I remember how it was -- JR
UK: Teacher faces having to remortgage home due to mounting legal costs after being suspended for refusing to use transgender student's preferred pronouns and name
The woman, who cannot be named as a result of a court order, was suspended by a primary school after she refused to use a student's preferred pronouns and name.
The pupil, who was born female, had been placed in her year 4 class and used male pronouns and had a male name.
After arguing that it could be harmful to encourage the child's belief that they were 'in the wrong body', the teacher was sacked last year when she continued to challenge the school's policies.
The High Court rejected the teacher's application for a judicial review and ordered her to pay the council's £14,000 legal costs, according to The Times.
The court ruled that she lacked 'standing' to challenge safeguarding failures. It also noted that the school had moved the child to a different class in response to raising a safeguarding concern.
Now, Nottinghamshire County Council say she is not 'impecunious' and that she owns a four-bedroom property. Council lawyers say that a charge could be placed on the home to settle the costs.
Speaking to The Times, the teacher, referred to as 'Hannah', said: 'Teachers are being bullied not to question trans-affirming policies when evidence shows that the actual result of the approach is to put the welfare of children at serious risk.'
The Christian Legal Centre, which is representing the teacher, said she has launched a tribunal claim against the school for allegedly victimising her for whistleblowing, unfair dismissal and religious discrimination. The tribunal is expected to hear the claim in August 2024.
At the time of her bid for a judicial review, the teacher told The Sunday Times that 'children are being experimented on', adding: 'Schools are silencing teachers who disagree with the policy of simply accepting that if parents ask for a child to be treated as the opposite sex, they must go along with that.'
When the High Court rejected the application last month, the reasons cited for stopping the case from going ahead included the teacher lacking 'standing' to challenge safeguarding failures in relation to an individual child at the school.
It emerged yesterday that lawyers for the council have told the teacher that it would be lawful to 'enforce' the costs immediately and have put forward the proposal that she could remortgage the house she shares with her husband.
Lawyers for the teacher argued that she has been left impoverished by being sacked.
They also argued that enforcing an order on legal costs would be unlawful under whistleblowing legislation before an employment tribunal rules on her case.
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‘Eat or Be Eaten’: Academe’s Cancel Culture Law of the Jungle
In the savagery of the jungle, the rule is “Eat or be eaten.” It seems that law of the jungle has made its way to college campuses.
“At Oxford, students now live in fear – they think cancelling each other will help them get ahead” reads a headline from the British outlet the Telegraph, depicting a reality many warned would happen if cancel culture were allowed to rage unchecked.
The once prestigious institution has followed its academic peers across the globe in becoming a hotbed of illiberal activity.
Just last month, students protested a planned appearance by feminist scholar Kathleen Stock over her views on gender, claiming that allowing her to speak would be endorsing what they call “transphobia.” Stock’s position that transgenderism is ideological nonsense ensured she inevitably became the target of activist students.
Two years earlier, Oxford played host to a cadre of leftist professors who claimed that musical notation was a “colonialist representational system” and that it was complicit in perpetuating white supremacy.
Dominus illuminatio mea, “The Lord is my light,” may be the official motto at Oxford, but the discourse going on at the university is anything but illuminating.
It also should be cause for concern.
The insanity occurring at the university has caused the students there to mutate into a new kind of beast, one more than willing to cannibalize others to achieve dominance.
From the Telegraph article:
At parties and events, people live in fear of something they say or do being recorded. This is more than just the effects of the internet age. It is well-known that certain people, especially in student politics or journalism, often secretly audio-record the entire evening in the hope of catching someone out.
And buried deeper in the article was an anecdote that would be hilarious if it weren’t such a grim reminder of the state of college campuses.
“I remember how, at the dawn of the invasion of Ukraine, there was a scramble among students to be the one who set up the University’s Ukrainian Society,” the author writes, adding:
Once formed, it was immediately added to some of the victorious founders’ LinkedIn and Twitter bios, even though they were yet to do anything.
