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.
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