aviel wrote:LaoWai wrote:But it's a two-way street in the US. Professors don't get to deny anyone in their classes freedom of expression either. They're not allowed to penalize students for saying or writing things they disagree with.
As an instructor, I was required by contract an anti-homosexual marriage paper by a homophobe by the same standards as I evaluated a pro-homosexual marriage paper by a homosexual. As a government employee, I wasn't permitted to say, "This is hateful garbage and I'm not even going to finish reading it," the way any private citizen could. (There's actually some double-think there, giving up freedom to ensure freedom.) I had to read it carefully, make notes about rhetorical elements, grammar, sources, then explain to the student that "godhatesfags.com is not what might be considered an academic source; perhaps you could improve your grade by finding academic sources to support your claims."
I understand what you're saying here but this is not a good example. A paper decrying homosexual marriage will necessarily have bad arguments, and as a professor it is absolutely within the scope of your authority to give a paper a poor grade because it makes a bad argument.
That is actually being made to endorse policy, and it's required by contract. The thing that make that not-the-least Orwellian to me is that I got to choose to sign the contract.
How is it being made to endorse policy? It seems to be exactly the opposite, being made not to endorse policy through grading practices. Which is incredibly different from being forced to endorse policy through grading practices. The latter is an infringement of freedom of political expression, the former is a protection of it. The latter promotes critical thinking about government policy, the former forbids it. The latter is kind of Orwellian, the former is not.
It's taken me a good while, but I can see now that we've been getting into apples and oranges here. I'm going to shoulder the blame for that one entirely. Let's shift the conversation altogether.
Let's start instead with cultural expectations for teachers. In China, the expectation for teachers is largely that a teacher should embody what he or she teaches, and it is expected that teachers also be moral role-models for students. "Do as I say, not as I do" is simply unacceptable to most Chinese. Historically, Confucianism has more or less dominated Chinese education.
Confucius dictated (in very much what we would consider the Piagetan model of instruction), and Confucianism is most easily summed up in one simple sentence: 君君臣臣父父子子 (roughly, "Let the ruler be the ruler, let the minister be the minister, let the father be the father, and let the son be the son"). In traditional Chinese thought, you, the individual are a cog in a machine, like it or not. The teacher is the teacher; the student is the sudent. In much the same way that all a good oarsman needs to know is how to row, and that the helmsman is a good helmsman, all the student needs to know is how to study, and that the teacher is a good teacher.
If you ask any morally upstanding foreign teacher in China what sentence they hate the most, the answer will probably be "I know." The Chinese, 我知道了, is actually closer to "I know that now." If the teacher says it, it must be right, or at least temporarily acknowledged as right. As long as the teacher is the perfect embodiment of ideals, the teacher is right.
If a foreign teacher openly smokes, drinks, curses and questions the government, the most hated response will be "No." Exchanges like "A: Bobo, let me see your book. B: No. A: Bobo, are you refusing to let me see your book? B: No. A: Bobo, are you human? B: No" are routine here. When the teacher is not a perfect embodiment of ideals, the teacher is impeachable, and anything the teacher says is necessarily wrong.
In the West, our most influential contemporary thinker has probably been Socrates. Socrates questioned everything, even that he was the wisest man. Man, he had the oracle of Delphi backing him, and he still gave up the power to say, "This is so"! This evolved, eventually (not fast enough for Socrates, unfortunately) into the Lockean idea that any schlub in the most backwater region of nowhere could question the government that provided him with economic and gastronomic stability. Eventually this was actually codified into law in at least one country as "freedom of speech."
Teachers in the West must also be a perfect embodiment of their long-standing cultural ideals, even if those ideals include fallibility. In the West there's an, again, long-standing tradition that argumentum ad hominem is dirty pool, so if a teacher smokes, drinks, and curses outside of class, it has nothing to do with what goes on in class. Yet, there are acceptable limits. If a teacher is caught outside of class using meth (i.e., breaking his country's laws), it could result in dismissal. If a teacher is caught diddling a minor (i.e., breaking his country's laws), it will definitely result in dismissal. Oddly enough, even though not-using-meth and not-diddling-minors aren't written into the definition of a teacher, there's a cultural understanding that these are included, a cultural understanding that the government enforces (almost as though government were meant to serve the people it represents).
If a Western teacher questions the government's decision to wage war in Iraq, no problem. That's actually the job of a teacher: 君君臣臣父父子子. If a teacher gets a paper that is filled with hate-speech and responds, "Take your redneck manifesto back up to the Appalachians and diddle your cousin with it, you twisted individual," then...ooops. The teacher has just violated a cultural norm. Again, 君君臣臣父父子子.
In both cases, there is a similar underlying process: underlying cultural expectations shape government policy, government policy shapes the contracts of government employees, and private citizens choose to become government employees or not. Outcomes may differ radically, but the foundation is similar, and the outcomes in both cases are shouldered by those who choose to do so. We (and I am definitely included in that "we") may have a strong preference for one outcome over the other, but classifying one outcome as right and the other as wrong is a sort of argumentum ad humanitatem in the end.
tldr: Culture's ain't all the same.
It's always in the last place you look for it, unless you're the kind of person who keeps looking for it after you've found it.