In an ecosystem where all that matters is the perception of virtue, it should come as no surprise that the animals within will do whatever it takes to seem virtuous. They act like woke peacocks that are willing to kill other birds to be the most beautiful one of all.
While this urge to hunt prey has unfortunate consequences for the state of higher education, it has even more dire consequences for the state of Western civilization.
The law of the jungle at its core is that the strong will dominate the weak. The snake eats the mouse and is in turn consumed by the hawk.
The point of civilization is to reject the natural, entropic state of things, to bring order to the chaos by establishing a society where the weak can coexist with the strong. The snake and the mouse and the hawk are all neighbors and only fight over politics or sports.
By so callously looking for opportunities to destroy their opposition, to tear them apart with fang and claw, the students at Oxford backslide into a state of nature and barbarism.
Once they leave campus, there’s zero doubt the “eat or be eaten” philosophy they so carefully honed at school will follow them.
In a brilliant article from last year, historian Victor Davis Hanson warned that “Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization” and that “we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.”
What lies beneath is the beast, the primal state of man. And it’s hungry.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/08/campus-cancel-culture-law-jungle/
***************************************************Teachers Union Unveils LGBTQ+ Toolkit for Indoctrination
This month, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, released a toolkit for educators intended to help guide them on LGBTQ+ issues with their students.
According to the NEA’s “LGBTQ+ Support & Protection” webpage, the toolkit, titled “Defending the Freedom of our LGBTQ+ Students to be Themselves,” gives teachers guides to addressing students by their preferred pronouns, offers LGBTQ+ classroom library book recommendations, and provides art that teachers can display in their classrooms to use as a “tool for change.”
“In English, we have two sets of gendered pronouns: 'she/her/hers' and 'he/him/his' are pronouns that are attached to a particular gender. Men/males have typically been referred to using he/him/his and women/females by using she/her/hers. We likely all grew up assuming we knew someone’s pronouns just by looking at them, or knowing their gender, but that isn’t the case,” the NEA’s Pronoun Guide document states. “In an effort to be more affirming of all, it is important to get out of the habit of assuming pronouns. Plural pronouns are becoming more widely accepted as gender-neutral singular pronouns. It is grammatically correct to use singular ‘they’ to refer a singular person of unknown gender or to a non-binary person who does not feel gendered pronouns work for them.”
The toolkit encourages teachers to use “gender neutral” pronouns, which includes “they/them/theirs” and terms like “ze/zim/zir/zirs/zirself/zay” and includes six “professional learning” modules for educators to use to learn about “addressing bias around sexual orientation and gender identity,” and “how to create a safe school climate for students and staff.”
In recent years, teachers unions have circulated materials in schools pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity, which Townhall has covered. Last fall, it was revealed that the NEA equipped teachers in Ohio with QR-code badges that direct students to how-to guides promoting “non-binary” gender identities, “queer sex,” and the idea that “transgender men” can become pregnant, among other things.
"Instead of doing the work to teach kids what pronouns actually are, the NEA wants to push very controversial ideas about sex and gender,” Alex Nester, an investigative fellow with Parents Defending Education, told Townhall.
Last fall, Townhall covered how teachers unions across the country refused to return to work after COVID-19 lockdowns despite extorting billions of dollars from taxpayers in order to open schools back up. And, when schools were scheduled to open up, teachers unions in several cities went on strike over issues like air conditioning, class sizes, salaries, among other issues. At the same time, the National Assessment of Educational Progress' scorecard was released showing that students suffered irrecoverable learning loss due to lockdowns. The scorecard showed that students who were already behind in school fell even more behind.
“That's all they're doing here. It's not about inclusion, or caring for kids. If the NEA really cared for kids, they would work to improve test scores and student achievement--not promote political agendas,” Nester added.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/06/14/teachers-union-pronoun-toolkit-n2624500
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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