The arrogance of some teachers never ceases to amaze me.
A new Pew Research poll found 71% of teachers claiming they don’t have enough influence over what is taught in public schools. And 58% say their state government has too much influence over what they teach, “And more say the federal government, the local school board and parents have too much influence than say they don’t have enough.”
Teachers do not have a corner on wisdom, and they certainly don’t have a corner on truth. Large-scale interference by the government and parents is a fairly recent phenomenon. I wonder what the numbers from teachers would have been 15 years ago regarding state interference in curriculum choices.
The “interference” was made necessary because so many teachers see education as a propaganda exercise. Instead of teaching kids to think for themselves, they tell students what’s important and what they should be thinking. They reinforce this propaganda with exercises that penalize independent thinking.
The Pew Poll surveyed about 1,200 K-12 teachers on their teaching of race and gender issues in the classroom.
When it comes to teaching about gender identity – specifically whether a person’s gender can be different from or is determined by their sex assigned at birth – half of public K-12 teachers say students shouldn’t learn about this in school.
A third of teachers think students should learn that someone can be a boy or a girl even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
A smaller share (14%) say students should learn that whether someone is a boy or a girl is determined by their sex at birth.
Another poll by USC polled 4,000 Americans, about half of whom had one school-age child. Their data showed surprising opposition from Democratic parents to teaching young children about transgender issues.
Democrats were by and large supportive of L.G.B.T.Q.-themed instruction in schools, yet were split when it came to addressing transgender issues for younger students in elementary school.
Fewer than half of the Democrats polled supported teaching about gender identity in elementary school, or using a transgender student’s pronouns at that age without asking the parents. About a third of Democrats supported assigning a book about a nonbinary author’s personal experiences to elementary school students.
Issues about race are a different matter. What many white parents are concerned about is the demonization of whites in the slavery narrative and the tendency of teachers to attempt to shame and assign guilt to contemporary white people for something that happened 150 years ago.
Yes, there are lessons to be taught about the contemporary black/white divide and how this divide is a carryover from the legacy of slavery. But it’s a nuanced subject that too often is used as a hammer against white children to elicit feelings of guilt.
Perhaps teachers should consider new approaches to teaching about race in America: past, present, and future.