Rick Frankum <frankum@slimy.com> wrote in message news:<ch74j9$oge$1@bgsv5647.tk.mesh.ad.jp>...
> The Japanese article is at 
> <http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20040831-00000069-mai-soci>
> on Yahoo! Japan.  Probably not for long, though.
> 
> John W. wrote:
> > The teacher supposedly said: '"It was only natural the girl was
> > murdered. The killer wasn't wrong. Those around her were wrong."' The
> > article says he clarified this by saying "any child would be capable
> > of acting the same way."
> 
> It seems clear to me that he was talking about the potential, more a "it could 
> have happened here".  Maybe not the most constructive way to get kids to think 
> about the cause of the incident, but not as malicious as the English article seems.
> 
It didn't surprise me that a teacher said such a thing, and the
reaction also didn't surprise me. I find it interesting that students
have the power to get a teacher suspended for saying something
inappropriate, but a student could do something even worse and
teachers most likely (depending on the incident) wouldn't be able to
get the kid kicked out of school. A friend of mine teaches at a
private school in the US and sometimes expresses amazement at the
things Japanese students who go there think they can get away with.

John W.