Gay teacher's Facebook post sparks major public debate

A social media post by Belgian teacher David Degreef, who turned down a job offer by a Brussels school after being told not to disclose his sexual orientation in class, has sparked a major public debate this week.

In a Facebook post, Degreef said he was offered a job at a primary school in Brussels’ urban education network on the condition that he didn’t tell his students that he is gay. He argued that sometimes students ask teachers if they are married but was told to not divulge this information about his private life.

The director-general of the public education network of the city of Brussels, Charles Huygens, has advised teachers to maintain neutrality in the classroom by being careful in their statements about their private lives, including their sexual orientation. “We live in a big city with people of different origins and with different convictions, so we should respect a minimum of rules,” he told deredactie.be.

Huygens’ statement received criticism from both education professionals and politicians. Raymonda Verdyck, managing director of the Flemish community education network of schools (GO!), said that “whether you love men or women doesn’t have anything to do with neutrality; it’s essential to the identity of a person.”

Her counterpart  at the Catholic education network, Lieven Boeve, declared that openness around sexual identity helps “to raise young people to become complete individuals”.

Brussels state secretary for Equal Opportunities, Bianca Debaets, also supported the teacher. “Brussels children should learn to deal with diversity,” she said. Debaets wants to have a meeting with leaders in the Brussels urban education network, as does the Interfederal Equal Opportunities Centre. Jozef De Witte, head of the centre, stated that “we should lay the basis for an inclusive society, and schools and teachers have a leading role in this”.

Degreef himself told Radio 2 that “it’s first important that directors and schools get used to the idea that there are homosexual teachers who want to talk about their partners. The children and parents will then just follow, whether they have a foreign background or not.”

photo: The photo David Degreef (right) posted with his now-famous Facebook message