Shortage of Teachers

The teacher shortage across the nation is getting more critical, following two years of an extended and mishandled pandemic which affected education in public schools significantly. Unions have made unreasonable demands for their teachers who did not want to teach in a classroom due to an irrational fear of death from a virus.

Some teachers quit because they refused to teach the divisive and racist critical race theory (CRT). Other teachers refused to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Students older than 12 were also forced to vaccinate against the highly ineffective Covid-19 injection to attend school and other school-related activities.

The teacher shortage is exacerbated by the license required by each state’s Department of Education in order to teach in public schools, even for seasoned teachers with a Ph.D. in a non-College of Education degree and a lot of years of experience teaching in higher education – they must have the approval of the vaunted Department of Education or else they are not qualified to teach.

Knowledge and content of a particular subject are not as important as a license. Due to the teacher shortage, licensed teachers are now teaching subjects they know nothing about.

The license, a piece of paper issued by each state, guarantees that the prospective teacher is good at making adorable and colorful bulletin boards and lesson plans - the paperwork with objectives must be completed, posted, and turned in to the administrators in a timely manner and placed on visible bulletin boards. Whether there is actual teaching and learning of those objectives in the classroom, that is a different story! And the students’ performance on standardized states proves the lack of learning.

The teaching profession has attracted students who had a harder time passing science and mathematics classes in college. Stronger math and science students were not interested in a College of Education degree because they knew that the pay was and still is lower when compared to employment with an Arts and Science degree.

Teaching has never been easy – it takes dedication, long hours, knowledge, and the pay is quite low. The school day never ends for a teacher at 4 p.m. The briefcase is full of papers to grade, lessons to plan, and reading materials to keep up with new developments, good or bad, required by the Department of Education.

I cannot imagine what must take place in most classrooms today! Judging by the woke teachers posting on TikTok, the situation in the elementary classrooms, with the most impressionable students, the teachers are bent on grooming kids into their depraved and delusional lifestyle. People with obvious mental issues oversee vulnerable kids.

Gone are the days when teachers were mostly positive role models, imperfect humans outside of the classroom. They came to class cleanly dressed, men were shaven, cared for their appearance, respected their students, and taught them how to be respectful to adults and peers alike.

Parents were sure that their kids would be safe in the classroom, would learn to read, write, do basic mathematics, home economics, learn life-long lessons of civics and citizenship, and skills applicable throughout adulthood.

Students were able to tell how many states form the United States, what the capital is, knew geography and history, the Constitution, their presidents, could write a cogent paragraph in proper and correctly spelled English, and knew their math tables.

Now students must spend time with social activism, social justice, learning Common Core math which reduces their performance on standardized tests even more; they must read sexually explicit stories, so explicit that the boards of education do not allow parents at meetings to read aloud the content of their children’s homework assigned by teachers following the Common Core curriculum.

Less than two decades ago, even without a college degree, high school graduates could read, write, do basic math, cook, balance checkbooks, could do simple math in their heads without a calculator, knew basic geography, basic history of their country, how to survive, fix a flat tire, change the oil in cars, cook, sew, learn useful skills in shop classes, raise a family, understood clearly the two biological sexes, and be respectful of life, born and unborn, and be generous and kind to others.

At the turn of the twentieth century, eighth graders could pass a difficult exam which most high school and college graduates today would be hard-pressed to even score in the lower fiftieth percentile.

In 2022, the pink haired, nose-ringed, lip-ringed, and heavily tattooed woke teachers are upset because they are not allowed to talk to their kindergarten and elementary school students about their sex partners, graphic sexual orientations, being transgender, and other immoralities. The mental and sexual baggage is so depraved that one wonders what is going to happen to our future generations exposed to such perversions in the classroom, often without parental knowledge.

It used to shock us when people with criminal records, liars, pedophiles, and habitual drunks became teachers and counselors in our public schools. Teachers who had sex with their underage students made headlines for months and years and they went to prison for their crimes against minors.

