Morons are eating our schools!

Amen and hallelujah. All I ever wanted to be. Well, that and a jazz musician.

I told my kids, my students: “Question everything.” Including, especially, me.

I wouldn’t last a day today.

When I left the profession, in the late 1980s, the Heavy Hand of Government was beginning to beat public schoolteachers about the head. I loved the job, and I got out in time.

I could be fired, and indicted, in some states today, for doing what Socrates did.

A lot of right-wing morons today claim that schoolteachers and college professors are “indoctrinating” students in “woke” ideology. Whatever that is.

The Pumpkinhead in the White House has withheld billions of dollars from universities, research centers, federal science projects and public schools, and why? Not because they are “indoctrinating” students to become liberal, but because they will not indoctrinate students to be neofascist.

Consider:

“Teachers from ‘liberal’ states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment … given for the first time [in August], that ‘keeps away woke indoctrinators,’ according to Oklahoma’s top education official — Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction,” CNN reported. Walters resigned on Sept. 30 to lead “an anti-union teachers’ union,” whatever that might be.

But not before he ordered all Oklahoma high schools to put Turning Point USA chapters in every high school, “saying it would counter ‘radical leftist teachers unions’ and their ‘woke indoctrination.’” He threatened to strip school districts of accreditation if they did not comply.

Among Turning Point’s Christian jihads are a “professor watchlist” and a watchlist of school board members. Can’t let teachers step out of line. Look at what happened to Socrates: He wouldn’t drink the Kool-Aid, so he had to drink the hemlock.

Won’t teachers ever learn?

The scariest, and most accurate, report on the Republican neofascist takeover of our public schools came in a long Oct. 17 article by Lisa Falkenberg in the Houston Chronicle. Teachers in the Houston Independent School District describe prepping their elementary students to hide books under their desks if a vice-principal or “district official” enters the classroom, because teachers in HISD must spend 100% of their time “teaching to the test.”

“When Rose’s teacher gave the word, the children were trained to stop reading and place their books inside their desks,” Falkenberg wrote. “They’d grab pencils and pretend to be engrossed in a packet of test prep.”

Little kids in elementary school had to hide their books or their teacher would be punished.

Nazi Germany, anyone? Uncle Joe Stalin?

The “test prep” materials — rote repetition, boring as hell for little kids — are meant to boost the schools’ reading scores.

“Rose always placed her book with the open side down so as not to lose her page,” Falkenberg wrote for the Chronicle. “She was smitten by the gallant, non-conforming little mouse who takes on the cunning dungeon rats in Kate DiCamillo’s book ‘The Tale of Despereaux’. The 8-year-old never thought she’d be part of a daring plot in her own classroom.

“I just wanted to read the book,” Rose, now 9, told [Falkenberg] in a recent interview.”

Indoctrination? Who is indoctrinating whom?

Republican education policy follows the Taliban, who have banned books written by women from Afghan schools.

“Teaching to the test” is indoctrination. Today, in our country, it’s far-right Republican indoctrination. That’s a giant step toward fascism: “They are eating our kids. They are coming after our kids.”

Teaching to the test: Who draws up the test? And why? For what reason? Is there only one correct answer to the test questions? (Usually.)

Of course public schoolteachers and college professors tend to be to the “left” of today’s Republicans. Why? Because they value knowledge and empathy and young inquiring minds more than cold cash.

Are university professors overpaid? Maybe some of them. But so are politicians.

Are public schoolteachers overpaid? Hell, no.

I noticed, in my nine years teaching in public schools, that most high school teachers get into it because they love their subject. The ones that stay do it because they love the kids.

Today you have to love the state.