Porn star allowed to teach in school.

Teacher reprimanded Should he still be allowed to teach? A male teacher who moonlighted as a porn star has been allowed to return to work. 
The 31-year-old, Benedict Garrett who uses the pseudonym Johnny Anglais, was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct and received a reprimand after a two-day hearing at the General Teaching Council.
‘The committee therefore finds that you are guilty of unacceptable professional conduct.’ stated the General teaching council.  Benedict Garrett will still be allowed to return to work as a teacher but the reprimand will remain on the GTC register for two years.

The council should be commended for its decision. But is this slap on the wrist enough? How can we allow a person to teach who has no remorse for his actions? Garrett admitted working in the industry but argued it was not unacceptable professional conduct as none of his behaviour was illegal.  How can a teacher continue to work within his profession when he is unable to discern the conflict between being a teacher and a porn star? Garrett describes himself as a ‘man with a mission...to unashamedly demonstrate the art of pleasure in the realms of fitness, sex and entertainment’ and claims that rather than being irresponsible, he in fact is doing us all a huge favour as he claims this “teaches young people to be open-minded.' So it wasn’t about the pay cheques or the ego boosts then….  I first encountered Garrett on the BBC’s, The Big questions seated beside me, you can watch him expressing his views on pornography here.

With no regret and a near evangelical position on pornography, how can Garrett be allowed to be a role model to his students? His lack of acknowledgment of his unprofessionalism has undermined his position as a professional teacher and a role model. Allowing him to continue teaching clearly sends a wrong message to our children and in particular to the pupils of that school.  That pornography is a socially and morally acceptable industry and that aspiring to be a porn star is a viable and acceptable career option, with no discussion of the degrading and objectification of women within the porn industry.

This story is another blow to those who are deeply concerned with the hypersexualisation of our culture, which seeps into the mind of our children through the daily drizzle of magazines/newspapers containing page after page of graphic pictures and sex stories that feed society’s inexhaustible hunger for sex and gossip.  With pornography increasingly mainstream, explicit images are spilling over into our children’s lives. High street retailers now sell Playboy branded homeware goods that includes stationery sets; bedding set and branded key rings, clearly aimed at the children’s market. From children’s things to the porn star look of the ever popular Bratz dolls, the invisible barrier which divided children from the adult world of sex, is regularly overstepped. And for good reason, children are simply not equipped to deal with the ramifications at either a physical or a psychological level, of sex.

The Porn industry was always intended to be an exclusively adult domain; adult magazines are intentionally placed on the top shelves in order that impressionable minds do not encounter such material.  A teacher moonlighting as a porn star has no respect for the adult/child divide and has failed to treat children as children and continues to prop open Pandora’s box. Ultimately, uncritically having a teacher/porn star in the classroom validates a macho, voyeuristic and misogynistic attitude in young males and reaffirms in the mind of young women that their value is premised on their sex appeal.

If we continue to blur this essential division between children adults, we ignore the social repercussions of sexualizing our children at our own peril.

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