It was shocking to see college professors have steamy affairs with their students, yet nobody punished them in any way – liberals rolled their eyes and said, it was consensual sex. Never mind that the issues of professorial ethics and sexual harassment were not addressed.

It is now seen as tame for a public-school administrator to invite an imam to speak to students about the wonders of Islam shortly before his son and fiancé were caught trying to join ISIS. What exactly would American Christian students learn from such a speech that the attendance was made mandatory? And when did proselytizing for a non-Christian religion became compulsory in public schools? Liberals have been telling us for decades now that we cannot mix religion with public schools - we must be politically correct.

There is a shortage of teachers in our public schools because they have been habituated to “teach” from home in front of a computer and refuse to be in the classroom; they are afraid of a virus and want to wear a mask in perpetuity.

There is a shortage of teachers because the best, the brightest, and the most knowledgeable among them chose to leave the profession and pursue other ways to earn a living. With notable exceptions of the most dedicated and stellar teachers, the worst and the least prepared among the licensed ones chose to stay – they have few other avenues of employment.

There is a shortage of teachers because student discipline and behavioral issues caused by bad parenting or lack thereof have driven many teachers to renounce the profession. Administrators expected them to be first responders, doctors, nurses, counselors, and social workers, and to give students passing grades even though they had not earned them.

If you ask the National Education Association, the teacher shortage in all states can be explained by underfunding, poverty, and inequality. “Policymakers must take action to fix the underlying issues – underfunding, poverty, and inequality – that have dug us into the deep hole that we’re now in.” Teachers view the classrooms as “dangerous,” following the pandemic. “Teachers often have master’s degrees, even doctorate degrees, and yet they earn far less than other college graduates.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

The deep societal divide pushed daily by the mainstream media and Democrat politicians via their divisive policies is reflected in the classrooms. “Poverty, segregation, and inequality are huge issues, deeply embedded in American societies, and manifested in classrooms. Students come to school unprepared to learn, hungry or sick; parents have life circumstances that make it difficult for them to engage in their children’s learning; teachers’ safety and mental health is threatened.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

Societal issues reflect the sad reality that young generations now are not ready to be parents, have not learned how to be responsible adults themselves and are still relying on their parents for their survival. Some are hooked on drugs, alcohol, and on their smart phones, constantly taking selfies to post on TikTok, hoping that they will become the next Internet “influencer.”

Their role models are immature, entitled, narcissistic and whiny individuals, and are thus not ready to be parents. The main ingredient of a successful adult, personal responsibility, has never crossed their paths and lips. And their wild and misbehaved children, unfortunately, are now in the classrooms. Why would a low paid teacher deal with such parents and their children, in addition to teaching them?

Sadly, as a profession, teachers, good or bad, command little respect from society as a whole, even though they are the ones shaping America’s future by virtue of having your children’s ears and minds longer than any parent.

 

Societal Degradation and Cultural Marxism

Rust and decay
Photo: Ileana Johnson

Over the last four decades, political correctness promoted strongly by academia and the MSM has gained steam and unprecedented momentum. The “progressive” wing of society exploited the rest by using their money, power, and influence to install Cultural Marxism.

The nuclear family, Christianity, traditional morality, race, gender, and sexual identity were attacked one by one to achieve this goal. All were depicted as tyranny of the “evil white man” who benefited from “white privilege” at the expense of the “black and oppressed man.”

“Cultural Marxism is a Marxist dialectic infused with Freudian theory and applied to identity and culture.” People are divided into groups, each with their own narrative of historical oppression. These groups are given the status of victimhood and thus all its members must fight together against the predetermined oppressors. The members then transform the perceived wrongs and resentments into full-blown hatred for Caucasians, resulting in protests, riots, and cultural revolution.

The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci wrote that Christianity, the bedrock of Western European cultures, stands in the way of socialism. The fifth column inside these countries should be used to destroy the foundations of the Western culture, he wrote, thus enabling the advance of socialism at all levels of society.

