Tag: indoctrination

Teachers’ Unions Falling Out of Favor With Americans. Is It Any Wonder?

The debate over schools reopening has affected how Americans view teachers’ unions. It has been well-publicized that the unions in many districts have submitted political demands that have little to do with pandemic safety as a condition of returning to the classroom.

None of the political demands have anything to do with educating children, either. One of the requirements, defunding the police, has actually been getting children killed in cities like New York City, Chicago, and Atlanta. Perhaps the most annoying displays were members of the teachers’ unions protesting school openings in large groups while maintaining that returning to the classroom is too dangerous.

Of course, these protests were done side by side with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Center for Popular Democracy. Hyperbole was on full display, especially considering that over 20 other industrialized countries have opened schools with no significant COVID-19 outbreaks. The coffins were a nice touch, especially for a virus that has a 99.8% recovery rate and where fatalities are most common above the age of 70. Nationally the average age of school teachers is about 40.

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Fairfax County, Virginia public schools tell parents not to hire tutors because it is unfair to kids whose parents can’t afford them

If you had any doubt that hard-left ideologues run government school systems in many (most?) places, take a look at Fairfax County, Virginia’s most populous county, with over a million residents, one of the richest counties in the United States with an average household income well over one hundred thousand dollars.

The educrats who run the Fairfax public schools have advised parents there not to hire tutors or organize informal homeschool “pods” to replace the shuttered schools because some parents cannot afford to do so, and that would be “unfair.”

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Teachers Openly Fret That Parents Might Hear Them Brainwashing Children, Call Parents ‘Dangerous’

In one of the creepiest yet most revealing Twitter threads ever to be posted on the platform, a teacher recently fretted out loud that virtual classes might allow parents to hear him brainwashing their kids. Matthew R. Kay, an educator and author of a book on “how to lead meaningful race conversations in the classroom,” worried that “conservative parents” would be able to interfere with the “messy work” of indoctrinating children into critical race theory, gender theory, and other left-wing dogmas.

Here’s the entire thread, which has since been set to private:

So, this fall, virtual class discussion 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? 

How much have students depended on the (somewhat) secure barriers of our physical classrooms to encourage vulnerability? How many of us have installed some version of “what happens here stays here” to help this? 

While conversation about race are in my wheelhouse, and remain a concern in this no-walls environment — I am most intrigued by the damage that “helicopter/snowplow” parents can do in the host conversations about gender/sexuality. And while “conservative” parents are my chief concern — I know that the damage can come from the left too. If we are engaged in the messy work of destabilizing a kid’s racism or homophobia or transphobia — how much do we want their classmates’ parents piling on?

It’s important to note that while some teachers responded to Kay’s comments with the appropriate level of horror and disgust, many others chimed in to share their own strategies for brainwashing during a pandemic. One teacher said she’d also been “thinking about” the problem Kay described, and had decided that she’d ask students about their preferred pronouns via survey — though she still worries that “caregivers” might see it and learn something about their children that they weren’t supposed to know. 

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