Month: August 2007

Freedom of expression for primary and high school teachers

I was prompted to write this by a request, which I received today.

Some background information: large part of the contents of my DEAF-INFO Web site is material, which was posted to the DEAF-L mailing list by various subscribers over the years. When the mailing list was active, I saved the best posts and put them in the Web site, with attribution to the original contributor.

The request, which I received today, was to remove the attributions to a particular contributor.

In the past I received similar requests. Upon further questioning, it turned out that most of those requests were made by people, who expressed their strong opinions about various deafness related issues, while they were students. Few years later, they were to get jobs as teachers in schools of the deaf. Then they were concerned that they’ll get into trouble because of the opinions, which they expressed in the past.

I asked someone, who teaches in a regular primary school, about this. She explained to me that teachers are forbidden to publicly express their opinions. The teachers are usually state or county employees. The only people authorized to publicize opinions are the employer’s public relations specialists.

I believe that this state of affairs is rather unfortunate. Teachers work “in the trenches” – they deal with pupils with learning disabilities, they deal with non-working educational methodologies, they deal with poorly-designed materials. They should be able to criticize non-working methods of instruction. If their school principal does not improve the methods, the teachers should be free to publicize their criticism. This would allow parents to ultimately have a say in improving the quality of instruction their children receive.

This is important especially in the area of deaf education, which is especially rife with conflict among different goals (integration vs. separate identity), philosophies (oral vs. Sign Language) and a bewildering choice of communication methods.

Treatment of terminal patients by unapproved drugs

In a recent case brought before a federal appeals court in USA, the court ruled that patients with terminal illnesses do not have a constitutional right to use medicines that have not yet won regulatory approval.

There is a big gap in the reporting about the case in question. It was not stated whether the pharmaceutical companies in question would supply the experimental drugs for free or at most for nominal cost; or whether they would require the terminal patients to pay full price for those drugs.

On one hand, selling unapproved & experimental drugs to patients with terminal illnesses is akin to making loans bearing usurious interest to people with poor money handling skills, or to bilking gullible victims by witch doctors. Patients or their next of kin could be induced to part with huge amounts of money in a futile last-ditch attempt to save their lives. Such an activity should rightly be banned.

On the other hand, if a pharmaceutical company is willing to provide an experimental drug free of charge, then the above considration does not apply. The company’s researchers have to believe in the drug for them to want to foist it on the terminal patients. In such a case, the company would have no financial incentive to foist untested drugs on gullible victims. The only benefit the company would get would be from having more clinical experience with the experimental drug.

My suspicion is that the case in question was about the right of pharmaceutical companies to foist, for a pay, experimental drugs on terminal patients. It would be interesting to see who is really behind the Abigail Alliance, the case’s litigants.