tim's experiment

It is a commonplace enunciated by sundry authorities from Voltaire to Noam Chomski via several distinguished judges, that freedom of speech entails freedom to express opinions with which most of us violently disagree.  It is essential to the pursuit of truth that all people may enunciate their version of it, within very broad limits. So on being told that large numbers of people think it is OK if the police torture suspects to get them to confess, one is disappointed, even angry, but one does not expect or advocate action. The answer to erroneous opinions is the expression of correct opinions. Hong Kong and China are both signatories in different ways to international conventions which outlaw torture in all circumstances.
The situation is perhaps muddied by the Motherland’s habit of joining clubs whose rules it has no intention of following, but still. The right not to be tortured is one of the most fundamental human rights. Anyone who thinks differently is a menace and a moron. That would normally be the end of the matter.

But this time it isn’t, because the survey which uncovered this large group of dimwits was not of people in general, it was of teachers. Specifically it was of teachers who are supposed to be teaching the new Liberal Studies subject. And more than one third of them were OK with police torture. Readers who hope this was a freak result from a misunderstood question will be disappointed to hear that it was quite consistent with the other views of the surveyees: 55 per cent of them approved of parental corporal punishment and no less than 57 per cent thought youngsters had no right to choose their own religion.

Now of course as citizens these people have a perfect right to their own opinions. They may if they wish deem it desirable that police should pull suspects’ fingernails out, and all we can do is lament their ignorance and lack of understanding or sympathy. But is such an attitude acceptable in a teacher? Personally I grew up with the idea that teachers were entitled to their own opinions and that was that. In my youth we all knew that teachers in Germany were required to support the constitution, and regarded this as an odd continental quirk due to the recent history of that country. It was supposed that Germans had fallen for Hitler in large quantities because so many teachers had told them that he was basically a good egg with some funny views about Jews.

In the 60s, as I recall, the libertarian view of these matters came under stress, because some teachers pushed the envelope in the matter of discussing, and even enjoying, sex with students. There was also a vociferous puritanical lobby, and I think still is, against the idea that students should be allowed to consider the possibility that homosexuality is part of humankind’s rich pageant of sexual variations, rather than a mortal sin or a disease.

This is, plainly, a delicate area. On the one hand we wish young people to be questioning and open-minded. It is right and healthy that they should skeptically consider the merits of their parents’ prejudices. On the other hand one of the jobs of an education system is to transmit and preserve the existing culture. Before students start questioning the rules they should know what they are, and have some experience of obeying them. Most of this transmission can be left to the unconscious effect of interactions in corridor, class and playing field. But we all expect students to learn that some things are right and some things wrong. Indeed parents who are not themselves particularly godly often try to send their kids to religious schools because they suppose that religious establishments will excel in this area.

So, in effect, there are limits. A teacher who advocated sex between 10-year-olds, or killing your grandparents to solve your financial problems, would not long remain a teacher. Or so we all hope. On the other hand teachers are allowed to advance the interesting historical myth that is creationism, as long as they do it in Religious Studies classes, and to pursue the worship, according to the choice of the school’s sponsors, of God (Christian), God (Catholic), Buddha, Mohammed, the late Chairman Mao or the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

So the question which arises is whether torture and its unacceptable status as a police procedure is so fundamental and important a matter that teachers should be required to have, or at least to express, a particular view on the subject or leave the profession. We must note that this is a bad time to be asking this question, because the convention that nice countries did not condone torture, like the convention that nice countries did not engage in aggressive war, has been much battered by Mr GWBush and his cronies. Hong Kong television routinely broadcasts episodes of “24”, an exciting programme which is the most toxic American export since the abolition of slavery. I try to avoid watching this prolonged celebration of the political uses of torture, but occasionally the only alternative is horseracing. So I stumbled on another grim landmark, when for what I hope was the first time the Jack Bauer character shot dead an unarmed prisoner who had clearly surrendered, was no threat to anyone and was, to boot, a woman.  I realise that there was a certain lack of realism in the days when a surrounded miscreant was always offered a fair trial if he gave himself up, but the convention embodied a useful aspiration, that the rule of law should govern relations even with society’s enemies.

So I think we should require that Liberal Studies teachers have an acceptable view of police torture. I advance this opinion with no hope of it being implemented. After all once we start students looking at international human rights law we are getting close to a “sensitive” matter, this being the euphemism in educational circles for the fact that human rights are ill observed by Mother. And indeed they are increasingly ill-observed by our own government. I wonder how many people would have endorsed torture if the survey had been administered to policemen?