A high school teacher has been banned from teaching for two years over a series of blog posts about his school that were deemed to be in violation of the professional code of conduct. The teacher views the punishment as “cancel culture” and his union rep said it was a disregard of the freedom of speech.
Alexander Price, a teacher at Denbigh High School in North Wales, was found guilty of professional misconduct over a series of blog posts about the students, teachers, and parents at his school. The ruling claimed he offended teachers, parents, and students in his online anonymous diary called “The provoked Pedagogue.”
Price wrote 24 blog posts between January 2016 and March 2018. He stopped writing them after a colleague discovered his anonymous diary and reported it to the school’s headteacher, Dr. Paul Evans.
The headteacher quickly realized Price was behind the blog posts after reading one titled “Liars, Backstabbers, and Empire Builders” that made a direct reference to a conversation they had. Price was immediately suspended pending further investigation.
In one of the posts, titled “The Problem With Prom,” Price described the event as “a shallow vacuous affair, about nothing more than who spent the most on looking nice.”
He went on to say that girls in the event looked like a combination of “Eastern European prostitutes and trans-human Kardashian clones” and spent the whole academic year “planning for the event when they should be learning.”
He also criticized the boys, saying they “snorted coke.”
In another article, Price attacked the school’s headteacher, likening him to the sycophantic character from the popular fantasy novel Lord of the Rings, Grima Wormtongue. He also said that Dr. Evans was “slithering around the school in a foul mission.”
Price said that he wrote the blogs as a “cathartic” (for psychological relief) exercise and even made them “colorful and entertaining.” However, the panel at his professional misconduct hearing concluded that the posts were “inappropriate, offensive, or derogatory” to students, his colleagues, and parents. Therefore, the panel found him guilty of professional misconduct.
Price did not deny writing the blog posts. However, he does not believe the posts should have led to him being punished for professional misconduct. He said that the panel took the blogs out of context by only reading excerpts that did not represent the main message of the articles.
“I find it ridiculous you say you have considered these comments in their entirety because you blatantly haven’t,” Price said in a statement. “This process is clearly designed to cover up the failings of a failing school.”
He added that the school was “dangerous and failing,” and that’s why he wrote the posts.
Addressing the panel, he said: “In these times of cancel culture and the ownership of language this is one further example of the liberal elite attempting to sanitize the world with their own brand of passive-aggressive censorship and bullying.”
His union rep said the punishment was “chilling in that it has inhibited freedom of speech.”
