AN IMPORTANT REMINDER: ‘Public schools don’t belong to the teachers.’
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.”
We have any number of institutions that seemed happy to sacrifice public trust on the altar of leftism.
