Public Schools Are The New Liberal Churches And Teachers Are The Clergy

If you haven’t heard, Kentucky was (and still is, due to contested results) the site of one of the nation’s most closely watched and contested elections this week. The incumbent, Republican Matt Bevin, won his seat in 2015 in a bit of a landslide, considering that his predecessor was a Democrat. The state was deeply in debt at the time, with teacher pension programs that were underfunded and in danger of collapsing, due to a failure of previous governors and general assemblies to properly fund the retirement system. Bevin ran on a promise to fix the system, and passed a bill that was designed to do just that—but the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned it.

Bevin made a mistake—well, it was a mistake in the sense that it prevented his certain re-election in a state that voted 65-35 for Donald Trump in 2016. He attacked the teachers in Kentucky, likening them to “thugs.” He blamed sexual abuse and shootings on them. When they called out sick en masse to protest him at the statehouse, he said they just wanted a day off.

So what did the teachers do? Well, they did they always do—they indoctrinated the children.

My son’s school held a “mock election” on the day before the “actual election” in which they invited kids to cast a vote for governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Let me provide some context. At the top of this page, you’ll see an image that shows the actual results of the gubernatorial election in my county. Bevin, who ended up losing the statewide election by about 5,000 total votes, or about .3 percent, won our county by roughly seven points—not the landslide you would expect for a Republican in Clark County, Kentucky, but a healthy margin.

But in the mock election, the 5th and 6th graders of Clark County voted to elect Bevin’s opponent, Andy Beshear, by a margin of 71-29.  When the school posted the results of the exercise on its Facebook page, the responses from parents were so full of anger and vitriol that the administrators deleted the post.

According to my son, they talk about Matt Bevin at school all. the. time. And not just in Social Studies, but in Math, and Science, and English, and Art.

Matt Bevin is the devil, and he’s making it harder for us to do our jobs!

So naturally, the kids, who want the approval of their teachers, voted against the man the teachers all demonize on a daily basis. They don’t know much about politics—they’re 10 and 11 years old. They only know what the clergy of their school tell them. They believe what they’re told to believe, and in most cases, that’s in direct opposition to what their parents believe. In other words, the opinions of their teachers are more powerful than the opinions of their parents.

This is hardly surprising, of course. Kids spend more time with their teachers than they do with their parents, and the majority of teachers are activists first and educators a clear and distant second. They believe the popular mythology that being a teacher is some sort of sacred profession, making them impervious to criticism. They think it’s massively unfair that they “work so hard” and yet are paid so little (average Clark County teachers make considerably more money than the average Clark County resident). It’s no wonder that the young adults of America think Socialism is a good idea. Their teachers have been telling them that it is for most of their lives.

I asked my son who he voted for, and he said, “Bevin, of course.” But I doubt the majority of his tween friends are as politically-minded as he is. We talk about politics in the house—maybe not every day, but we talk about them. We talk about why conservative principles make sense. We talk about individual freedoms and why individual accountability and responsibility is important. (And, it should be noted, he went to a Christian private school until last year.) Based on the results of this mock election, it’s clear that not every similarly minded parent in the county is having the same conversations.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not the world’s biggest Bevin fan. He’s a bit of a carpetbagger, having been born and educated outside of the South. He was a bad candidate, one that not even a last-minute visit from The Donald himself could fix.  And in Kentucky, even the Democrats are pretty conservative, so it’s not like a vote for Beshear is a vote for Hillary or Bernie. His father was a Blue Dog Democrat governor—but he also ran up a good amount of the debt that Bevin has spent the last four years trying to fix.

The moral of this story? Don’t trust your kids’ teachers to reinforce your values. They’re much, much more interested in giving their values to your children, instead. Talk to your kids about what they’re learning at school, especially on political and social issues, and don’t be afraid to engage with them in discussion about it.

We can’t trust these people to educate our kids. They’d rather indoctrinate.

30 Replies to “Public Schools Are The New Liberal Churches And Teachers Are The Clergy”

  1. link3721

    I feel like people in “public” positions (whether public school teachers or other government workers) have a responsibility to keep personal politics to themselves. History and political classes are a bit of a gray area which would be hard to enforce, but generally speaking any “political” activity while in a government position should be addressed with the equivalent of the Hatch Act (which unfortunately isn’t very well enforced).

