Teachers: Undervalued and Underappreciated
Bashing teachers and the American education system has been a major political sport and a popular but mediocre theater ever since that awful day in October 1957 when the Russians put their first Sputnik in Space.
Many politicians, most media, corporate America, and every person you meet on the street owns an opinion on how to “fix” education. All our society’s problems, they suggest, from broken families and gun violence to lack of competitiveness and poor performance on standardized tests, stem directly from teachers not doing their job, teaching Johnny to read, write, behave, and believe as gospel what their elders tell them. We hear cries about the loss of “traditional” or “family” values, which we conveniently blame on public education. Woe is the day we bother to look in the mirror to view the real source of the problem.
These critics, most of whom are very conservative, affluent, and seeing themselves and their children as being “special” and deserving more than the rest of us, spare parochial and private schools their abuse. To them, these schools represent the new “ideal” and find resonance among a large segment of suburbia, where we Americans have gone to escape the cities and “urban problems.” Suburbanites are still primarily white, middle class, and possess one or more SUVs to help them navigate the rough terrain in the suburban…
