By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
Sugar Grove, Ill.
Our children are the future. What we teach them, along with what we don’t teach them, will have benefits and consequences. When I was just a fledgling teacher, a veteran colleague impressed upon me the idea; “We are always teaching something, so we need to be mindful of what we say or do as educators.” I filed this very poignant nugget of wisdom into an easily retrievable place in my memory. This advice serves me well to this day.
True educators protect students from their own bias. Teachers should understand they are in a position of power. Children are a captive audience in the classroom. For these reasons, educators must be careful how they conduct themselves. My teachers and professors, in the 1960s and 1970s, rarely if ever revealed their political positions, even when pressed for an answer. I remember one professor explaining: “It isn’t professional of me to influence my students with my politics.”
Educators in those days believed they should teach us how to think, not what to think. This very important idea may have been lost on today’s teachers. Our children, along with much of our world, have been politicized. Bias is baked in. Education has been filled by those who make a concerted effort to give only a one-sided look at our society and world. One-sided education is not education. It is indoctrination!
School districts and school boards serve the community, not themselves! For this reason, they should approve politically neutral textbooks and supplementary material as part of a curriculum. What is approved, however, can be modified, altered and changed in the presentation of the lessons. It’s called pedagogy, the art, science, of, professional teaching! So, as a safety measure, it would be important for schools to look for political diversity in whom they hire. However, is not what is happening. The balance is no longer there. Those holding conservative views need not apply, is one prominent methodolgy!
Today’s school districts are not equal opportunity employers. Educators are undergoing “sensitivity” training on a regular basis relating to the situations in which their students find themselves.
Parental abuse, sexual identity, bigotry, drug use, gang initiation, and membership encompass just some of the social ills teachers become educated on in these so-called sensitivity training session, not so much how to teach math. Unfortunately, these concerns compete to take over large amounts of a teacher’s preparation and even instructional time. Some educators have become activists recruiting students into political activities. Others become personally involved with students to include concerns about their sexual identities, very dangerous and unprofessional thing to do.
Some administrators, counselors, and educators foolishly have attempted to become the answer to all the social ills of our society. It is far beyond the scope of what schools can do or should do. The mission statements of our schools need to deal with academics, first and foremost.
To the contrary, in Maryland, there has been a development and implementation for the training of educators termed psychoeducational lessons. These lessons deal with the A dual pandemic of COVID-19/systemic racism in Maryland school districts.
This training includes: “Restorative Justice Training on Restorative Circles, Mindfulness, and Other Restorative Practices. It includes Counselors as Equity Literate Leaders & Implementing Cultural Responsive PBS ( Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports).”
Math and science are on the back burner.
In a communication to staff members, an associate superintendent in the school district advised school principals that parents who request Zoom login information, for access to school and potential Zoom events should not be given connection information. Furthermore, parents were told not to log in and observe class when the child was not with them. If teachers saw a parent logging in separately from their student, they were to notify their principal.
What are these schools in Maryland hiding from the parents of the students they are supposed to be serving? Why have school boards in these school districts allowed the teaching of curriculum administrators feel should be kept hidden from parents?
These are just a few of the concerns parents around the country have had, and why they have been enraged about the teaching of CRT (critical race theory) and other curriculum damaging to young impressionable minds. The job of schools is to serve the students and parents of a community. It is not to re engineer our society by working through the young impressionable minds of our children.