Teachers Show Their Colours
Covid reveals how little they care about our children
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Before the teachers lose themselves in reflexive rage, let me remind you all: I am a teacher. I have been for the last 14 years.
I am not some business guy who wants to extract value for children at the expense of teachers` wages and sanity.
Teachers should be paid more than they currently are.
They should also be more qualified. And there should be fewer of them. Bigger classes with better teachers, who are better paid, are infinitely better than smaller classes with mediocre teachers.
But, I must tell you a secret I have learnt in my years of teaching. A vast number of teachers do not like children. You would not believe how some teachers speak about children. As things. As brats. As resources. As idiots.
Now - the teachers are not entirely to blame here. You don`t find groups of people twisted and bitter without some extraneous factors.
Schools and education systems are demoralisation machines: endless bureaucracy; children who are not as disciplined as in days gone by because of a decaying culture; children addicted to technology which their parents believe is somehow important to their personal growth; endless assignments and `group work` and assessment to gather `data`. These issues are not entirely the fault of teachers, although often the bureaucrats in venting the policies are former teachers.
But - all things considered - how teachers have embraced the war on children that is the new Covid regime of health and sanitation is truly disgusting, and revealing.
Look closely at the picture above.
That is school for so many kids now. Smiling, caring teachers acting as prison wardens. Kids surrounded by plastic screens. Breathing in micro particles of plastic from the wet fabrics that cover where they breathe and communicate. (Those particles are endocrine disruptors by the way which are rendering young people more infertile every passing year.) Teachers often refusing to come to school because of how unsafe it is. I wonder what they would say if grocery store workers did the same.
Often we are told we live in some kind of Handmaid`s Tale patriarchy. That is nonsense. Half of schooling is conditioning kids to obey the Great Mother figure that is the school system, a tyranny of niceness and safety. Examples below. There are many such cases:
So much of schooling has become a massive psy-op in the age of the great matriarchy. Kids as deadly germ vectors is just the latest iteration. Kids are shouted at if they drop their masks. If they hug their friends. If they play contact sport. No. They must stay in the hoop of safety; they must always be safe. Outside of the hoops and plastic screens is the old world of germs and toxic masculinity.
Meanwhile, here are some facts:
The median age of Covid deaths in the USA is 78. The life expectancy is 78.
The median age of Covid deaths in the UK is 82. The life expectancy is 83.
We are ruining childhoods for that.
(Why the vulnerable and scared cannot just shield themselves, rather than `shielding` everybody in their plastic clutches, is beyond me.)
To those who want to keep kids locked down, be honest.
Acknowledge you are not following any kind of scientific logic. Acknowledge your risk analysis, and your cost-benefit analysis, is non-existent or utterly depraved in its selfishness.
CS Lewis said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I have no solution to this. I know there remain pockets of sanity. But for the vast majority of kids, I fear that this machine, this `new normal` tyranny, will keep grinding them down.
At least when years go by, I will be able to look back and know that I spoke out, that I said something. That I tried.
I have nothing else to say right now.