Southern Progressives

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Article by Linda Caldwell:

Nothing used to define a community’s sense of place like its school house. That changed after consolidation shuttered many small schools. Something else changed too. It’s now fashionable for some politicians to demonize public schools and the teachers who work there. They claim teachers are teaching children to hate America. The truth is, those politicians are teaching Americans to hate public school teachers.

It’s no wonder some of our elected officials drank the anti-public-school Kool-Aid. Charter schools, and others who aim to dip their fingers into public tax dollars, have been relentless with their sales pitch.

If you ever worked in sales (which I have), you know the first rule of sales is to convince the prospect that they have a need. Then, the salesperson will offer to fill that need with a product or service they represent. The charter school industry has mastered that strategy to perfection

Charter school proponents claim that Tennessee families are clamoring to have charter schools replace public schools. News Channel 5 at Nashville investigated the money trail and discovered that Tennessee families are not paying for the multi-million-dollar charter school lobbying campaign. The money is, in fact, coming from billionaires and millionaires from outside Tennessee.

Channel 5 counted at least 61 registered school privatization lobbyists, compared to just 17 lobbying for public schools. The privatization crowd spent about $8.7 million to lobby officials over the past five years, and that doesn’t count expenditures they classify as “education.”

When Tennessee public schools closed during the COVID pandemic, people missed the social services that public schools routinely provide. For a brief moment in time, schools were actually appreciated.

Governor Lee said, “Time lost in the classroom also has implications beyond academics.”

He added, “It will take all of us to ensure the safety and well-being of our children while they aren’t in the classroom.”

Of course, that newfound appreciation disappeared faster than leftover chocolate icing in a mixing bowl. After coming off of two of the toughest years in their careers, Tennessee teachers were viciously demeaned by Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College.

During Arnn’s radical rant, he spewed, “Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

He went on to say, “Education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”

Remember what I said about selling the need?

Then Arnn moved into his sales pitch — which was for Hillsdale College (his employer) to provide instruction for 50 charter schools in Tennessee.

He said, “We are going to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”

Despite Arnn’s obvious bias against Tennessee public school teachers, his promise to bring a classical education to Tennessee caught the eye of several Tennessee legislators. They seem unaware that they can add classical subjects to Tennessee public schools whenever they choose. Cameron Sexton, Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, recently said, “While students are continually being introduced to woke ideologies, it can be easy for schools to forget the importance of teaching the classics — which our Founding Fathers were educated with.”

So, what does Speaker Sexton think the Founding Fathers studied? Well, history tells us that formal education for our Founding Fathers began around age eight for those who could afford it. Students were required to learn Latin and Greek grammar, and to read the Roman historians, Tacitus and Livy, the Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, and to translate the Latin poetry of Vergil and Horace.

A formal education at that time stressed grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. I would personally love to see Latin offered in every Tennessee high school, so perhaps Speaker Sexton will produce the funds to make that happen, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t understand why Tennessee taxpayers should foot the bill for classical studies at private schools and deny them to Tennessee public schools?

The demonization of public schools and teachers is not restricted to Tennessee. Virginia public schools are ranked fourth in the nation, yet Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is demonizing Virginia public school teachers. He went so far as to install a tip line so citizens could report any teacher who said anything in the classroom that they might find objectionable.

Virginians began to make prank calls to the tip line. It became such a source of mockery that the Washington Post did an article about the tongue-in-cheek complaints. My favorite was the caller who sarcastically warned that Virginia schools were teaching “Arabic numerals.” And my chest swelled with pride when I read that one call came from Narrows, Va. — my hometown.

The Post predicted that the governor’s embarrassing tip line would quietly go away within a year. Sure enough, it went dark in September.

I do not believe for one minute that Tennessee teachers are teaching our children to hate America. I do, however, believe it is dangerous to turn Tennessee schools over to people who teach Americans to hate school teachers.

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