American Censorship

My step brother just began his new job as a teacher in Tulsa, OK... Very random right. Well thats the point. He recently got the job after a rigorous selection process. The only difference between him and the other teachers is that he got his job through the Teach for America program. This program takes bright, fresh out of college students and sticks them in the middle of blue collar America to shape the minds of the youth. This program was established when it was discovered that teachers with experience degrees had no desire to teach in lower income areas.
Anyways he was set up with housing and a job and will now spend the next three years of his life in Oklahoma.

He is a former New Trier graduate who lived a pretty typical North Shore life and is now being transplanted directly into the "real America". With these circumstances, it is understandable that he may experience strange things that he wants to share with friends and family. For this reason he chose to make a blog.

Making a blog about being a teacher in a disadvantaged community, while being a Teach for America employee is not as easy as it sounds. There are so many politics involved, that the second he began posting things about his class, T for A was all over it. They made him take it down immediately. My only problem with this is that this became a political issue, that he would in the long run say something that would make the program look bad. I haven't doubt in my mind that nothing but constructive and humorous stories would come from this blog, and yet it is disbanded within days of its creation. It is simply because everything is too monitored. Let's say he did make a comment about something that was seen as "politically incorrect" (HOLY MOLY), his superiors would immediately correlate his behavior to the T for A program, something they could simply not allow. Potential suspensions, punishment and drama, etc. would ensue and the situation would become a mess.

It sickens me to think about how limited our society it is the status quo to be politically correct all the time. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of publications that could be public if it were not for their lack of conformity. This only makes me think about the knowledge and the stories that we are all being deprived because of these standards. Even in a country that is renowned for freedom of speech, I still see it as overly censored.

I also see a deep correlation to the civil liberties issues that we have studied. The Teach for America program is essentially restricting its participants from speaking their minds, maybe in attempts to prevent dissent as past US administrations have.

So in conclusion I pose the questions: Do you think the US has too much censorship? Why is it that we have a standard for behavior in the US? Who is responsible for that? Is this type of incidence a violation of civil liberties?