity about his account of things - than the story seemed designed to make me feel.
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I Am Jeffrey Robbins
01 Apr 2008 09:59 am
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Comments (41)
Why don't you not send your kid there if it's that bad?
y81,
How come you aren't home-schooling?
Forcing your child to go to a place where he's hated and despised for six or seven hours a day seems like poor parenting. Not to mention that you aren't just forcing your kid into such a place, aren't you actually paying those people much $$$s to hate and despise your kid?
So why keep doing it?
Well, Constantine and keatssycamore, I'll certainly keep your comments in mind the next time some liberal whiner is babbling about sexual harassment, racial discrimination etc.: if you don't like working for this company, get another job or start your own business.
Fortunately, my kids are too resilient to internalize the sick and hateful values of their teachers: they respond as the Horace Mann kids did, with mockery and derision. Though, suckup that I am, I would never let them put up a Facebook page expressing their views openly. Keep your head down and say yessir, that's my motto.
Good piece. As for "Jeffrey Robbins," from the piece:
"Jeffrey challenged McGuire’s focus on liberal politics and civil rights, proposing to write his class research project on plagiarism in Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and saying that his hero was Roy Cohn"
This guy just sounds like an typical teenage idiot to me. OTOH, it's plausible that McGuire actually did call Robbins a Nazi in class. But McGuire lost her job, and Robbins got elected student-body president of his prestigious prep school after managing to reverse the administration's decision to shut down the elections. I'd say he's doing just fine, and not really in any great need of sympathy from Atlantic editor Ross Douthat at the moment.
Ross: "But having found myself in minor ideological scrapes with my own high school teachers from time to time"
Yes, but did YOU join a Facebook group defaming your teacher with a "grotesque illustration of the black slave Tituba, one of three women first accused in the Salem witch trials" as the profile picture? Again, this is just typical teenage idiot behavior. But hardly designed to produce sympathy.
y81: "Though, suckup that I am, I would never let them put up a Facebook page expressing their views openly."
How do you know they don't have one? Do they really allow you to go and check up on their Facebook accounts?
People need money to survive in this world -- that's why they put up with crap at work. But y81, you're probably probably paying at least $15k a year (if my recollection of Manhattan private schools is correct) to put up with bad education, and, for what reason? God forbid the conservative who hates lefty-loony liberals can't get his kid into Harvard or Yale?
keatssycamore, I'll certainly keep your comments in mind the next time some liberal whiner is babbling about sexual harassment, racial discrimination etc.: if you don't like working for this company, get another job or start your own business.
Keep them in mind all you want, but if you can't see the difference between earning a paycheck to be "hated" and "despised" (met a lawyer lately?) and paying someone to "hate" and "despise" your children, then I retract my home-schooling suggestion. It's obviously not a good idea in your situation
Constantine, I didn't say it was bad education. It's just annoying to have a far left political agenda, and a considerable amount of personal hostility, served up with the education. But it wasn't too different when I was in school.
From your comments, I take it you wholly reject Obama's explanation of why he remained at Trinity: no rational person maintains a relationship with an institution unless the institution is perfect in every respect, correct?
P.S. Korha, I have 25 year old niece who acts as my spy, though she's mostly looking for sexually inappropriate content, as my children are girls.
Korha asks " did YOU join a Facebook group defaming your teacher . . ."
I couldn't tell from the article whether "Jeffrey Robbins" was a member of the group or not - at best, it seems to have been unproven, since the teacher assumed it based on circumstantial evidence.
Just read the article. So, basically, kids are acting like kids, and a teacher got upset over being called names. The only difference is that it was posted in a public place, instead of being talked about behind the teacher's back. Honestly, has anyone who's gone through any American high school not complained about a teacher before, or called her a "witch" or worse? They're teenagers. Resisting authority is what they do. Putting up with that kind of idiocy is pretty close to a job requirement.
y81,
Had you cared to take my question seriously, then I think that this part of your sarcastic reply:
Keep your head down and say yessir, that's my motto.
could have led you to produce a completely understandable answer to the question "Why?". It seems possible, maybe even probable, that the type of person who has such a motto would be the type of person who would believe the path to success has been laid out ahead of time and just needs to be followed to its' ends.
Hence, you may think to yourself, "You know, knowledge is a fine thing, but why risk my kid's shot at Harvard by home-schooling when I can afford to send him to a Manhattan private school?"
And then further think to yourself, "Besides they have to learn to get good grades from teachers who hate and despise conservatives when they get to Harvard, so they might as well learn how to play the game now. Heads down and all that, you know."
