Suspended/Fired

They're grade ten students, ages ranging around 15 years or thereabouts.  And they're curious.  They know all about the world they live in.  It's a fascinatingly gruesome one.  They play video games based on violent encounters and death.  They can imagine violence, and they are capable of displaying and using it, and they do on occasion.  But death is an alien concept; the knowledge that it happens is there, but there is a missing link; their imaginations go so far and no further.

There are issues and occurrences to which they are indifferent, neutral and dismissive, and they have no interest whatever in pursuing them, irrespective of whether from doing so they can gain valuable knowledge.  But the bizarre, the crudely anti-social, the product of twisted minds hold an irresistible pull of mesmerizing force, and represent what they would like to explore further.  They may be repelled by what they see or learn, but their curiosity must be satisfied.

Not all of the students in the class at the high school in southern Montreal, Cavelier-De Lasalle, being 'taught' by a new teacher were agitating for him to facilitate their viewing of a video that held the recorded actions of a demented murderer were willing to view it, but the majority of the class clamoured for the teacher to agree.  And he did.

Most of these 15-year-olds had experienced the frisson of excitement from viewing on television or through the Internet, forbidden acts of criminal and morally repulsive interactions between people whose scruples and ethical judgement are not remotely normal.  They thought it would be fascinating, this group of 15-year-olds, to view in their classroom, scenes of torture, mutilation, murder, necrophilia, dismemberment and cannibalism.

All the more compelling because these were not actors cleverly being passed off as victim and predator.  This video was the real thing; filmed during the commission of a series of criminal acts too horrendous for many to believe in its graphic depiction of the depths to which human nature can plunge. There is not too much left to the imagination by all accounts. 

And there is not too much left, after viewing those acts of a horribly disturbed psyche, to imagine any human being aspiring to achieve the pinnacle in vile notoriety as an outcast of society, someone who has deliberately transgressed even the boundaries of brutality and savagery.  And, the action of the teacher, in finally acceding to the pleading of the class, exceeded his allotted share of common sense.

That he took care to omit some of what he considered the more obscenely dreadful portions of the video hardly excuses his lack of judgement.  Any part of that documented incident of human depravity transcending all notions of the limits of suffering that might be imposed upon another human being by an unspeakably foul sadist would represent an excessive abomination.

Not for anyone to view, much less impressionable (despite their entrenched expressions of having seen it all) young people upon whose memories those acts will be seared all the days of their lives.  For this was no game, this was someone who deliberately mounted a well-planned and choreographed execution whose commission was meant to convey horror as he inflicted a gory death to a human being.

The teacher has been dismissed by the school board after having initially been suspended with pay.  There is nothing he could say in his defence that might allow his action to be regarded as a teaching opportunity and a learning experience.  His inability to foresee the outcome of his impulsive act of submission to a group of young peoples' whims is more than adequate assurance he does not belong at the head of any class in the teaching profession.