    Reply
  2. Acd

    Having followed Matt Bevin’s primary campaign in 2014 when he tried to unseat Sen. Mitch McConnell and then his relatively easy win for governor in 2015 I was surprised to find out that he was so disliked this time around but your explanation puts it into perspective now. Public schools are becoming indoctrination centers and parents need to have regular conversations with their kids about many subjects including politics.

    Reply
  3. Fred L.

    I dunno, if the prez can bring politics into military aid, seems like a green light for teachers to bring politics into the classroom.

    goose, gander, all that.

    I kid, both examples are despicable.

    Reply
    • Josh Fromer

      I think you mean the former Vice President brought politics into aid (and his handicapped son’s employment) But I get your point.

      Reply
    • Ronnie Schreiber

      Whether you agree with President Trump or the teachers, or disagree with both of them, they’re two completely different situations.
      To begin with, I doubt there is any foreign aid, economic or military, that doesn’t have some political angle. Then there is the fact that the president is a politician who also has the constitutional authority to carry out foreign policy.
      Teachers, on the other hand, are hired to educate, not indoctrinate. They are not supposed to be politicians. Unfortunately, they’re the produce of Ed Schools, which seem to be more about fads and politics than education. Why do Ed Schools hate phonics?
      https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191107-Gilbert?cid=wcontentgrid_hp_6

      Reply
    • delow241

      Contrary to the fake news narrative politics in military aid is as old as, well, military aid. There has NEVER been a dollar given to another country in aid that did not have some kind of string attached to it that would benefit the USA….or in the case of the previous “president” destroying the USA.

      Reply
  4. benjohnson

    Speaking for my own kids, you can sort of inoculate them against the propaganda by preparing them ahead of time for the techniques the teachers use. It really backfires on the teacher when your child pipes up ‘Mrs. Teacher, I think you’re trying to manipulate my feelings.”

    Reply
    • stingray65

      Of course the danger for students who “speak truth to power” in the classroom is that they end up in detention or with poorer grades that might hurt their chances of getting admitted into a highly competitive university and therefore miss his/her chance for the really high quality Leftist indoctrination that universities supply to our impressionable young adults.

      Reply
    • Ronnie Schreiber

      Perhaps if those public school teachers did a better job they’d get less criticism. They embrace educational fads that don’t work and many use their positions to indoctrinate students. Of course, since you agree with that indoctrination, you don’t have a problem with it. If the indoctrination went in a different direction, let’s say it taught kids that America is an exceptionally great country, you’d likely complain.

      “A few years ago, when I was on my university’s Graduate Council, a new course proposal came to us from our College of Education. The proposal referred to the different learning styles of students, something that struck me as odd — I remembered having heard years before that the learning-styles theory had been discredited. Trusting my colleagues’ expertise, I kept my mouth shut and, assuming that learning styles must have been rehabilitated by new research, voted to pass the proposal.

      I later polled the education majors in one of my history classes: Not only did they know about learning styles, they all knew the acronym “VARK,” which stands for visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic — the four alleged learning styles. The theory, it seemed, was alive and well.

      Then I sought out the supporting research. Instead, I quickly came across a New York Times article on the curious persistence of learning styles — curious because of widespread evidence debunking the theory (The Atlantic has since published a similar piece). Despite all this, learning styles still apparently pervade colleges of education. A 2014 article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the topic of “neuromyths” found that over 90 percent of teachers it surveyed believed in learning styles. . . .

      Evidence shows that virtually anyone can learn to read if they are taught to associate letters with particular sounds (phonics) and that trying to teach students to read using the whole language approach works poorly. Still, colleges of education continue to resist phonics. . . .

      There are real costs to these inertial, anti-scientific ways. Researchers warn that trying to accommodate students’ beliefs about their own learning styles may actually make it harder for them to learn. The fact that fewer than 40 percent of American eighth graders are proficient readers is partially attributable to educators’ dogged opposition to phonics. . . .

      No doubt there are useful things we could learn from the high schools and they from us, but what’s wandering in from the sidewalk may be the worst aspects of the high school, not the best. Instead of the enthusiasm of the robotics team and the Latin club, it’s the top-down administration and the stifling, centralized approach to curriculum and pedagogy that seem to be trying to get their noses under the tent.

