Teacher

 

Few professions carry more respect than that of someone charged with the privilege of preparing children for adult life, and successful people can almost always look back on one or more teachers who made a big contribution to that success. And teachers organized in Unions have made good use of that respect to obtain higher salaries in the government school monopoly, than they might enjoy if schools formed a free-market, competitive industry.

However, nothing on this web site implies that you don't give your employer good value for money - and even if you don't, that's not the reason it suggests you need to leave your government job. The problem rather is that, as shown on the Mafia comparison page, he pays you with stolen money, and accomplishes purposes that are destructive.

Thanks in part to your work, children are compelled to end their interest in one subject and to muster interest in another, at fixed intervals of time. Any natural curiosity he has about one is to be turned off when the bell is rung. You know better than that; you know it forms a wholly unsuitable learning environment - as does the grouping of children of varying ability and forcing them all to "learn" at the same pace.

This is not education. Education is about "leading out" an existing line of interest; about satisfying curiosity, answering questions - some of which are, yes, to be stimulated de novo by a good teacher. But operating a big school, with big classes, makes that impossible. Curiosity does not arrive packaged in 50-minute slices.

That is not accidental. The whole purpose of government schools is not to educate, but to drill - to discipline, to instill respect for authority. Don't take my word for it, take that of an outstanding teacher, John Taylor Gatto. Notice the seven lessons which he says he was paid to teach - including confusion, indifference and dependency.

Or consider the view of Daniel Greenburg, principal of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA. In his seminal 1988 paper "A New Look at Schools" (page 63) he quotes Jonathan Kozol: "US education is by no means an inept, disordered malconstruction. It is an ice-cold and superb machine. It does the job; not mine, not yours perhaps, but that for which it was originally conceived... The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens... In the double talk of Schools of Education, we employ... elegant expressions like 'the socializing function.' The function is...: twelve years of mandatory self-dehumanization and self debilitation, blood loss."

If you teach in a government school, this is what you are helping produce. What does that do for your self-esteem?

What it produces for society is seven generations of obedient, dependent Americans - who started with a strong ethic of work and self-sufficiency and a people educated at home to a remarkable degree, which all formed the bedrock, in its first century, of the greatest prosperity the world has ever seen. That is what you are helping destroy, when you teach in a government school.

Is there an alternative, if 40 million youngsters are to be educated? - oh, yes! Here's a foretaste of what education will be like, in the coming free society.

Self-esteem is a vital part of life. We all need a purpose, a raison d'être, a way to feel pride in what we have been able to accomplish, a basis for ambition to achieve more in future.

Working for government undermines your basis for self-esteem. Make a clean break; offer your skills elsewhere. Get an honest job - even if at first you have to take a pay cut. You'll not regret it; at life's end you will look back in pride and pleasure, and be able to say, "I helped build that!"

Qs and As Home Page