Today's culture wars treat teachers like political prisoners or, even worse, the enemy.
...PEN America, a nonpartisan advocacy organization that promotes and defends free speech, has documented the introduction of 185 educational gag orders — most related to race, gender, racism and American history — designed to control what may or may not be discussed in a classroom. Combined with the more than 1,500 book bans issued in the past 10 months alone, these bills "represent an orchestrated attempt to silence marginalized voices and restrict students' freedom to learn," according to a statement released last week by PEN.
Not all of these gag order bills have been signed into law, but they have had an unsettling effect on the teaching profession nonetheless. They put teachers on notice: Big Brother is watching you.
And all of this comes on top of the burnout exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, the epicenter of yet another culture war. The pandemic has led to mass teacher absences, contentious mask debates and chaotic "plans" for how to teach remotely. No wonder a poll by the National Education Association found in January that 55 percent of teachers in public schools are ready to leave the profession altogether.
Many won't, of course. They need the paycheck. They need the health insurance. They may hate the cultural context they now find themselves teaching in, but they love their work. The Achilles' heel of schoolteachers, one all too easily exploited by politicians, is that they love their students.
They may be teaching with whiteboards instead of chalk and computers instead of books, but in this sense, teaching has not changed since my grandmother's day. Policymakers are still out of touch with actual schools, and natural-born teachers are still in love with learning, still in love with sharing the excitement of ideas. Most of all, natural-born teachers love kids. And we cannot afford to lose a single one of them. Margaret Renkl
Not all of these gag order bills have been signed into law, but they have had an unsettling effect on the teaching profession nonetheless. They put teachers on notice: Big Brother is watching you.
And all of this comes on top of the burnout exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, the epicenter of yet another culture war. The pandemic has led to mass teacher absences, contentious mask debates and chaotic "plans" for how to teach remotely. No wonder a poll by the National Education Association found in January that 55 percent of teachers in public schools are ready to leave the profession altogether.
Many won't, of course. They need the paycheck. They need the health insurance. They may hate the cultural context they now find themselves teaching in, but they love their work. The Achilles' heel of schoolteachers, one all too easily exploited by politicians, is that they love their students.
They may be teaching with whiteboards instead of chalk and computers instead of books, but in this sense, teaching has not changed since my grandmother's day. Policymakers are still out of touch with actual schools, and natural-born teachers are still in love with learning, still in love with sharing the excitement of ideas. Most of all, natural-born teachers love kids. And we cannot afford to lose a single one of them. Margaret Renkl
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