There is a relentless assault on educators underway in this country. No other profession is as vilified as ours is on a daily basis. Yes, people hate lawyers, too. But how many articles, discussions and blog posts have you seen this week aimed at demonstrating how evil, stupid and unprofessional lawyers are?
Educators can do nothing right in the public’s eyes. What’s worse, educators themselves absorb this message and happily make it their own. The week before last, everybody dumped on a Harvard professor because we all know a lot better than he does how he should teach his classes. Then there was another scandal surrounding a professor who breastfed a child in class. This week there is a hullabaloo about the hiring practices of the English Department at Colorado State. And every time when this non-issue du jour is turned into a major drama, we, the educators, join the pack that hounds our colleagues.
What we don’t want to realize is that our turn will come next. Today in class, at the committee meeting, in the office each of us might do, say or write something that the next irresponsible journalist or blogger will use to promote the idea that all educators are freaks, jerks, and hateful creatures. This is a message that sells very well nowadays. Crowds of ignoramuses want to excuse their grievous lack of intelligence by fostering the idea that they never learned anything because teachers are stupid.
I suggest that we stop participating in this vicious endeavor. Let’s stop lending our voices to the attempts to destroy education in this country. The teachers of Illinois are on strike right now, protesting the ridiculous decision by the Obama administration to force teachers to stop teaching and start training students to pass some meaningless standardized tests. Do you enjoy my posts about students who think that Latin America is a country and who ask in shocked voices, “Hitler is dead? When did that happen?” Prepare to see a lot more posts like those if Illinois teachers lose their struggle. Obama continues Bush’s policies aimed at destroying education in this country. This is the real issue we need to discuss.
Let’s stand in solidarity with teachers in Illinois, adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, graduate students, post-docs, tenured and tenure-track faculty, Visiting professors at colleges, Quebec CEGEPS, state universities, Ivy League schools, big research institutions, small teaching colleges. When the next round of manufactured outrage against a colleague comes on, let’s refuse to participate. Let’s give our fellow educator the benefit of the doubt.
Instead, let’s turn our attention towards issues that are really crippling our attempts to educate. The bad working conditions of school teachers, the idiotic standardized tests, the swollen administrative budgets, the exploitation of contingent faculty, the lack of tenure-track positions, the overblown athletic budgets, huge classes where nobody can get individual attention, poor school districts where teachers have to buy chalk and paper with their own money – this is what is destroying our education. These issues, and not a teacher who brought her kid to class once or a professor who punished students for cheating, are our real enemies.
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