'Our Children Are Listening' by Cheryl Gibbs Binkley
There is a political strategy underway to demonize the people who teach our children. Daily on social media platforms, on major media outlets, and in public forums, we see and hear people accusing public school teachers of deliberately destructive and dangerous practices.Teachers are called offensive names, accused of the lowest crimes, and portrayed as dangerous and untrustworthy. Our commercial media and social media are permeated with this narrative.
Most who spread these perspectives say they believe one of three things:
They are preserving their own primacy as teacher of their children,
that they are gaining political power against an ideology,
or in some cases that they are actually protecting their children from ideas and people that would harm them.
There are many things children learn across their time in school, from basic numbers to calculus; from letters and words to Shakespeare; of events in history from roughly 6,000 bce forward; and science from washing our hands to avoid disease to the orders of plants and animals to the vastness of the universe.
For thirteen years our children learn about the amazing wonder of our world from their teachers. Most will learn with at least 30 to 40 different teachers in K-12, each of whom will be trying to share new and sometimes difficult learning with them, most of which has little to do with politics.
Learning is an intensely personal and individual interchange. For we humans to learn we must be able and willing to access the knowledge when it is presented. For a teacher to be effective, they must find a way for each student to be able to hear and understand their offered knowledge and wisdom.
Yet, as a society we are telling our children:
Don't trust your teachers.
Don't believe what they tell you.
Don't cooperate with their lessons.
For learning to happen, a student must have some modicum of trust that they can believe and rely on the person delivering the information and skill, that the teacher is presenting something of worth and value for their benefit.
By demonizing the people who teach our children, and by media amplifying those characterizations, we are not just disrupting institutions, or simply changing the venue where our child might attend classes.
We are convincing our children that they should not learn.
We are destroying the very basic prerequisites for learning.
We, as a culture, are striking at the heart of every child’s chance to learn.
We are diminishing the future of our own children.
Children cannot learn when they believe the person teaching them means them harm, and that their loved ones and community would disapprove if they do.