'Public schools don't belong to the teachers'
- Joanne Jacobs
- Oct 16
- 1 min read
If you're hired to teach in a public school, you're supposed to teach your subject and be neutral about your politics, writes Robert Pondiscio. Maybe your ed school professors told you teachers are “change agents,” “child advocates,” or “architects of democracy,” and urged you to challenge "systems of oppression" and teach for "justice." But that's not your job.
Public education is "an essential government service," not a personal platform, Pondiscio writes. "It exists not to change society but to sustain it — to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends."
For a long time now, "teacher preparation programs have evaluated candidates not only on their knowledge and skills but on their dispositions," such as “commitment to diversity,” “cultural competence,” and a “social justice orientation,” he writes. Teachers are encouraged "to treat the classroom as a platform for identity and belief rather than as a civic institution that molds citizens."
That's eroded public trust, he argues. Neutrality and humility are "required to sustain or restore faith in public education."
Pondiscio proposes creating professional codes of conduct for teachers that help define "the difference between teaching about politics and teaching politics, between modeling civic virtue and recruiting followers."
"Public schools don't belong to teachers," he concludes. "They belong to the public."
There is a wide ranging consensus that the teaching profession is of capital importance in the task of generational relay of the values of open societies.. This profession's ideological capture by the ill-wishers of democracies is a fact; about 8 % of college teachers are self -described Marxists and the rest is in great measure socialist or neo-socialist.
In the present conditions of an ongoing conflict of free systems with those of authoritarian (or worse) persuasion I would like to remind the readers here of the the historic debate on Berufsverbot.
West Germany in throes of ideological conflict with its communist East Germany neighbor introduced a legislation in (1970's) banning the members of the radical left from teaching professions…
I'm convinced 90% of the problems in our education system can be traced back to schools of education. The teaching-certificate monopoly needs to be deeply questioned and, likely, broken.
So much this. Educate, don't indoctrinate. Schools should be teaching the skills needed to maintain a civil society, instead they've turned into a brainwashing factory for whatever the social justice cause of the day is.
Joanne: "If you're hired to teach in a public school, you're supposed to
teach your subject and be neutral about your politics, writes Robert Pondiscio."
"Supposed" by whom?
Is Mr. Pondiscio really this naive? Bookkeepers shouldn't embezzle, ugly losers shouldn't murder models on the train, talentless illiterates shouldn't rob convenience stores at gunpoint, Public Health officials shouldn't subsidize the creation of pandemic diseases, and delusional dreamers shouldn't promote fantasies about societies where no one does what s/he shouldn't do. But they do.
Joanne: "Public education is 'an essential government service', not a personal platform, Pondiscio writes.
Wrong. Children, parents, prospective providers of education services, and taxpayers get nothing positive from government operation of schools that they wouldn't get from a…
In countries and areas with diversity, public schooling in a political prize. In homogeneous societies, then the schools are used to promote the legitimacy of the state and group.
And…