As if parents don’t already have enough reasons to be concerned with the education and care of our children, one high school teacher from Green County, Georgia, is giving us yet another reason to doubt the system by berating a teenage girl with demeaning and sexist slurs… and it was all caught on camera.
Shaniaya Hunter is a junior at Green County High School in Georgia. She was recording her teacher’s lesson on a school-issued iPad when she reportedly asked him a question that caused an overreaction of epic proportions.
After her teacher initially told Hunter that, “clearly, you are the dumbest girl that I have ever met,” he continued to humiliate her in the recorded rant by saying that her only purpose in life would be to “have sex and have children, because you ain’t never gonna be smart.”
First of all, wow. Second, for a man who claims to be an educator, he certainly could stand to brush up on his own grammar, because this recording is evidence that he “ain’t” all that smart himself.
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Hunter was understandably humiliated and brought to tears by this man’s remarks. To make matters worse, Hunter’s mother isn’t even sure whether the teacher was disciplined. She has reportedly been informed that he’s still employed by the school, which is a very poor testament as to how seriously this school system is taking such a heinous act.
How can kids carry on in school if they’re unsure of whether the school staff will stand behind them, if they’ll support them when another teacher makes a mistake of this magnitude? Our children are meant to feel safe and secure while at school; it’s a teacher’s job to accomplish this. It’s their job to educate and encourage our children, not publicly devalue them and call them dumb.
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What this teacher subjected this young girl to is wrong on so many levels. It doesn’t just reflect poorly on this educational institute but on a long and outdated history of women being subjected to relentless misogyny. We’re in the midst of National Women’s Month, a time that is meant to celebrate the cultural, economic, political and social achievements of women — a month set aside to recognize how far we’ve come as a gender.
We’ve left the assumption that we’re nothing more than sandwich-making housewives capable of nothing more than childbearing far behind us, and the people teaching our sons and daughters should have, too.
It’s a shame that incidents like this man degrading this young girl still happen every day. These stories make headlines far too often. Though we’ve come so far, this story makes it obvious that there’s still miles of ahead of us until we can confidently say that we’ve solidified our value to this society.
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What this man said to this girl is not OK. It’s sad, it’s grotesque, and he has no place teaching our kids the expired misogynistic lessons that he’s so eloquently displayed. Hunter’s mother, now with the aid of an attorney, has stated that they aren’t done fighting this. And to her we say: Neither are we. We will all keep fighting for our place until the world finally decides to accept it.
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