Probably reasonable. There's lots of other reasons you might subject your children to 35 to 40 hours a week of hatred and derision. Some are even less reasonable than my guess above. Like, for instance, I'm doing it because the Douthats' are doing it. Or that you are doing it because you are so vain that you want to tell people that your kids attend the Blah Blah School of Finishing on the upper East side.
But I think the real reason you do it is that you want to give your kids the very best education that you possibly can (within reason of course). You do not actually believe they are being hated and despised at school and you do think the school is doing a better job of educating them than you would, or could, on your own. And that's why you pay through the nose.
Wouldn't blame you for being annoyed about paying so much though. I can't imagine what a Manhattan private school must cost. That's probably partially where the resentment came from that led to the whole "hated" and "despised" comment you started with. Again, I think that's reasonable, if it's the case.
But since you went with sarcasm, I guess I'll never get to know the complex thought processes of y81. I'll just have to be content with irresponsible speculation.
J Mann: "I couldn't tell from the article whether "Jeffrey Robbins" was a member of the group or not - at best, it seems to have been unproven, since the teacher assumed it based on circumstantial evidence."
You can see group membership on Facebook.
y81: "Korha, I have 25 year old niece who acts as my spy, though she's mostly looking for sexually inappropriate content, as my children are girls."
Smart.
Korha, I think you're right - I misread the article.
As a committed pedant, I must inform you that Horace Mann is in the Bronx, not Manhattan.
Har-dee-har-har.
"But having found myself in minor ideological scrapes with my own high school teachers from time to time, I left the piece harboring a lot more sympathy for young Robbins"
What a bunch of crap. Teaching high school and college is one of the most thankless jobs in America. Whether you do your job or not parents and politicians will point at you and say "You're the reason our kids are not learning. Your the reason our values are being corroded". I love how people like Ross, and other conservatives all have these memories of being up against lefty teachers who were trying to indoctrinate them, only to be rebuffed by little Ross' commitment to conservative principles. Please. Conservative love to describe Democrats as the part of victimization, but reading stuff like Ross and y81 (who I'm convinced is a college student, and not a parent) makes me come to the conclusion that what really ticks conservatives off about academia and school is that don't acknowledge that conservatives are the true victims in society.
At the end of the day the issue wasn't about politics, it was about maturity and adequate responses. Those kids were acting like trust-fund brats who hated not having their way, and the parents, board, and teachers grossly overeacted. Give me a break, lawyers were called in? Board meetings? Contract negotiations? Excessive much?? Breathless letters to the school newspaper, geez that acted like that newspaper was the NYtimes. Horace Mann seems to be a school in need of reality check.
Odd, I would expect a self professed _conservative_ to advocate high school students being obedient to their teachers (and to policemen and employers and other authority figures naturally.)
I'm not a conservative, and I'm actually fine with students disagreeing with their teachers respectfully and even think that it can enliven and enlighten the classroom. The keyword being 'respectfully' and politely. Which it sounds like young Mr. Robbins and his coterie were anything but. Wasn't there a Supreme Court case on a related issue back in the '60s....the thing about wearing black armbands to protest the Viet Nam war.
Does the principle that legal minors ought to be polite and respectful towards their authority figures suddely not extend to those authority figures who profess left-wing ideas?
In response to Hector:
"Does the principle that legal minors ought to be polite and respectful towards their authority figures suddely not extend to those authority figures who profess left-wing ideas?"
You get the picture, and no, it's not sudden.
I do think it would have been interesting if the article had more discussion with the students. But as someone who taught at the university level in the '90s, I can tell you that the Facebook incident described at Mann is just a new way of organizing a long-running phenomenon you can find on most college campuses.
Oddly enough, I left academia in large part because I disagreed with much of what passed for leftist, postmodernist theory in my field and consider myself today a libertarian, if anything.
But for sheer nastiness, no one can hold a candle to today's conservative kiddies.
Raised on Limbaugh and Coulter, youngsters feel pretty free to use the vilest language and most personal insult in classroom speech, campus editorials, even in what passes for academic essays.
In a way, it *is* classic rich-kid bullying that's existed in many times and places, but in the US today, it's been granted a peculiar power by a generation of upper middle-class adults whose politics makes low-paid, low-status teachers into a favorite social scapegoat.
Here's how the game goes. Every few years, students who are self-professed young conservatives in a school pick a teacher to bully.
The basic charge is that the teacher is a liberal, but the victim is always someone perceived as weak, unpopular, unattractive, in short, a loser.
