This video comes from the NHC Educational Justice channel on YouTube, ad has the title ‘Even a Mass Exodus of Teachers Doesn’t Faze our Administration at any Level. They Just Don’t Care’. It’s of a teacher presenting her evidence before the New Hannover County school board, or so I assume. The teacher states that very many of her fellows are leaving the profession so that vacancies are going unfilled. This is not because they hate their jobs or the kids, but because of low pay, the endless testing, the burden of getting the kids through SATS with little support, such as teaching assistants and so on. They are also stigmatised as already overpaid, and heavily criticised when children do not succeed. And as for pay, one woman left because she found that she could earn more as a waitress with the tips.
I’m putting this up because these complaints are exactly the same that teacher over here have repeatedly voiced ever since the days of Maggie Thatcher. There’s also the problem that there are any number of videos on the net by Republicans exposing and talking about radical teachers in the classroom talking about how their indoctrinating their children about Black Lives Matter, White privilege and Queer theory. There’s an awful lot of videos about gay and trans teachers talking on TikTok about how they’ve come out to the children in their class and are trying to support their children’s gay and trans identities. While these are serious issues, I think the far bigger issue is simply that faced by teachers over here as well: poor pay and an excessive workload. Concentrating on extreme left-wing radicals, in my view, presents a distorted image of the profession. Most teachers are in there not to turn children into intersectional Marxist revolutionaries or gay or trans activists. They’re in teaching because they want to stand in front of a class and teach ordinary subjects like reading, writing, maths, science, history or whatever. And I do believe that the far right is weaponising the concern about radical indoctrination in order to destroy the state school system. Right-wing activists like Matt Walsh will show a video of a gay/trans/non-binary teacher talking about their views and how they’re teaching them to their class and then advise their audience to take their children out of school and home school them. There’s a similar attitude over here with the Reclaim party and the New Culture Forum. But underneath it is a deeper hostility to state provision of education.
Instead of being misrepresented as raving Marxist radicals, intent on creating a new generation of young revolutionaries, most teachers are professionals with a serious commitment to teaching. They deserve better pay, support and respect.
And definitely not to be used as propaganda in a radical libertarian attack on state education.