American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten told an audience in Washington, D.C., that “private, religious, online and home schools” are an “extremist scheme by a very vocal minority of Americans” that lead to the “bullying of the most vulnerable among us.”
Speaking at the National Press Club, Weingarten criticized the “privatization” of education, insisting that the efforts to break public schools’ chokehold on education are preventing “kids from recover[ing] from learning loss, sadness, depression and other effects of the pandemic.”
She said that with a straight face. She actually said that public schools help kids be less sad and less depressed.
As a former public school teacher, I can attest that the atmosphere at school is so hospitable to mental illness. Children are forced to sit among kids their age — regardless of intellect, maturity, or mental health — and they are forced to endure bullying, peer pressure, self-esteem issues, and academic stress. Going to school also causes many children and teens with non-traditional ways of learning to believe they have “learning difficulties.”
And with every diagnosis of depression or anxiety or learning disability, there is a doctor all too ready to prescribe a drug to “treat” the ailment.
According to findings reported by IQVia in 2021, more than six million children are taking psychiatric drugs (i.e. ADHD or antidepressant drugs).
To say that public schools are working to reduce that number is ridiculous and reveals a prejudice against parents and a bias in favor of maintaining the educrats’ monopoly of manipulation on the minds of America’s children.
Next, Weingarten insists “false claims” that “public schools push a ‘woke’ agenda” have led to “school board meetings descending into screaming matches.”
If these claims are false, what are the parents screaming about?
They are screaming about the fact that all the policies Weingarten calls “false” are in reality very true and very degenerate.
For years, The New American has covered the rise of the woke agenda in public schools, and some of those articles can be found here, here, and here.
Next, Weingarten denounces “laws restricting what teachers can teach and students can learn — particularly about about race, gender, LGBTQ issues, current events and American history; and laws attacking kids who are transgender,” claiming that these laws are fomenting “hostility and fear.”
Weingarten slams conservatives for not knowing how to define “woke,” so I challenge her to define “transgender” and I’d love to hear her version of American History.
Actually, I can hear her version of American History any time I want simply by dropping into any American “History” class in any one of the more than 90,000 public schools in the United States.
Adding to the “climate of fear and intimidation,” Weingarten criticizes states that permit parents to sue school districts and teachers for teaching lessons that have been legislatively prohibited in public school.
Shouldn’t a school district that knowingly defies laws enacted by the representatives of the people be held accountable?
If the people elect state lawmakers that pass legislation preventing schools from teaching kids subjects that the people believe are inappropriate for children, then teachers and administrators who want to continue teaching the inappropriate and illegal lessons should move to a state where such subjects are accepted or encouraged in that state’s public-school classrooms.
But, see, that would be an expression of not only consent of the governed, but that would be an expression of individual freedom that Weingarten and her colleagues in the establishment’s education mafia cannot allow.
“Shouldn’t teachers be free to talk with students who are withdrawn or in distress, and to answer students’ questions?” Weingarten asks rhetorically.
The short and easy answer is “No!” If parents exercise their natural authority over their children and their civic right to elect those who make laws in their state, and those representatives are able to pass proposals that protect their state’s children from being exposed to images and information that the people and their representatives believe are false or filthy, then teachers are NOT free to answer all questions put to them by their students.
But again, if teachers want that “freedom,” then they are free to get a license in a state with fewer protections for children.
Simple as that.
Finally, Weingarten complains that the “school privatization movement is methodically working its plan: Starve public schools of the funds they need to succeed. Criticize them for their shortcomings.”
First, Weingarten’s term “school privatization movement” is another way of saying “protecting parental rights to control the children’s education.”
Second, if public schools were functioning, wouldn’t parents be pleased to fund them? Most parents send their children to public schools and they would want those schools to succeed; they wouldn’t “starve” those schools of any money, material, or manpower if they saw that their money was being spent wisely and producing well-educated children.
Lastly, organizations that must compete in the free market actually encourage the calling out of their shortcomings, as such constructive criticism is the only way to improve and to outperform their competitors.
And that’s why Weingarten is so nervous about the growth of the school choice movement: She knows that public schools can’t compete; she knows that under the old system, they didn’t have to compete, and unless she can foment fear of homeschool, private schools, and religious schools, she will lose her place at the federal feed trough and she will be exposed to the rigors of the free market.
I will give the final word to Richard Price, a man of forgotten, but immense influence on our Founding Fathers, who issued the following warning in 1784:
The end of education is to direct the powers of the mind in unfolding themselves; and to assist them in gaining their just bent and force. And, in order to do this, its business should be to teach how to think, rather than what to think.
But hitherto education has been conducted on a contrary plan. It has been a contraction, not an enlargement of the intellectual faculties; an injection of false principles hardening them in error, not a discipline enlightening and improving them. Instead of opening and strengthening them, and teaching to think freely; it hath cramped and enslaved them, and qualified for thinking only in one track. Instead of instilling humility, charity, and liberality, and thus preparing for an easier discovery and a readier admission of truth; it has inflated with conceit, and stuffed the human mind with wretched prejudices.
