Teacher Unions Promote a Culture War OffensiveThe attack on traditional American values is being intensified on a grand scale by America’s teacher unions.
By Larry Sand
June 4, 2023
Back in the mid and late 1960s, college students rebelled against authority and American traditions. Social mores, government policies, corporate America, schools, and the media were targeted mostly by urban youth eager for radical change. But now, almost 60 years later, we have done a 180. The government, big business, schools, the media, etc., aka “the establishment,” are now the radicals demanding change.
Even the military has not been spared the ravages of the woke insurgence. The armed forces now proudly support “diversity and inclusion.” The military, whose traditional raison d’être has been defending the country by killing people and blowing up things, now concerns itself with such matters as “reviewing hairstyle and grooming policies for racial bias.”
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But when it comes to education, a large majority of current culture war activity comes to us via the teachers unions, which were not an influence in the 1960s, but now are front and center in the woke revolution.
Perhaps there is no more egregious example than American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whose statements and actions could fill a tome on culture war activity. With no sense of irony, on May 21, she wrote, “Culture Wars Harm Education.” Yup, the woman who was once rightfully deemed “an arsonist pretending to be a firefighter” is pointing fingers at everyone else.
Just a few Randi-isms: She once said about COVID that “Millions of Floridians are going to die for Ron DeSantis’ ignorance and he’s choosing to profit from it. She has asserted that unions “actually make communities safer and . . . the right-wing is threatened by that.” She also retweeted Virginia’s former Secretary of Education’s post calling parents advocating for their children “racists.”
The National Education Association is also a prominent culture warrior. The union is touting June 10 as “Teach Truth Day,” when educators should “pledge to teach truthfully about U.S. history, defend LGBTQ+ rights, and speak out against anti-history education bills, banned books, and more.”
The irony here is that the NEA is partnering with the Zinn Education Project, whose approach to history is based on Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States. Published in 1980, the book became extremely popular and still dominates our nation’s classrooms. Zinn maintained that teaching of history “should serve society in some way” and that “objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” When called on the carpet for writing a history book that played very fast and loose with the facts, the author freely admitted it, saying that his hope in writing the book was to create a revolution.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/04/teacher-unions-promote-a-culture-war-offensive/
