The late George Carlin had a bit about parents, kids, and schools. Carlin, for my money, was one of the few American standup comedians who could also be called philosophers. He and Will Rogers and Mark Twain.
And, yeah, Mark Twain was a standup comedian, arguably the first in history. He made a living mainly by making public appearances before packed houses around the world and…, well, talking. About life. About people. About current events. About god. About, for pity’s sake, everything and anything. His audiences, as a rule, laughed themselves silly.
Carlin joked about all the ubiquitous suburban moms with messages on their Dodge Caravans in the 1980s and ’90s. He ranted:
These people with bumper stickers that say “We are the proud parents of an honor student at the Franklin school,” or the Midvale Academy, or whatever other innocent sounding name has been assigned to the indoctrination center where their child has been sent to be stripped of his individuality and turned into an obedient, soul-dead, conformist member of the American consumer culture. Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: We are the proud parents of a child whose self esteem is sufficient that he doesn’t need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car. Or, We are the proud parents of a child that has resisted his teachers’ attempts to break his spirit and bend him to the will of his corporate masters.
His audience roared. Like Twain’s. Carlin employed hyperbole. Like Twain did. And, like Twain’s, his exaggerations were firmly grounded on simple, unassailable truths.
Not that teachers are villainous tools of corporate America. They’re not. But schools are. And that’s one of the reasons, in these polarized times, that teachers are viewed as The Problem by the Right and heroes by the Left. That is, if you accept my assertion that the Right is firmly in the clutches of corporate America and has bought its self-serving messaging hook, line, and sinker. Teaching is one of those vocations wherein liberalism, progressivism, or woke-ism is endemic. If you define liberalism as an open, embracing, understanding, respectful, sensitive, non-rigid way of looking at the world — which I do — then teachers, artists, musicians, librarians, psychotherapists, journalists, homeless advocates, settlement house workers, day care providers, and many others are, almost by definition, liberal, progressive, or woke.
Hedge fund managers, surgeons, gun shop owners, military careerists, law enforcement workers, and many others tend not to be.
Of course, there are exceptions to both of the above generalizations but if you pick out a random cop and a random teacher and ask each whom they voted for in 2024, you’ll likely have been able to guess accurately beforehand what their answers’d be. Want evidence? A Princeton study looked at police officers’ voting patterns; the Educational Freedom Institute pored over teachers’ political campaign spending. Seems pretty clear to me.
For soldiers, inquisitiveness and empathy rank low as necessary traits. For reporters and social workers, they are paramount. Yeah, careers, by and large, can be categorized as liberal or conservative.
Teachers don’t want your kids to be brain-dead malleable consumers. But they’re forced to helm classrooms that really are factories turning out obedient, conformist products. Also known as graduates.
Those American graduates, according to one non-American observer, are “easier to manage.” That non-American is a woman named Samantha Waite. She offers a slicing, dicing, crushing perspective of American schools and the anti-intellectualism that is built into them over the last 200 years. She cites the outsized influence of educator Horace Mann, who traveled to Germany in 1843 and was spectacularly bowled over by the Prussian System of school teaching. Nothing illustrates that line of pedagogy (I hate that word, so forgive me) more than the Prussian “innovation” of bolting kids’ desks and chairs to the floor in rigid rows. Mann loved that idea and American school systems similarly ate it up.
The Prussian System and its subsequent American offspring, says Waite, became itself a factory. US industrialists and the American politicians they controlled, she argues, saw the Prussian System as the perfect assembly line for a workforce. She says:
Children sat in rows, faced forward, memorized what the teacher said, and did not question. They received, retained, and repeated. Teacher was the authority and the authority was never to be questioned. This model suited American industrialists perfectly. The country was industrializing rapidly. It needed workers who would show up, follow instructions, operation machinery safely, and did not organize. It did not need workers who asked why. The Prussian System delivered exactly what was required and it became the foundational architecture of the American public education system. Much of it remains intact today.
Aw, hell, why should I make Waite’s argument for her? Listen to her for yourself:
