Bob Morris wrote:
>
> Another friend, a married woman, like you describe, tried teaching in L.A.
> schools, as she enjoys teaching and kids. She gave up after a year. The
> bureaucracy was lunatic, no supplies, long commutes, endless paperwork,
> etc... Sad.
Many leftists (let alone the general population) still exhibit a lurking, perhaps not fully conscious, adherence to the 19th century view of the schoolmarm as someone who essentially sacrificed the good of her life for the good of the students. This has been implicit, perhaps even explicit, in many or most of the posts in this thread, in their suggestion that teachers are not only in the lower quarter of their college classes but that they are somehow inferior human beings. If they were proper teachers they wouldn't be deliberately stupid.
We probably are not going to get decent schools in the next quarter of a century -- it seems the fairly conscious policy of the ruling forces to degrade the system. But if leftists want to put up even a decent losing fight for excellence in the schools they are going to have to learn to treat teachers as part of the working class -- and as such more important than their "product" (the student). The same is incidentally true of almost all the other "service" jobs that actually are human services: nurses, medical technicians, nursing home aides, home care workers, social workers, etc. Only a working class movement that treats such workers as fully equal members of the working class will _also_ create the conditions in which those workers will both want to and can be _forced_ by fellow workers to produce decent services. (And the unions will have to stop representing scabs, incidentally -- e.g., prison guards, cops, and other human detritus. When a teacher is a jerk and "acts like" a cop, she does it as an individual. But cops by definition are scabs. There is no way to be a decent cop.)
Carrol