The Marxist scholars of the Frankfurter School at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, picked up Gramsci’s idea and, when they fled Hitler’s Germany, they brought it to New York where they started training Doctors of Education and Doctors of Philosophy.

They then indoctrinated Marxist teachers who influenced every generation of students in our public schools and universities, immersed in Marxist theory, with hate and disdain for their own country, its symbols, heroes, its Judeo-Christian roots, and its history.

Their ultimate goals were to seek power and to resolve the manufactured injustices, created by Cultural Marxists activists, with radical social engineering projects that will fundamentally and irreversibly change our society.

The celebrated hero of the radical left is Karl Marx, who, in collaboration with his friend Friedrich Engels, wrote that the history of all societies is a history of class struggles between two basic classes of people, the owners of the means of production (the exploiters) and those who sell their physical labor to survive (the exploited).

In socialist countries the means of production were owned by the omnipotent Communist Party-ruled government (the exploiters) and those who sold their labor for pennies a day, the proletariat (the exploited). A powerful force which enabled the tyrannical government to stay in power, was composed of police, military, and hundreds of thousands of paid snitches, Karens.

Marx was an intellectual bum who was allergic to work, content to be supported by his rich friends, while his large family suffered from his neglect and his lack of willingness to work in order to provide food and a decent existence. As the communist apparatchiks often repeated to each other, “hard work is for the tractors.”

Marx and Engels saw the oppressors and the oppressed in constant struggle and …”in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The duo believed that one day there will be peace instead of war and unity instead of opposition. Never mind that this statement “violated their own theory of dialectics which says nothing in nature can be at rest – everything is a unity of opposing forces.” (W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, 2014, p. 49)

And the root of all this class struggle, they said, is private property which must be abolished at all costs. There is no coincidence that U.N. Agenda 21/2030 states that private property is not sustainable and must be dispensed with to fulfill its 17 sustainable development goals.

Engels wrote that class hatred rose from private property. In the absence of private property there will be no greed, pride, selfishness, imperialism, and war. “Private property also had led to the necessity of creating the State.”

Having lived under the boot of socialism dictated by the Communist Party, I know firsthand that classes do exist, the communist party elites with their followers, and the poor proletariat whose private property had been confiscated by the Communist Party and distributed to the communist elites and their sycophants.

Karl Marx was the founder of “scientific socialism,” whose ideas, in collaboration with his benefactor Friedrich Engels, launched decades of pain, suffering, famine, killings, tortures, and forced labor camps for those whose ideas were divergent from communism. They were punished and sent to reeducation camps in the infamous gulags where many perished. The Marxist philosophy caused more than a century of oppression of people struggling to survive day bay day under the communist utopian boot.

Teen Vogue presented Karl Marx in 2018 in a rosy light, as the “anti-capitalist scholar and economist.” There is no mention at all how Marx’s dangerous ideas, applied in many Soviet satellite countries, have resulted in the death of 100 million innocents at the hands of the Communist Party totalitarian regimes. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-karl-marx?utm_campaign=falcon&utm_medium=social&mbid=social

“Scientific socialism” was an actual course taught yearly to both high school and college students in socialist Soviet satellite countries. The U.S. advisor, who looked at my transcript in 1980, laughed when he saw such a course. He said that they do not give college credit for Marxist indoctrination. Today I would probably get six hours credit and a trophy.

There is nothing scientific about socialism and it does not take care of people as the name implies. (socius, Latin for comrade, ally) Just as there is nothing “shared” under communism except misery, pain, and suffering. (communis, Latin for shared)

There are many overtly declared socialists and communists today in Congress and in state and local governments, yet they live under and profit from the capitalist market economy.

The World Workers Party, a self-defined “revolutionary Marxist Leninist communist party in the United States,” celebrated in May 2018 in New York 200 years since the birth of their guru, Karl Marx. The theme was Marx@200, the Class Struggle in the Age of Trump.

