The Kids
And you of tender years,
Can’t know the fears, that your elders grew by.
And so, please help them with your youth.
They seek the truth, before they can die.
Teach Your Children – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
…..
Certain issues tend to belong to one political party or the other. For example, Republicans have “owned” the issue of national security pretty much since the cold war started. That is still the case. Democrats, on the other hand, have owned the issue of education for as long as I can remember.
That, however, may be changing.
Republicans have been trying to wrestle this issue from Democrats at least since the 70s. From Jack Kemp’s “opportunity zones” in the 80s to George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” all have failed.
But now, the Democrats may have literally thrown the issue in to the laps of Republicans.
Both parties are very adept at misreading the public’s enthusiasm for their platforms and have pushed their agendas too far provoking a backlash from the populace. I remember well when the Republican controlled House passed a bill related to the case of Terri Schiavo and the issue of whether a feeding tube could be removed from a terminal patient in a vegetative state. Republicans went beyond where the public was at the time, and it helped lose the majority in 2006.
The Democratic party today, as I have chronicled in these missives, is controlled by the authoritarian hard left. When things go wrong for them politically, they often believe that the cause is that they did not go hard and fast enough to the left. This is rarely true, but they are blinded by their sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the rest of us. If their policies don’t work, it is not because of the policy, but because they have failed to “educate” we morons and deplorables as to the virtues of their obviously beneficial fiat.
And, so to education. Part of the reason Democrats have so dominated the education issue is that the Teacher’s Unions are 100% Democrat and they have successfully marketed themselves as really being about “the kids.” That is as untrue as anything ever spoken. Teachers’ unions are labor unions. They exist to improve the pay and working conditions of their members. I do not fault them for that. What I take issue with is the charade that they care about “the kids.” They don’t. A California Teachers’ Union representative decades ago was caught saying he would care about the kids “as soon as they start paying union dues.”
The evil of Teachers’ Unions has long been the way they use “the kids” to benefit their political and union agendas. The propaganda media, of course, plays right along.
During the pandemic, however, it all came unraveled. So many parents of all political persuasions objected to teachers who would not go in to a classroom and would not teach while that parent was still going to work in whatever job they had. The unions wanted their members to get paid and not work. That may be the supreme ambition of every union. But it did not work with parents, who are really the teacher’s customers. It became abundantly clear that “the kids” were not the focus here and were being harmed by the insistence of the unions that teachers not teach.
Then, as though that wasn’t enough to piss off parents, came the teaching of Critical Race Theory and Gender Fluidity to Kindergarteners and up. You all know the story so I won’t repeat it. Suffice it to say I have talked to parents (in California) whose 6 year old boy was told by a teacher that he might consider being a girl. The parents found this out form their son, not the school.
The left sees schools as indoctrination centers for youth. Teach the impressionable young leftism, and eventually leftism will win. Separate children from their parents and make them children of the state. This is essential to their grand plan. I know many people hate the analogy so I won’t be direct here. But there was a fellow in the 1930s in Europe who did this with his country’s youth.
The national teachers’ union organizations are being ever more direct about their goals. The latest Manifesto (my word not theirs) from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) lists amongst the goals of the organization the promotion of a whole bunch of leftist political position including social justice and transgender advancements. These issues have nothing to do with teaching or with reading, writing and arithmetic. They are political positions, pure and simple, and the AFT is making it clear that amongst their major objectives is indoctrination in and promotion of leftist policies through government funded schools. We should take them at their word.
Teaching is a very difficult profession. You have to be devoted to it to do it well. I have tried it at a university level twice and failed. I like to think that I did not fail the students, but I certainly failed to feel the satisfaction from teaching that I expected. The unions are the problem, not the teachers themselves. But so many states require that all teachers join the union or they are not allowed to do their job. And too many teachers simply follow the union’s or school district’s dictates rather than object and probably be fired. That is another problem that is beyond the scope of this particular writing.
Parents of all political stripes, want to raise their own children in the way they want to raise them. They don’t want the state to decide for them.
Republicans have a once in a lifetime opportunity to seize on this overreach by the left and own the education issue. And not just own the issue, but fix the problem. Every Republican candidate in 2022 should be making education a major part of their campaign. But it is not enough to just be against what the Democrats and their union allies are doing. We must as well be for another vision for the future of education in America. That vision, broadly, should involve more local parent control of schools and the curriculum; school choice and competition through charters and other options; Teach only fundamentals and not political positions, left or right; reject the 1619 project and teach the truth of American history; pay good teachers more and fire bad ones.
More about all that in a future missive.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive fast & live free