The Direction of Teaching in America

As a former teacher, I was dismayed at times about the quality of teachers who were shaping impressionable young minds in public schools. I was shocked that they knew so little and often were proud that they were ignorant. Too many teachers were not ashamed to admit that they were weak in history, mathematics, literature, science, geography, physics, and chemistry.

I watched such teachers like a hawk at my children’s schools. Every day I knew the lessons and the topics they covered. I monitored my children’s learning all the time even when they seemed tired of my questioning them. We went over homework, words, concepts, capitals, historical dates, math tables, spelling words, and cursive writing. It was a joy at the beginning of the school year to shop for school supplies with my children at Walmart and to organize the famous Trapper Keepers for each child.

The school principals and teachers then did not have the Democrat party’s activist agendas, they were struggling with class scheduling, faculty meetings, disruptive students, failing students, reading and math proficiency, unreasonable parents, missing parents, helicopter parents, parents demanding unearned grades for their progeny, truancy, graduation rates, ACT scores, pregnant students in school, hungover teachers in the classroom, and the occasional teacher’s scandalous affair which spilled into the school and impacted teaching and learning. 

There was no Internet, no libs of TikTok, and other social media platforms to spew hatred and woke ideology. There was some respectability to the teacher profession, teachers in general tried to be moral and behavioral models for their students.

Teachers were not sporting pink hair, nose rings, multiple facial piercings, sleeve tattoos, scuffed jeans with holes, and t-shirts with Che Guevara’s revolutionary photo and communist logos. There was no overt communist social activism in the classrooms. Teachers were not withholding information from their students’ parents; they sent home daily and weekly classroom lesson plans. Students could bring home their textbooks.

There were no teacher unions in some states, but the State Department of Education was king in choosing what the students learned every year since 1979. Most teachers had good intentions, slightly under-prepared for the brighter kids but were not the Marxist activists of today.

Teachers were following the latest educational fad and directives from the State Department of Education, in line with the latest teaching methods coming from the minds of academia. 

These teaching methods were the hobbyhorse of research for research’s sake from Colleges of Education at universities around the country, especially teacher colleges that had been grooming communist teachers for multiple decades, following the model of the European “intellectuals” who moved to New York to seed their Marxist indoctrination in American academia.

The global warming agenda started to creep in and infiltrate public schools via student channels, video games, movies, cartoons, and other mass media forms of indoctrination. Students were frightened by their teachers that the planet was going to burn up or freeze over because their parents’ lifestyles were killing the planet.

The quality of teachers started to diminish in the last thirty years, as fewer students sought a degree in Education. It was a trend caused by poor teacher pay, lack of respect, the inadequate preparation, and the quality of potential students who failed to pass basic courses in math and science. It was easier to memorize educational fads which changed each year to fit the woke agenda developed over the last fifty years. As the saying goes, “Those who can’t, teach.”

Students began pursuing journalism and communication degrees, social studies degrees, social justice, gender justice, environmental justice, racial justice, and other newly developed and woke collegiate curricula, shamelessly claiming the existence of “injustices” across the board in the U.S. Pick a subject, we will find and create an injustice in that field.

The market became overfilled with starry-eyed social justice warriors seeking a significant place in the myriad of non-governmental organizations that did not pay better than teaching but afforded students the opportunity to travel to third world countries to bring them American “democracy,” mob rule that is.

In their feel-good, easy-peasy college classes, these graduates failed to learn that we are not a democracy but a constitutional republic. Why would they know when most of them have never read the Constitution, nor did they take or pass a civics class.

Educational scholars in the U.S. then and now were influenced by the Frankfurter School which comprised the German intellectuals at the Institute for Social Research, an organization at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, founded in 1923. Its founder was Carl Gruenberg, a Marxist professor of law at the University of Vienna. This Marxist center was funded with money from Felix Weil, a rich student, whose doctoral dissertation focused on the pragmatic problems of implementing socialism.

These German, Italian, Canadian, and American scholars sat the stage for the eventual decline of education in this country and its devolution into the cultural Marxism we see today.  They helped train, brainwash, and establish teachers as a revolutionary frontline who would eventually transform society into the socialist/communist society they sought.

In the words of Barack Obama, five days before he became president, “We are five days from the fundamental transformation of America.” Few people focused on that one ominous sentence unless they survived a socialist country ruled by the Communist Party. For them, that one sentence chilled them to the very core of their beings.

How did the federal government become so powerful that it dictates what is happening to teachers, administrators, schools, and students? Certainly the 1979 establishment of the U.S. Department of Education by President Jimmy Carter was the official start of a declining American education.

The government now forces schools to teach racism under the pretext of anti-racism. The Critical Race Theory (CRT) is aiming to fundamentally change schools into places of overt Marxist conflict, whites against minorities, rich against the poor, heterosexuals against the gay and transgendered.

The funding largesse is going to schools, most of which are starved for cash and are not going to turn down “fee money,” to compel them to replace traditional learning with CRT. Money is also invested in perverting and sexualizing students. Homosexuality and gender confusion has now exploded into brainwashing young children into body mutilation. Drag Queen Story Hour, encouraged by teachers and administrators, features men dressed as women, reading disturbing stories to kindergartners.

Public education has become government education and teachers are government employees expected to do their bidding. They must accept and agree to escalate in their classroom the social re-engineering of public education. Common Core curricula, in place all over the country under different names, has dumbed down the students’ performance in mathematics, reading, and writing, behind many less developed countries.

Before 1979, Americans used to be the most educated people in the world thanks to private and home schools. John Dewey’s and Horace Mann’s dreams of a centralized, government-controlled, anti-Christian public education became reality, and the quality of teachers and students began a serious decline after 1979.

“Today, in school districts all across the country, teachers, administrators and superintendents all work toward the same mission as the founders of public education, as they help brainwash and raise un-American and amoral generations of adults, in the same manner as was done to them.”   The Problem with Public Education : The John Birch Society (jbs.org)

We are no longer a superpower thanks to public education, we have moved to a dumb, ignorant, and self-destructive immoral nation. The government is in control of public education and is “weaponizing” it, destroying Americanism, its uniqueness, talent, and creativity, and replacing American exceptionalism with collectivist ideals.

Unless we reverse this educational trend of destruction and start training and hiring teachers and administrators who respect and understand our constitutional republic, and our history, there is no fixing America’s decline.

NOTE: Google is no longer allowing me to post comments, so here is one comment by Pilgrimson:

"The last sentence of this article states...

"Unless we reverse this educational trend of destruction and start training and hiring teachers and administrators, who respect and understand our constitutional republic and our history, there is no fixing America’s decline."
I believe that there have been at least two generations of destruction that have passed, that I do not conceive there are enough teachers and administrators alive to be able to fill the positions needed to accomplish the fixing of Academia.
Not to mention being outnumbered by the Communist Marxists!