Never before has a sitting U.S. President been so vilified, disrespected, insulted, and maligned continuously by the radical left like President Trump has, a man who gave up a lot to help our country and to create a thriving economy for all until the Corona-19 virus plan-demic hit.

There is an insufferable, bizarre, and constant hateful rhetoric coming from the left and their Democrat Party’s divisive and anti-American platform which glorifies criminals, rioters, and looters.

Communism had been tried in 1620 in the Pilgrim Colony at Plymouth. This communist society of religious men and women was determined, due to their isolation, to succeed – they had to work to survive.

Governor William Bradford wrote that young single men resented having to work to sustain those less able to work, and for other men’s wives and children. Men’s wives did not want to be slaves to those who were not married, i.e., “dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery.”

The production of this communist colony was so low that “the colonists were faced with starvation.” The moral of this actual event was that the taking away of property and bringing it into a commonwealth was a huge mistake. Communism was abandoned in favor of free enterprise capitalism and the colony prospered.

Skousen wrote, “The Pilgrim Fathers had discovered the great human secret that a man will compel himself to go over so much further than he will permit anyone else to compel him to go.” (W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, 2014, p. 137)

Skousen continued, “Governor Bradford concluded that Communism is not only inefficient but that it is unnatural and in violation of the laws of God.”

A man named John Reed, a journalist, freshly returned from Moscow in March 1919 encouraged left wing socialists to form a communist party (a Third International copied after Marx’s First International to promote world revolution) in this country and to use “revolutionary activity to Sovietize America.”

And the violence and bombings (caused by communist activists) that followed are well documented by historical records but are certainly not taught in public schools, only Howard Zinn’s revisionist history.

Through young and brainwashed activists, talking points in support of communism were established. They are easily debunked:

-          Activists want to get rid of capitalism to save the planet

The planet does not need saving, Mother Nature is doing a fine job of coping and renewing itself with help from conservationists. Capitalism creates jobs and opportunities to succeed for all, while communist utopia crates slaves beholden to the omnipotent technocratic government.

-          Activists fight against war

Activists specializing in community organizing, agitation of the weak-minded, and indoctrination of the young compass-less would be better served to look for a real job and to contribute to the improvement of their fellow Americans of all races by volunteering instead of protesting for pay, building instead of burning neighborhoods and businesses that serve such neighborhoods, donating to needy families instead of looting, and cleaning instead of leaving tons of trash and destruction behind when they are done with the protest d’jour.

-          Liberation movements done in the name of fake problems and invented constructs

Everybody is free to work, to behave properly in polite society, when stopped by police, and to follow the rule of law. Apply yourselves, show up for work every day, don’t complain, renounce violence, stop being a protected minority, it is insulting to your intelligence and ability, pay taxes, use your time and money to study a meaningful subject matter that would result in employment, pursue useful skills that society needs instead of useless propaganda fluff majors, and integrate in society in a meaningful way. Social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice may seem like lofty goals, but jobs are scarce and temporary.

At the end of the day, radicalized young Americans are manipulated by the government, academia, and the media to gain control of society and to move it in the direction of socialism.  Cultural Marxism with its political correctness, multiculturalism, and anti-racism will degrade civilization and society for a long time.

The champions of violent Cultural Marxism, ANTIFA and BLM, are taking the country on a downward spiral with the blessing of federal, state, and local politicians who give them space to destroy, burn, and loot our once successful country, the envy of the world.

Eastern European countries are still trying to recover economically and emotionally after decades of Marxist oppressive rule by the violent Communist Party and their apparatchiks. Cultural Marxism will completely hamper their recovery and produce serious setbacks morally, economically, and financially.

Dr. David J. Bobb spoke to the Republican Women of Clifton

“No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.”  