      Ed school graduates now occupy a growing role in academic administration, especially at lower-tier schools, and they are bringing an ed-school mentality with them.”

      These aren’t Republicans that are suing because the Detroit Public Schools failed to educate them: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/11/07/detroit-public-schools-literacy-lawsuit

      Reply
    • VanillaDude

      Sorry, I support conservative politics and conservative governors, but this governor was a political catastrophe. He turned against our neighbors who are in the teaching profession when all he had to do is behave like a grown-up who lost a court case. He made a tough situation worse. It is a shame that he lost, but he brought it on himself.

      You don’t attack the middle class. That is where we live. Governors do not live in the middle class and they have no place to demonize anyone struggling to make ends meet. There is room for disagreements, but no room for bad behavior. Republicans are the middle class. This is a Republican governor. He should have known better. Shame on him for losing in a Republican state. He harmed the GOP with these actions and harmed Kentucky.

      Reply
  5. Scout_Number_4

    We opted out of public schools for our son precisely because of this. I can’t say his K-12 education was completely indoctrination free, but I will say we got very good value for our money. He’s now working on his BScEE at a Jesuit university, thinking for himself (more or less) and doing just fine.

    Mrs Scout and I have no regrets on this matter. I wish every parent had the options that we had.

    Reply
  6. hank chinaski

    Our public schools are all Orange Man Bad, all of the time. No drag story time that I’ve heard of…yet.

    Bevin is often referred to as a huge Churchian cuck and not much of a loss.

    The loss of Virginia is a major bellwether. FL is next, then TX. The critical mass to enact constitutional amendments is nearing, as if that matters anymore.

    Reply
  7. John C.

    Looking at those teacher salaries, it is amazing how little it takes to stir up the envy among people who should have plentiful jobs offering much higher. We really lost a lot when we ashcanned our unionized manufacturing sector so we could better pay tribute to our Asian betters.

    Reply
    • Ronnie Schreiber

      If those unions (and their employers) hadn’t agreed to cost enhancing and quality detracting work rules, perhaps our manufacturing sector would have been more competitive.

      Reply
      • John C.

        Or perhaps if we had not opened our self up having to compete with people who make much less than us. In 1970, the average Japanese worker made 20% of an American. It is even more extreme than that with China now.

        Reply
  8. stingray65

    Of course teachers have to do their part to correct and remedy the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, anti-Socialist/Democrat propaganda that many of their students with Neanderthals/Deplorable parents get at home. If we took the politics out of the classroom, we might therefore have millions of school children who continue to erroneously believe in evil and despicable things such as men and women are not interchangeable, that Western culture and Capitalism is responsible for almost all modern life we enjoy, that trannies are mentally ill, that Islam is not a religion of peace and utterly incompatible with Western values, that welfare states and open borders are incompatible, that high taxes and regulation hurt economic growth and keep people in poverty, that Socialists/Leftists only care about power and are responsible for 100 million deaths in the 20th century, that abortion is murder, that renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuels and kills thousands every year because poor people can’t afford the consequent expensive electricity to heat or air condition their homes, that electric cars powered by coal are not actually green, that attempts to create equality of outcome through affirmative action/quotas actually discriminates against the most able and competent and makes everyone (except the bureaucrats who administer the equality programs) poorer, that banning guns will mean only criminals have guns, and that sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never hurt me. Evil thoughts and beliefs such as these must be banished, and if parents won’t fulfill their responsibilities in providing their children the facts of life, then it will be up to educators to do the job, which is why teachers deserve short work days, 4 months off per year, well above average wages, and lavish pensions.

    Reply
  9. Gene B

    This is a very clear example of what’s happening nearly everywhere today. If you want to give children a chance to grow up recognizable, KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. They stand no chance against the 100% INDOCTRINATION, as bad as it ever was in the Soviet Union. KEEP THEM OUT, even if you have to spend your last dime.

    You will be glad you did.

    Reply
  10. NYCFinanceGuy

    School indoctrination should be focused on instilling kids with good values – the importance of studying hard, focusing, hard work, competitiveness, honesty, fairness – basically the values that will make them successful people and good citizens.

