Quick! Prepare the hemlock...

Thanks to Ron Silliman's blog I've happened upon two interesting tidbits from The Toronto Star.

First, the director of the Leo Baeck Jewish Day school in Toronto was found to have graphic poems on his personal website (oh no!), and the parents of these k-8 students want him sacked. The more enlightened of the bunch say it's not about the existence of the pieces, it's that he chose to put them out into the public sphere.

Second, the naughty poems article built on the precedent of drama going down at Ryerson University where a freshman moderated (but did not originally start) a Facebook study group for his chemistry class. Specific homework tips passed about the group by its various members, according to the university, counts as cheating so they want to expel the group's moderator. The focus on the group, in practice, was not giving others final solutions to problems, but to brainstorm approaches to the problems. Which brings me to today's analogy du jour...

social networking sites : my generation(and on) : :
rock 'n roll : the BabyBoomers

Their rules are shifty, they challenge many social norms...and they lead to sex&drugs? They're an opportunity for dark characters to get their hands on our virginal youth. They're obviously the devil's playground.

The issue of the educator and his poems is a tricky one. I understand it could be disturbing to be the parent of a 6 year old and then see poems about sex and murder written by the person in charge of your kid's education, but it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to censor their creative work because they also work at a school. The argument that he should have known better than to put them out in public raises issues of ownership of private spaces. Do these parents own who this Prashker guy is outside of school? Do they own the personas he portrays in the metaverse? Why does visceral expression mean you're automatically unfit to deal with kids? All of these things also seem to be dependent on the assumption that a human being is a stable and coherent self. It's hard to accept that maybe the really nice and genuine guy who waves at you when you come to pick up your progeny is also the guy who wrote misogynistic murder scenes, and that those two elements really can live together in a single person in a totally healthy and organic way.

These are questions that often pass through my mind as someone who wants to teach and as someone who also writes "challenging" work. It's actions like those of these parents that keeps a lot of artists relegated to some kind of fringe status in the "productive world." If you engage with certain ideas/discourses on a regular basis and dare to not shamefully hide it away, you pose a threat to the very stability of society(?) You're unsuitable to be around the young? For some, simply unsuitable.