On issues of free speech, homosexuality and abortion, teachers are more conservative than other college-educated Americans, concludes an Education Next article by Robert O. Slater, professor of education at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Teachers seem liberal only if they’re compared to less-educated Americans.
Seventy-five percent of K-12 teachers are women. The average teacher is a 46-year-old white woman who’s been teaching for 14 years and earns $43,000 a year, “close to the $43,954 median annual earnings of Americans with bachelor’s degrees.”
As a group, American teachers tend to be more supportive of free-speech rights than other Americans, but when compared to other Americans with 16 or more years of schooling teachers are less supportive of this important democratic value.
. . . On homosexuality and abortion, teachers tend to be more liberal than less-educated Americans but more conservative than those with high levels of education. Teachers also attend church and pray more than nonteachers, additional indications of their conservative leanings. Finally, over the past four decades, support among teachers for the liberal view that the government should help the poor has declined more sharply than it has for other Americans.
Only on the issue of prayer in schools do teachers come out on the liberal side.
Like other educated Americans, teachers tend to be trusting people who see the world as good.
Update: Bill O’Reilly thinks teachers are unAmerican. What a blowhard.
> Only on the issue of prayer in schools do teachers come out on the liberal side.
Well that’s not true; the article says (and you repeated) “As a group, American teachers tend to be more supportive of free-speech rights than other Americans.” That means teachers are more liberal than conservative.
The conservatives, of course, would be the ones who want to *ban* talks by “a communist, homosexual, atheist, or racist.” Well, OK, the conservative might be more willing to allow a racist than a liberal. but we’ll let them have that. Otherwise, it is *liberals*, not conservatives, who are supportive of free speech.
Compared to other college-educated Americans, teachers are less supportive of free-speech rights.
Stephen, you are entitled to your beliefs but not your own set of facts. On college campus after college campus it has been the left, not the right, that has prevented people they disagreed with from speaking on campus.
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/465
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52302
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/3295
However when it comes to people who are the darling of the left there doesn’t seem to be anyone preventing them from speaking even when they have been convicted of murder or helping terrorists.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/b/bohmerp/znetmay99.htm
http://www.overlawyered.com/2007/10/lynne_stewart_speaks_at_hofstr.html
Porn is basically the only “free speech” that the left supports.
Note their continuous attacks on political speech.
Leftists are intolerant of free speech because they are ideologues. Anyone who claims that the Left is supportive of free speech is either one of those ideologues or has had his head in the sand the last forty years.