As with commenter above, very common differences of opinion (for example, about the outcome of the Vietnam war or the treatment of Native Americans in the US) are dubbed with outrageous labels like "sick, hateful, twisted," and of course, "anti-American." As the pile-on picks up speed, the teacher's physical appearance, ethnicity, and sexuality are insulted in the most gross and childish ways.
The charges from the young Repub "judge" are often copied almost verbatim from other similar incidents or popular conservative media. Claims that the target is herself or himself victimizing the critics are common, as are threats to record his or her class, subject him or her to surveillance, and to assemble "dossiers" with "proof" of the teacher's bias, ala David Horowitz.
Up through the nineties, the vehicle had to be print, so the more common vehicle was a student-run paper. Now adays the web has opened up oh so many new possibilities.
If any other adults intervene on behalf of the teacher, say a university administration pleading for civility, or other kids with some poor wimpy little rally or editorial, the young Republican gang run whimpering to a group of powerful backers in the media or among alumni or both, who immediately defend them.
The one thing I have never observed is any adult conservative in one of these situations say, you know what kids, it's possible and indeed honorable to disagree with courtesy and respect.
So long as the student uses the magic word "liberal," any and all actions they take towards a teacher, no matter how contemptible or cowardly, are automatically defended by conservative mentors.
So there's a "dog bites man" aura to the Mann incident. The behavior described is typical at both universities and high school, and as we see, supported by both parents and the sort of media figures these young people encounter.
Shed no tears, Mr. Douhat. Young "Jeffrey Robbins" will be proudly telling his tale of driving his high-school teacher to tears to adoring Republican alumni and future employers while the poor schmuck he meanly insulted keeps making beans as a teacher.
Lord Nelson et al.: You know, it is perfectly possible to teach history or any other high school subject without the students' having the faintest idea of your political beliefs. In fact, I recommend it. Of course, if your whole college and grad school education has been dedicated to instilling the belief that your race and sex entitle you and your political beliefs to incontestable moral authority, it can be hard to keep them to yourself. And until you are ready to condemn the purveyors of "Condoskeeza," "Chimpy McHalliburton," or Michelle Malkin's ping pong balls, don't complain about today's high school students.
This is the same school, that employed an English teacher, Andrew Trees, who wrote a rather risque
,but amusing roman a clef, Academy X, and was fired for it. Needless to say, this was the school
Elliot Spitzer, went to before Princeton.
"And until you are ready to condemn the purveyors of "Condoskeeza," "Chimpy McHalliburton," or Michelle Malkin's ping pong balls, don't complain about today's high school students"
This is a dodge. The issue here is whether teachers and professors try to promote their political beliefs at the expense of education. I see no reason, in this discussion, to bring up random political bloggers you make horrible puns and create immature names for other political bloggers. Are teachers and professors saying these things? What is the connection between these phrases and what happens in the classroom?
"Of course, if your whole college and grad school education has been dedicated to instilling the belief that your race and sex entitle you and your political beliefs to incontestable moral authority, it can be hard to keep them to yourself"
Realize that nobody ever makes this point. I've been in college a number of years, both as a student and a teacher, and have never heard this line of reasoning offered as the basis for the discussion of race or gender. This is the conservative's paranoid interpretation of these issues. And this is product of a political movement that has been trained to scream "liberal bias" at everything they don't like about the school or university.
MLP, I was defending the students against charges of immaturity and rudeness. As long as Congregational ministers and mainstream bloggers are permitted to use crude sexual insults for conservative women, it will be hard to prohibit high school students from using insults for people they disagree with. Young people are usually pretty good at detecting hypocrisy.
Y81,
If the Congregational minister you're referring to is the good Reverend Wright, then bear in mind that his church is as 'Congregational' as the name would suggest. There exists no central authority that could disagree with him. I belive I did make the point in some other thread that I found the Reverend's pelvic thrusts during his sermon about the Clintons far more offensive than his 'God damn America' bit.
Re: You know, it is perfectly possible to teach history or any other high school subject without the students' having the faintest idea of your political beliefs.
Interestingly enough, when I was at college (with Ross) one of the best classes I remember taking was a Latin American history class, taught by a professor who was a well known communist, and a strong partisan of Fidel's Cuba. You wouldn't necessarily know it from the content of the class- he taught the class in a fairly dry, impersonal, de-opinionated manner, and you had to listen pretty hard to try to pick up the occasional hint as to his own political beliefs. Hell, for balance one week we even had to read various documents and essays written by Reagan-administration officials, to balance out the various left-leaning historians and academics that we were reading. Although I'm not sure whether that really qualified as balance- those Reaganite officials were pretty stupid after all. Kind of like getting Jonah Goldberg to debate Eric Hobsbawm.
