Teachers to Parents: Butt Out

Lee Duigon

We’ve warned you about those teachers’ unions, but who listened?

Well, maybe you’ll listen to the teachers.

A big-name “educator,” one Mathew Kay, recently complained on Twitter about parents overhearing the content of online lessons and trying to butt in. He thinks they should butt out.

Millions of kids are now in virtual classrooms, online, with schools closed due to the coronavirus panic. Mr. Kay isn’t happy that parents might be finding out just what their kids are taught. He objects to “many potential spectators [those pesky parents]… overhearing the discourse. What does that do for our equity/inclusion work?” And parents, he added, are a threat to “honest conversations about gender/sexuality.”

What he’s talking about, of course, is indoctrination—“teaching” young Americans to be obedient little leftists and useful idiots for Far Left Crazy. One alleged teacher on his thread called the parents “outsiders.” And Kay himself wants the erection of “secure barriers” to keep those nosy meddling parents out of their children’s virtual classrooms.

What more do you need to know?

When I was substitute teaching at a public high school in the 1990s, the only gig I never got, never, was sex education. They never called a substitute for that. If the teacher had to be absent, they turned the class over to an assistant principal. And under no circumstances were any of the textbooks or other teaching materials to leave the classroom. Not ever. Obviously they were afraid parents might dip into those textbooks and kick up a fuss over what was being taught.

They’ve been concealing it for years, and getting away with it. A school in Chicago even tried to get teenaged kids to sign a “contract” forbidding them ever to discuss their lessons with their parents. But minors can’t sign binding contracts, so the scheme fell through. But you could still threaten kids with failure if they revealed the union’s secrets.

Why in the world do parents tolerate this? Do they just not care what is taught, as long as the kids are kept out of their hair? We may certainly be pardoned for thinking so.

But what with a federal Dept. of Education riding herd on all the school districts in America, and state departments of education, and the wealth and political power of the teachers’ unions, there’s very little, if any, authority left at the local level. Local school boards have to do what they’re told. Public schools are government schools, owned by the government. Shut up and pay your school tax.

And so the public schools were reshaped into indoctrination mills dominated by unions of devoted socialists, communists, and culture-killers. Some of them have made pilgrimages to Venezuela—to express their admiration for this great experiment in government-imposed poverty and repression, and to “learn” its techniques. Others just call themselves “Red for Ed” and demand higher salaries.

Once upon a time communities ran their own schools, deciding what should be taught in them and who should teach it. When they first tried to introduce sex education in my home town, outraged parents stopped it cold. But that was before we had a New Jersey Dept. of Education calling all the shots. So shut up and pay your taxes.

But now you can see for yourselves the insolence, the arrogance, and the revolutionary commitment of the teachers’ unions, who will damned well teach your children the virtues of collectivism, racial strife, and transgenderism and you, the parents, can just back off—it’s none of your business.

Just now, with thousands of schools still closed, America will never have a better chance to get out from under public education. Homeschooling has never been more efficient, more affordable, and more desperately needed. And there’s also Christian schooling to consider.

To concede the education of Americans to persons who despise America makes no sense at all.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Stop in for a visit; a single click will take you there. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net