-  Abraham Lincoln, January 1861, Fragment on the Constitution and the Union

 

Dr. David J. Bobb
Photo: Ileana Johnson

The Republican Women of Clifton hosted at their October 15, 2014 meeting Dr. David J. Bobb, President of the Bill of Rights Institute. Founded in 1999 as a 501(c) non-profit, the organization is “focused on providing educational resources on America’s Founding documents and principles for teachers and students of American History and Civics.”

With a vision to shape knowledgeable citizens with values and skills to exercise their God-given rights and responsibilities in order to maintain a free society, the Bill of Rights Institute educates young people about America’s Founders, the liberties guaranteed in our Founding documents, and how these principles are relevant today.

Dr. Bobb worked with Hillsdale College for 12 years and realized how malleable high school students are and how important it is to teach them what it means to be an American.

He compared the status quo of our country with the Office of Personnel Management, a dinosaur staffed by 600 people who bureaucratize all the paperwork necessary for federal employees to retire. The work is done entirely by hand, at great expense to the taxpayers, in windowless offices in a cave in Pennsylvania. People are crabby because they never see the sunlight. One employee finally quit, taking a job in handling explosives.

The American people are in that cave where the situation is so dark and dim, that taking a job as an explosives handler seems like a happier alternative. We are a nation “mired in debt,” and our economy is choked by a myriad of regulations under the control of progressives who are sclerotizing economic activity, in a schizophrenic state of affairs that dominates our political landscape.

Dr. Bobb’s organization is in touch with 35,000 teachers of the 120,000 teachers in the nation who teach “what used to be called Civics,” now called Social Studies, a substitution that treats the Declaration of Independence as an old artifact that has no bearing in your daily life, it is just a dusty museum piece.

The Constitution has become a “living document,” accountability is no longer present. Congress rubber stamps anything the administration throws their way. Congress has created a system of confusion and disorder, a lack of sense of reason, with a “mindboggling complexity made possible by a Constitutional illiteracy.”

The Constitution has become irrelevant, an obstacle to be overcome, an afterthought which prompted a college professor to write that there is no reason why we should abide by and be governed by a Constitution written by a bunch of dead white guys. “It is no taken seriously as a controlling document. You don’t take the structure that has been set up seriously.” That is the way academics treat it, Dr. Bobb said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when asked by Egyptian officials, recommended as a model the South African Constitution, a very complex and lengthy document, 100 pages or more, with a section on “rights” longer than our entire U.S. Constitution. The South African Constitution promises a right to education, health care, and a job, all the progressive utopia which is so appealing to our young people today.

MTV reached out to young people through Rock the Vote, using rockers and rappers to promise students that, if they vote, they can vote their way into prosperity. The reality is that young people, some of whom have yet to graduate, are saddled with $1.2 trillion in college debt, no job security, just a verbal con job. Why not “Teach the Vote” and “Reason the Vote?”

Young people can sense that something is wrong but they are not blaming the administration or the progressivism that created their economic situation. They are not seeing the real culprits because they’ve been told that the deck is stacked against them since 1980 when Howard Zinn wrote his book, The People’s History of the United States, a sort of Bible for Hollywood A-listers who shamelessly quote from it to young audiences with brains full of mush. Young people are shaped to work in activism for the left, in social justice, and schools groom and churn out students for activist causes.

Dr. Bobb does not think counter-curriculum control is the solution and the most effective way to reverse the trend. Students have to learn how to think and how to become careful evaluators of history.

Outlines of history classes are huge, sometimes 94 pages long, leaving no time for George Washington, resulting in neglect of important topics. And who decides what the important topics and standards are? Progressive standards in education neglect human nature, the fact that teaching is an art.

Dr. Bobb explained that the default setting of young people is progressivism. How can we get them to think and question the way in which they are brought up, he asked. Often they don’t even realize that they are progressives. They have no sense of history. What does it mean to be human, to be good, to be great, and to really connect with other people?

The Bill of Rights Institute advocates for a non-political curriculum developed from primary source documents with professional development programs for 21,000 teachers so far from all 50 states.

© Ileana Johnson Paugh 2014