The new school year is well underway, but students, teachers, and parents are being subjected to an educational and union bureaucracy that prioritizes the spreading of radical ideology over actual instruction, and the demands of union leaders over the needs of students.
The problem is widespread, and extends from kindergarten straight through graduate school. The vested interests, including the militantly aggressive left-wing union, the American Federation of Teachers, (AFT) have engaged in harsh tactics when their agenda is questioned or exposed.
An AMAC analysis found that in “the span of less than a week [in 2021] two California teachers were removed from their posts for openly attempting to indoctrinate their students in radical liberal ideology. Gabriel Gipe, an AP government teacher at a California high school, was caught on camera explicitly stating that his goal was to turn his students into ‘revolutionaries.’ Meanwhile, Kristin Pitzen recorded herself gleefully declaring that she removed the American flag from her sixth-grade classroom and made her students say the Pledge of Allegiance to a Gay Pride Flag. Both of these incidents come on the heels of another case where a teacher was removed for calling her students’ parents ‘dumb’ for being Trump supporters, going on to say that Trump ‘sucks’ and is ‘a literal moron.’”
Many of the issues were brought to a head during the pandemic, when the AFT, over the objections of many parents, sought to keep schools closed.
An example was recently provided in a Daily Mail examination. Reporter Harriet Alexander found that “A research assistant at the California Teachers Association dug for ‘dirt’ on parents who were calling for the reopening of schools during the pandemic – suspicious that they were being ‘used toward a larger goal to disrupt, destabilize and ‘burn down’ public schools’.”
What is being advocated? Just one example:: The New York Post reports that “New York is showering taxpayer funds on a group that sends drag queens into city schools — often without parental knowledge or consent — even as parents in other states protest increasingly aggressive efforts to expose kids to gender-bending performers. Last month alone, Drag Story Hour NYC — a nonprofit whose outrageously cross-dressed performers interact with kids as young as 3 — earned $46,000 from city contracts for appearances at public schools, street festivals, and libraries, city records show.”
The diversion from appropriate curricula to ideological-driven instruction extends beyond grammar school up into higher education. Mansur Shaheen quotes Dr Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist at the University of Pennsylvania: “Leading United States medical schools are beginning to value ‘wokeism’ instead of teaching and preparing the next generation of doctors, experts warn.” Goldfarb highlighted programs at major medical teaching institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, Duke and Pittsburgh. ‘Across these medical schools, there is now a default assumption that applicants understand and accept the tenets of woke ideology,’”
Why has this occurred? Much has to do with the way teachers themselves are being trained. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis believes that students seeking teaching degrees have been deeply inculcated in radical ideology at teachers’ colleges.
The Pacific Institute found that “It is important to understand the influence of schools of education, which train prospective teachers, on the political and ideological leanings of teachers. Dr. Greg Forster, Friedman Fellow at the school-choice organization EdChoice and a top education researcher, last year wrote that university education schools indoctrinate future teachers in left-wing ideology. ‘Peruse the course catalog of any major education school, or read the Twitter feeds of the professors,’ observes Forster, and you will ‘find yourself swimming in an ocean of hard-left ideology: ‘critical theory’ that says there is no truth, only power; ‘intersectionality’ that says you’re not allowed to be right about anything unless you’re right (that is, left) about everything; cheerleading for every fashionable left-leaning cause.’”
Illustration: Pixabay