It’s common to blame the woes of the current generation of teens and younger kids on their teachers. Not entirely without reason — there are too many numpties who opt for teaching because they’re too dumb to do anything else. Unscrupulous universities have steadily lowered requirements for undergraduate teaching students. Some teachers are quite plainly green-left zealots using their classrooms as bully pulpits.
But that’s a gross slur on a great many intelligent, dedicated teachers — who are being steadily driven out of the system in despair.
A young man of my acquaintance is currently pursuing post-graduate teaching qualifications. He is passionate and dedicated to the idea — although that idealism is fast fading. The first blow to his dream of being a teacher was studying teaching. None of it was practical, he said: nothing about planning a lesson or running a classroom. But it is almost wall-to-wall Marxist theory on gender and race.
As he’s perused teacher’s discussion boards, he’s been even more depressed by the number of experienced teachers who say they’re leaving the profession in despair. Their overwhelming complaint?
It’s not education any more — it’s re-education.
This is in Australia, mind. In the US, the Long March through the institution of education bureaucracy is even further advanced.
The results of federal control of our children’s education, any federal control—including the egregious Common Core—have been nothing short of horrendous. The U.S. public educational system, once the envy of the world, is a disgrace, run from above by people who would never think of sending their children to public schools, but are certain about exactly how we should run them.
When despairing teachers in Australia talk about “re-education”, they mean exactly that: curriculum control and education bureaucracy have been thoroughly captured by Marxist theorists, determined to make the nation’s children in their own image of the New Man.
This begins in our kindergartens, where 5-year-olds are taught the likes of critical race theory (overtly or covertly) or explained the intricacies of transgenderism before they have the faintest idea of how to read or add and subtract.
In classrooms today, teachers no longer teach. They read from preplanned syllabi as if they were robots. These syllabi, often filled with carefully crafted left-wing gibberish, are intended to make sure our children get a “proper” education, but they actually do just the opposite: cut off communication between student and teacher.
Much of that is unfair on the teachers themselves. If that’s the way our classrooms are run, it’s because it’s the way they’re told to run by the education bureaucracy.
It’s not all the fault of Marxist ideologues, either. The grimmest fact of the Long March is how leftist activism has fused with the bureaucratism of 80s neo-Liberalism. Education has become the kingdom of clipboard-tickers and KPI-meeters. Their archetype is the vile Dolores Umbridge, of the Harry Potter novels (the film version was far too sanitised compared to the written character).
Instead of imparting information or actually teaching, that function is left to highly manipulated technology in the form of iPads and the like that are given to students from kindergarten onward. The outgrowth of that is what I wrote about the other day—that 5-year-olds are putatively taught to read via “The GayBCs,” including N is for nonbinary, T is for trans, and so forth.
And don’t get me started on teachers unions, which are a conspiracy to preserve this system and exercise unfair leverage against taxpayers and parents who can only respond to their demands through politicians years after the fact.
Teachers unions are the industrial wing of the left. They are some of the biggest financial supporters of the Democrats in the US, and Labor in Australia. When Julia Gillard became prime minister, an old teacher of my acquaintance (one who’d got out of the profession, seeing what was coming) recognised her “type” immediately: “I got out of teaching because of teacher’s union arseholes like that,” he groused.
I say that even though I believe that the greatest people alive are the best teachers, worthy of more respect than anybody, national treasures, in essence.
The Epoch Times
If only they were allowed to actually teach, without an army of Umbridges in the teacher’s unions and education bureaucracy tying their hands and smothering the minds of their students.