"MLP, I was defending the students against charges of immaturity and rudeness. As long as Congregational ministers and mainstream bloggers are permitted to use crude sexual insults for conservative women, it will be hard to prohibit high school students from using insults for people they disagree with. Young people are usually pretty good at detecting hypocrisy."
I still don't get this. What hypocrisy are you talking about? Is Wright the principle of Horace Mann? Are "lefty" bloggers teaching the students? How is it that because some blogger uses idiotic language it justifies what the student wrote on Facebook? Your logic is really faulty here. Basically, you are saying that the immature language used by some bloggers and a preacher justifies idiotic and immature language by everyone, in any context. What if they never have read of political blog nor ever heard of Wright at the time of the incident? Personally, I think you are using this as an excuse to bring up Rev. Wright one more time, regardless of whether or not its germane to the discussion. It would be like me bringing up the lack of WMDs in Iraq as the reason the teacher's disciplined the students. One last point: pointing to two cases of idiocy (Wright and Horace Mann) does not justify the idiots, it just demonstrates that there is idiocy in the world.
How is it that because some blogger uses idiotic language it justifies what the student wrote on Facebook? Your logic is really faulty here. Basically, you are saying that the immature language used by some bloggers and a preacher justifies idiotic and immature language by everyone, in any context.
Yeah, as a conservative I think I come down on the side of the liberal disciplinarians, rather than the conservative troublemakers. Encouraging a lack of discipline and respect in schools, on the grounds that many people in society as a whole are often undisciplined and disrespectful, is both harmful to society and childish (I remember using the "I shouldn't be punished because so-and-so did the same thing and got away with it" argument in elementary school).
Students have every right to disagree with their teachers, but there comes a point where disagreement turns into disruption. It's the job of the school, and not students or parents, to determine where that line is and to keep order in class. And I also think things that go on outside class that end up undermining the authority of teachers in class can and should be dealt with by the school. If a student or his/her parents don't like the way the school enforces its rules and maintains discipline, they can find another school (especially when we're talking about ritzy New Yokr private schools, and not lower-rung public schools where students and their parents may have fewer/no choices).
JB, where is it written that the remedy of disgruntled parents must be to switch schools, rather than to protest to management (the Board of Trustees) of the school? By your logic, if you have a problem at the neighborhood grocery store, is it required by conservative principles that you walk out and shop elsewhere, rather than asking to talk to the manager?
I hasten to add that I would never do either, switch my daughters' school or complain. Instead, I rely on the traditional weapons of the weak, covert mockery and derision (coupled with appeals to principles or free speech and privacy if we get caught).
By your logic, if you have a problem at the neighborhood grocery store, is it required by conservative principles that you walk out and shop elsewhere, rather than asking to talk to the manager?
Again y81, if you can't tell the difference between a bad grocery store experience (I guess the baggers at your local store must always point and say, "Look at that fascist Bushpig, so typical, he's buying whitebread!") and being a disruptive little a-hole at school, then (as I noted above) your kids have bigger problems than their particular private school's political leanings.
Perhaps they are lucky enough to be learning the concept of "quitting while they're behind" at school because it appears doubtful they will learn it at home.
JB, where is it written that the remedy of disgruntled parents must be to switch schools, rather than to protest to management (the Board of Trustees) of the school? By your logic, if you have a problem at the neighborhood grocery store, is it required by conservative principles that you walk out and shop elsewhere, rather than asking to talk to the manager?
Parents have every right to bring their concerns to teachers and school officials. But you didn't say that you were "disgruntled" or "had a problem" with your school. You described "personal venom" and said that "[t]hey make it clear every day how much they hate and despise us, our lives, our beliefs and our values." Once there's that wide a gulf between how the school feels it should operate and what a student or his/her parents feel is appropriate, I'm not sure what's left to discuss.
I would never shop at a grocery store where my children (if I had any) and I were subjected to venomous comments or attitudes, or where the employees made it clear that they despised me, my children or my values. Similarly, if my children attended a school with that atmosphere I'd take them out of it, if necessary by moving to a different school district.
The fact that you use that kind of inflammatory and absolutist rhetoric to describe the school, while your actions indicate that the situation is nowhere near that serious, leads me to suspect that you're a drama king who just enjoys getting his back up, and that your poor oppressed children have just inherited a bad attitude from their father.
Bad attitude? You got me.
"When they said come down, I threw up."
