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Who’s Teaching at Your School?
This tweet a couple of days ago from a teacher attracted a lot of attention:
“So, this fall, virtual class discussions will have many potential spectators – parents, siblings, etc – in the same room. We’ll never be quite sure who is overhearing the discourse. What does this do for our equity/inclusion work?”
It prompted a long thread of responses from teachers across the country about how to get around what they saw as the clearly negative influence of parents in order to indoctrinate their students. And the responses showed that this was not about teaching our common humanity and treating each other with respect, but rather how to instill race consciousness, disable students’ ability to think for themselves, and to increase resentment, guilt, and divisiveness. It also tells you they know how outraged most parents would be if they knew what their children were being taught.
The reason I have not linked the tweet is that the thread eventually drew wider attention and received a massive dose of outrage, causing the writer to protect his twitter feed and is now unavailable to anyone not following him.
Woke educational philosophy has begun to permeate K-12 education, not just colleges. I no longer have children of school age and our grandson is not near entering school, but if I had a child in K-12 today, I would do a social media search on every one of their teachers and if I found stuff like this would raise a public fuss and try to mobilize other parents. I’d also take a close look at the school curriculum.
Published in General
You misunderstand me completely. Perhaps I misunderstood you, too, but I am really not your enemy.
Also… this is where I thought you were suggesting I teach explicitly one point of view. Can you see how I read what you wrote here in that way?
check this thought.
There is currently a debate in law circles. Should judges be activists from the right?
I think that position leads to very bad places, but I do not think that the people themselves who argue the position are “evil.” I understand why they feel this way. I disagree with them.
This discussion we are having here seems very similar to that one, though I think we may be talking past one another, which is the failure of text, I.e. “plain English” does not, actually, always read as “plain.” I have misread your implications.
Peace to you and good night.
This is the job of parents and families. The reason we are such a mess is parents have trusted a school board and school administrators and teachers to raise their children. Too many have outsourced their own parenting for a whole lot of things that matter little.
I pray that covid, and those parents who are disgusted, and home school their kids, or go to online charters, find the joy they have lost in raising their children 100% in the early, most formative years.
it is a million plus small armies in the form of strong families that we need, not better schools.
I absolutely agree, @julespa. This is why I think that parents are the only people who can truly disrupt the system.
However, I think that there is an idea that some formation is necessary in schools that has been expressed here, and that’s fair enough to examine, right?
For example, @westernchauvinist pointed out how the idea of civic virtue is formed pre-college, and she sees this as desirable. Perhaps more liberal teachers need to be replaced to accomplish this task, and more conservative institutions need to be built. There is nothing wrong with those ideas–they have real merit–even though I also think conservatives–including myself–have to then guard against the temptation of making new schools into mirrors of our own world-views, as progressives have done for my entire lifetime. (It’s a very, very thin tightrope as kids get older… Not, of course, when making “turkey hands” for Thanksgiving.)
A very important question should be asked by all, and I don’t know if I have the right answers: What exactly is an education for? (For example, Titus is absolutely right when he notes the essentialness of the liberal arts in human enrichment. Can most Americans be convinced of this truth? Can parents who have different core values articulate exactly what they want public schools to do?)
I guess I’m saying that while parents can and should disrupt the system, the hardest thing of all is rebuilding in a way that benefits the country as a whole. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an economy that allows everyone to homeschool… nor is everyone capable of homeschooling. But we care about everyone, right? We have a vested interest in education as a whole, and the devil is in the details.
No Child Left Behind, for example, was full of good intentions. It was really aimed at those kids whose parents simply do not have the same time or money or education as middle class families who are better positioned to disrupt the system itself.
Yet I think it is easy to argue that NCLB only made things worse.
This is hard.
The best we can do is local control, as imperfect and uneven as that would be. Subsidiarity. The feds should have little to say about education, but of course, fed money comes with strings attached. Government is corrupting.