14 DAY TRIAL // Matt Damon doesn’t seem to be the guy who loses his cool that quickly – unless, of course, you happen to be insulting something that’s close to his heart, as one reporter found out just recently, during the Save Our Schools March.
Over the weekend, Matt joined his mother in the March, taking a stand for the need for quality public education.
At one point, as the video below will confirm, he stopped to talk to the press about the issue. A reporter from Reason TV suggested to him – or at least tried to do so – that teachers shouldn’t get tenure.
She compared his job as an actor to that of a teacher, suggesting that job security (that is, getting tenure) would make the latter work less and invest gradually less effort into his or her projects.
This is the moment when Damon snapped, putting the reporter back in her place in just a matter of seconds.
“You think job insecurity is what makes me work hard?” he asked her.
She tried to reply to this by saying he had an “incentive to work harder,” which, in the case of teachers, would disappear if they had tenure.
“I want to be an actor; it’s not an incentive. That’s the thing. See, you take this MBA-style thinking, right?” Matt cut her off to say.
“It’s the problem with [education] policy right now. It’s this intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that,” he added.
“It’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when they have tenure. A teacher wants to teach. I mean, why else would you take a [expletive] salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?” the star further said.
A cameraman also tried to join the discussion, asking Matt what he thought should be done in the case of the 10 percent of teachers who are really bad at what they do.
The actor’s response was simply a must-see. Check it out below (*please note the video contains two instances of strong language that may offend).