Ever since I went and saw Good Will Hunting with my Dad when it first came out — I think I was in junior high at the time — it’s been a favorite.
The film is so entertaining and so much fun to watch that I’m willing to overlook its Marxist themes and shout-outs to such totalitarian radicals as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
Why? Because scenes like the two below are so wonderful. [Warning - some R-rated language]
How is it possible for anyone not to like this scene? Who wouldn’t want to be in this position?
Today at FrontPage I have an article hammering Matt Damon for blindly supporting the teacher union policies that have made it so hard to fire bad teachers who screw up kids’ lives:
Fields: In acting there isn’t job security, right? There is an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn’t it like that for teachers?
Damon: You think job insecurity is what makes me work hard?
Fields: Well you have an incentive to work harder.
Damon: [Shakes head] I want to be an actor, that’s not an incentive. That’s the thing. See you take this MBA-style thinking, right? It’s the problem with ed policy right now. It’s this intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that. It’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when they have tenure. A teacher wants to teach. I mean why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?
Cameraman: Ten percent of teachers are bad… Ten percent of people in any profession maybe should think of something else.
Damon: Well, OK, maybe you’re a shitty cameraman, I don’t know.
The Left has been able to dupe too many like Damon for far too long by casting conservatives as “anti-teacher.” It’s time to turn this rhetoric around. The real people who are “anti-teacher” are leftists who support the protection of incompetent teachers and refuse to allow schools to reward exceptional teachers.
If Damon had a “shitty camera” on one of his movies he would want that camera man removed from his job… he wouldn’t support him just because he had 10 years experience.
Also, imagine that it would take a year of hearings and over a quarter million dollars to get rid of the cameraman.
Matt Damon is spot on. Increasing job insecurity isn’t going to fix public schools. The best school systems in the world all have teacher tenure and collective bargaining. This is just a propaganda smear piece designed to distract from the heart of the education issue which is poverty. I have seen figures as high as 40% of children in public schools live in poverty. With statistics like this, how can our education system succeed? But propagandists like the author of this article don’t want to address issues such as poverty because it means facing some hard truths about the nature of our economic system and hence it is easier to pass the blame onto teachers. Shameless and disgusting.
“The best school systems in the world all have teacher tenure and collective bargaining.”
Let the dance of the lemons begin!
“I have seen figures as high as 40% of children in public schools live in poverty.”
What percentage of that 40% of “impoverished” children have new video game systems, internet access, and cable TV?
Dan, you are confusing job insecurity with accountability. What about teachers who can’t control a classroom, or English teachers who can’t write a grammatically correct sentence, let alone a coherent paragraph, or math teachers who can’t solve a simple word problem, or history teachers ignorant of basic historical facts? I could go on, but you get the idea. The system is full of these incompetents, whose jobs are safe. Their students aren’t.
Poverty is not insurmountable, or an excuse to belittle, or make assumptions concerning, the ambition and dreams and talent of the financially challenged. There are multiple systems at play here.
Take a peek at The Diary of Ma Yan, if the documentaries Waiting for Superman or The Lottery do not strike a chord. Ma Yan and her classmates are willing to get it done, and can get it done even with skipping meals to earn school supplies. Then imagine what could be done with U.S. per capita educational spending. Why are vouchers and merit pay such dirty concepts, if thuggish Will Hunting can be turned around for “$1.50 in library fines” (and conveniently privately-sponsored visits to a talented psychiatrist–not to mention, no meds)?
Maybe what we need is a Save Our Students rally. With 50 cent lemonade stands. I believe, if architecturally sound, the schools will stand on their own.