Do Teachers Know Best?

Teachers have been maligned, derided, put on a pedestal, ignored, followed, awarded, lionized, and sued by parents. Administrators choose their favorite teachers as educators of the year, star teachers, or outstanding faculty, lavishing praise and accolades on those they deem the best team players.

The unprepared teachers or those who cause embarrassment to the school district through their unscrupulous and immoral behavior are usually quietly transferred elsewhere with excellent recommendations unless there is a teacher’s union that prevents dismissal of such specimens of the teaching profession.

Do teachers really know best? Etymologically speaking, they “show, point out, guide, give instruction” to their charges but some of them go beyond their call of duty for better or for worse. Teachers are able to instruct to the extent of their level of education, actual comprehension and knowledge of the subject matter, and their level and type of ideological programming. As a student I’ve had some fantastic professors and some atrocious indoctrinators.

A teacher has the opportunity eight hours a day to mold a child’s mind, the proverbial brain “full of mush,” independently of their parents’ wishes. They have your child’s rapt attention. Young pupils believe their teachers to be the ultimate authority on everything and are never wrong.

People Magazine awarded their 2013 Teacher of the Year to eight teachers who work in challenging environments such as “underfunded schools, students with difficult home lives, and language barriers.” The media and the public in general believe that throwing more money at education will resolve fundamental flaws.

Named “The supportive survivor,” Valencia Robinson from New Smyrna Beach Middle School in Florida is a yoga devotee. “I will not let my students eat junk food in my class.” Aside from the fact that students should not eat in class and eating healthy is a good idea, it is the parents’ role to choose their children’s diet; they have not abdicated that role once their children step into the classroom.

The fact that a teacher is technology-savvy does not make them a better teacher. There is no evidence that using technology in the classroom such as laptops, e-readers, and tablets improves long-term learning, retention, interest, or a child’s ability to remember and understand information previewed on an electronic device. Although lately scorned, there is a lot to be said about traditional reading, memorization of facts, poetry, problem solving, computation, and writing.

Additionally, in spite of the Common Core rhetoric, not all children are able to learn to the same level because they have different IQs, different talents, abilities, interests, and a set of predominant intelligence that is unique to that student (Gardner’s intelligencies, i.e. logical, musical, visual, verbal, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and existential).

The most interesting choice for People Magazine’s 2013 teachers of the year was the team from the A.L.B.A. Elementary School in Milwaukee, dubbed “The team that said “Se Puede!,” a Spanish version homage to President Obama’s empty campaign slogan, “yes we can,” “si, se puede.”

Radames Galarza describes the best part of his day as “Meeting parents outside the classroom in the morning. I love seeing them grow as community leaders.” I do not understand how it is the role of the teacher to shape parents into community leaders. When did teachers become community organizers?

Elisa Guarnero, Brenda Martinez, and Radames Galarza petitioned the school board for a charter school a decade ago, making multiculturalism part of the curriculum.  In other schools, the team saw students who spoke Spanish be “treated as though their culture and language were liabilities instead of assets.” “Bilingualism, with culture relevance and parental involvement, is a mixture for success, said Guarnero, as quoted by People.

It is a fact that non-English speaking students’ performance on standardized tests does bring down the average scores of the entire school, giving United States lower placing in reading, math, and science on international standardized tests than they would otherwise have.

At the Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes (Why the Spanish name?), “400 youngsters start the day by saying the Pledge of Allegiance in English and Spanish.” The rigorous curriculum and the fine arts classes have helped students “beat state standards and math scores have surpassed the state average.”

Francis Bellamy composed the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States in English in 1892, not in Spanish, as an expression of loyalty to the federal flag and the republic of the United States of America. Modified four times since its composition, the Pledge was adopted by Congress in 1942 in English.   

A nation thrives when it is defined by one language and one culture with which generations can identify. Without a common language and respect for their parents’ and grandparents’ culture, forcing students to adopt languages of immigrant cultures alienates students from previous generations, turning them into global citizens surrounded by a hodge-podge of people from other nations who have no allegiance or love for the country they immigrated to. It certainly helped speed the demise of the Roman Empire when they did not require the invading hordes to speak Latin.

We are a nation of legal immigrants who have forged one distinct culture with one language and national borders that reflect who we are, unhyphenated Americans.  All past immigrants have learned English, assimilated and became part of our culture, of the fabric of our society, while celebrating their roots.

Unfortunately liberals made it necessary and passed laws to translate everything the federal government does in many languages, to the ridiculous extreme that Obamacare instructions and enrollment can be done in 150 languages. Our President was quite proud of this feature of the failed enrollment website. We have become the proverbial Tower of Babel.

Education tends to reward teachers who rave about other primitive cultures as superior while maligning, diminishing, or ignoring our own American culture.

Should we not reward teachers who educate our children to become Americans who love their country, who are proud of our technological achievements, and who become engineers, architects, scientists, writers, and home and nation builders?

Our children should not be taught to be ashamed of our country’s history, of our Christian roots and faith, of our exceptionalism and individuality, and of our important place and significant influence in the world.

It is commendable to reward good educators for all the right reasons. Rewarding the darling teachers who have a multicultural agenda, and who promote and influence the radical transformation of our national identity is a thin political ploy at liberal indoctrination.