Bad attitude? You got me.
"When they said come down, I threw up."
I do applaud your musical taste, though.
Using lyrics from Springsteen's Growing Up, in which he details (and laments) that people have to grow up and not act like immature idiots, kind of negates everything you have said up to this point y81.
It is not clear that "Jeffrey Robbins" was all that conservative. I went to a public school in Westchester County and a lot of teachers (especially history teachers)tried to push their social agenda on the class. The teachers tended to be very left-wing (the product of tenure after 3 years) and their grandstanding annoyed many students, the majority of them, mainstream liberals.
High school teachers who are teaching mandatory class should be encouraging students to reach their own conclusions not forcing them to accept their own. It is not unknown that many of these ideological teachers grade more favorably to those who agree with them. This takes place regardless of it being high school, college, or graduate school and as such, it is highly frustrating to student's who don't like being coerced into accepting the teacher's viewpoint.
Charles Stam
Charles Stam
It would be nice if everybody stepped back, took a deep breath and said, "I don't know anything about Horace Mann, or about the particular teachers and students in question. MAYBE the conservative kids are rich brats who pushed out a wonderful, idealistic teacher. Or MAYBE the teacher was using a strident harridan who tried to use her classroom as to push a political agenda on unwilling kids, who decided not to take it lying down. MAYBE the kids were flat out wrong. MAYBE they were right, but went overboard and forgot their manners.
The possibilities are endless, and I'm betting almost NONE of us posting here has any firsthand knowledge of what really went on.
So, why not refrain from identifying too closely with people on either side, when we don't really know if they DESERVE our support?
I teach Advanced Placement American Government and Politics in a good public school. I am a Democrat and contrary to what Y81 says, I do not hate or despise the beliefs, lives, or values of conservatives. Since I am teaching students who are taking the same types of tests that the students at HM and other private schools are taking, I know full well that any teacher who is spending very much time advancing any type of social agenda, be it liberal or conservative, will not get results. The AP and IB exams in history and political science are not ideological in nature. My guess is that schools like HM and the school Y81's children attend are getting results, so I doubt that very much of class time is spent on indoctrination. What is strange about the story is that the teachers made a big deal out of the Facebook thing. I would never go there to find out what students are saying about me. What good does that do? If students and parents aren't confronting me or my principal face to face with their concerns, then they aren't really serious.
Astorian is right that many of us don't know the people or events in question personally. However that does not remove our ability to judge their actions. (After all, our entire jury and legal system is founded upon cases being tried by people who have no foreknowledge of the parties in question. Otherwise it would be a Conflict of Interest).
And to that end, I judge "Jeffrey Robbins" to be a character of no redeeming value whatsoever. By all appearances he abused his wealth and "privilege" to actively destroy the career(s) of teachers at Horace Mann showing no remorse for his actions at all, even trying to feign that he was the victim when subjected to scrutiny by the school, and going as far as to falsely accuse a teacher of calling him a Nazi, claiming to have taped the incident.
And why would someone make such a false accusation? Obviously to cause trouble to the other for which there is no remedy. The only possible conclusion I can garner from this event is that little Jeffrey may be a Sociopath.
Datchery- in short, you haven't heard "Jeffrey's" side of the story, but you don't need to. You know his "type," and assume the worst of someone you don't know anything about. It may be you've known rich punks who think they can push teachers around. It may be that Jeffrey IS one of them. But the fact remain,s you're making assumptions.
Similarly, Ross knows the teacher's "type." He's seen liberal teachers trying to cram an agenda down captive students's throats, and is almost eager to believe that Horace Mann's faculty consists of left-leaning tyrants like the ones he's known.
I suggest we stop trying to fit thes REAL people into the storylines in our heads.
Me? I'm prepared to believe that the liberal teacher was a wonderful person, unfairly screwed over by a rich, conservative punk. I'm also prepared to believe the liberal teacher stepped over the line, and a brave conservative student fought back. I don't automatically assume anybody is a good guy just because he/she stands with me politically.
3)
Ah, written by J.T. Della Femina himself, the child who was in the school mix up to his eyeballs.
No, no agenda there. I'm sure his letter was completely accurate, fair and balanced. *eyeroll*
Danielle L McGuire, PhD
| 
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
As a parent at another Manhattan private school, I am so tired of the teachers and administration ramming their left-wing political beliefs and personal venom down our throats. They make it clear every day how much they hate and despise us, our lives, our beliefs and our values. I say more power to those Horace Mann students!
Posted by y81 | April 1, 2008 11:48 AM