    The coastal upper middle class and wealthy very strongly instill these values into their kids at home, even while also allowing the teachers to indoctrinate their kids with liberal agenda.

    I grew up in a lower middle class town in “flyover country” and am now raising my kids in a brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood. Even at the public elementary school, my kids are reading, doing math, science, and everything else a couple grade years ahead of when I did them – and they are average here while I was one of the smartest kids in my class.

    These Brooklyn kids take all sorts of after school enrichment classes and activities, and these helicopter parents and their nannies produce kids that are incredibly smart and focused. In turn, they are much more likely to attend Ivy League schools, have better careers, and even have successful marriages compared to the kids back home.

    In situations where parents don’t do enough to instill the values of focus and hard work, we need the schools to do a better job taking up the slack.

    Reply
    • stingray65

      Don’t you know that math is sexist, and proper grammar is racist, biology is transphobic, and “his”tory is patriarchal? Do a google search and you will also find that “hard work”, “perfectionism”, and “merit” are also considered racist indicators of white privilege. These topics and concepts therefore have no place in the classroom, and parents who try to instill them into their children at home are risking a visit from social services for child abuse.

      Reply
    • panatomic-x

      good nyc public schools are very good. my daughter has gotten a much better education here than i got growing up in a fancy nj suburb. they do lay on the indoctrination pretty thick but i doubt they would do anything as crude as a mock election. they go a little overboard on the lgbtq thing but the upside is bullying is a fraction of what i witnessed growing up. my concern is that because of the political climate, current events are no longer taught.

      Reply
  11. Booty_Toucher

    Teachers are the biggest whiners and also have the best PR department. They should be called out more often.

    Reply
  12. scotten

    Fuck teachers and fuck their unions. For FAR TOO MANY years the education system has been bent and broken for the benefit of the teachers and not the kids.

    I’m not totally anti-union but when the local governments get bent over due to a teacher’s strike… they can all stuff it.

    Reply
  13. Aleksey

    I live in Jefferson County, and it somehow managed to give Baby Beshear a margin of +100,000 votes compared to just 4 years ago when it gave Bevin a loss of 37,000 votes.

    I find it curious that all the small rural counties sent in their results throughout the night, but magically none of the precincts in the two largest blue counties in the state (Jefferson and Fayette) had between 0-4% of their precincts reported well into the evening. Curious that the largest blue counties were waiting to see what margin Baby Beshear needed to overcome from just two counties. Move along, nothing to see here. Don’t worry where the ballots came from.

    The final margin is under 5,000 votes, about 0.3% of the total, or just enough to not be in danger of being overturned by recount. I guess Bevin isn’t clever enough to find thousands of ballots in the trunk of an election official’s car, which is how Al “Sexual Assualt” Franken stole… err…” won” his Senate seat over Norm Coleman in Minnesota.

    Reply
    • stingray65

      Some of the inner-city precincts in Detroit (and I think Philadelphia) in 2016 where the various losers to Trump asked for recounts found more votes cast than their were registered voters, and almost none of them were for Trump, but much the Clinton’s chagrin the over count meant they couldn’t be used to legally challenge the election results.

      Reply
  14. Danio

    It’s oh so true that teachers are activists first, mainly advocating for themselves. My mother’s side of the family is/was nearly exclusively employed by Big Ed. I’ve heard it all.

    “People don’t understand how hard we actually work. Sometimes we actually have to stay at work until 5 to get things done.” Shock.

    Any time they’re asked to do anything outside of be in a classroom they act victimized. “Yard duty? I’m not a babysitter!”. “I NEED my prep time!”

    For the last 10 years of my mother’s career, she “crossed over” into management when she became a School Principal. It’s amazing how a sudden change in one’s position in life can modify their political opinions. Suddenly, the teachers weren’t the victims anymore. She realized the kids and the taxpayers truly were.

    She got her gold plated defined benefit pension at 57. Each of her siblings employed by Big Ed also retired with full pensions before 60 with plenty of time left to enjoy their 2nd and 3rd properties.

    Reply
  15. Dirt Roads

    All I know is obviously I went with the wrong career path. This Boomer has no damned pension and plans to work until they tip me out of my chair onto a gurney and pull a sheet over my face.

    I could’ve been a teacher!

    Reply

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