Socialist Teachers Unions

The National Education Association meets every year in a big convention in some big city and scads of teachers show up for this big event. This is their one big chance every year to tell us peons what we should support, what we should hate, and how we should live.

An agenda is presented showing all the things the NEA is for and against. In the past few years, they have presented agendas that the late Communist dictator Hugo Chavez would have loved. Many of the issues they choose to address have little or nothing to do with education but everything to do with the leftist worldview they promote.

Many have heard little about the NEA. They know it is some sort of teachers organization and that’s about the sum total of their knowledge. They don’t know how long it’s been around and they don’t have a clue as to what it really does, only that many of their kid’s teachers belong to it. The NEA likes it that way.

In all fairness to public school teachers, there are some that are not in favor of this teachers union. Some are not in favor of any teachers union–but their opposition is generally ridiculed or ignored.

I knew a man in Indiana several years ago that was a public-school teacher but was not in favor of a strike the teacher’s union wanted to engage in, so when they struck, he continued to go to the school and try to teach. His fellow teachers–in characteristic union charity, splashed black paint all over his white car. When that failed to keep him away from the classroom, they slashed his four new tires for him. This is the kind of thuggery you read about in the papers, which papers try to paint the teachers unions as champions of liberty and equality–more education (and money) for the young and the downtrodden–unless you happen to disagree with what they want to do. Then it’s a different story!

Samuel Blumenfeld, in his informative book “NEA–Trojan Horse in American Education” has given us a view of the NEA that is seldom presented anywhere and almost never to the American public at large. Blumenfeld noted that, at one point, the president of the New York Teachers Association told a gathering “I trust the time will come when the government will have its education department just as it now has one for agriculture, for the interior, for the navy, etc.” Blumenfeld continued: “Thus it should come as no surprise that the call for a federal department of education was made at the very first organizational meeting”. The educational socialists had this agenda in their sites for a long time before you heard anything about it. The socialists didn’t get what they wanted right away–the country wasn’t ready to accept that–federal control of education–but they were planning for it. They finally got it from Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s as a payback for union teacher support. Ronald Reagan claimed he wanted to disband it but he never did–more conservative talk while the liberals got all the action.

The Constitution, for all the problems it had, gave the federal government no role whatever to play in education in this country–so they just usurped the power and did it anyway! Come on, now, knowing how the federal government works, is anyone really surprised? One of the big election issues in recent elections in Virginia was who would control what the kids were taught–the state or the parents. The newly elected governor there seems to be in favor of parental control and input but I believe he is getting flak from the teachers, who seem to want the parents kept in the dark. And so, this battle continues. As long as you have a system of public education that is ultimately controlled from Washington it will never end. Don’t kid yourselves–local control of public schools is a myth to fool the naive.