Teachers, single mothers, and nurses! Oh my!

There are members of our society who deserve a level of respect and I would never want to deny them the respect that’s due. However, we as a culture fall into a bad habit of thinking that a little must be good so a lot must be better, and no one thinks that “a lot must bet better” more than those with political agendas.

As such, members of our society who deserve respect begin to become untouchable, infallible, and invincible. They cannot be criticized, judged, questioned, or opposed in any way. Doing so makes you a public pariah, and considered hateful, stupid, or uncaring. They may even throw a good “ist” or “phobe” word in there for good measure.

Thus we create a societal sacred cow. A creature that can only be worshiped and revered.

Unsurprisingly, most of these cows are born and raised on leftist ranches where they’re now milked for political expedience, talking points, and cheap outrage votes.

The first that I want to cover is the American teacher.

To be clear, I do have great respect for the people who wake up every morning and have a passion for teaching children how to read and write, solve equations, and teach them our history. I’ve met a lot of teachers in my day and you could tell the ones who really had a pure love for what they did. I learned a lot from them and, what’s more, enjoyed learning from them. I found myself just as enthusiastic about their classes as I did about sitting down and watching my favorite shows.

I’ve also met more than my fair share of teachers who were there because they wanted a paycheck. In fact, I’m sad to say that I probably met more of them than teachers who actually cared about what they were doing. My experience in our public education system left me highly prejudiced against it, and my time in watching it as part of my job has only darkened my view of it.

But we’re not allowed to talk negatively about teachers. “They’re teaching the youth of tomorrow! Theirs is the most important job!”

Is it?

As I write this, teachers are currently out in the streets protesting against having to do their jobs. It would be one thing if it revolved around COVID-19 fears, but they’re protesting about having to even be on camera to do Zoom classes for longer than a certain amount. According to the New York Times, these teachers want full pay and benefits but want to work way less. If they don’t get what they want, they’ll strike according to their threat:

Teachers in many districts are fighting for longer school closures, stronger safety requirements and limits on what they are required to do in virtual classrooms, while flooding social media and state capitols with their concerns and threatening to walk off their jobs if key demands are not met.

On Tuesday, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union raised the stakes dramatically by authorizing its local and state chapters to strike if their districts do not take sufficient precautions — such as requiring masks and updating ventilation systems — before reopening classrooms. Already, teachers’ unions have sued Florida’s governor over that state’s efforts to require schools to offer in-person instruction.

I’m supposed to respect these people?

These teachers know how they’re venerated by our mainstream culture and take advantage of it. Public school teachers get paid 33 percent more than private school teachers in salary and benefits, then turn around and use the power of teachers’ unions to demand more out of the taxpayer while they hold your children’s education hostage until they get what they want.

Yet, Democrats left and right hold up teachers as deities who are so above us while also being victims who are constantly oppressed by our collective boot. They always need more money, more funding, more benefits, more help, more everything.

Meanwhile, what are they teaching our children? Increasingly nothing.

Teachers in some states are either forced to teach things such as condom use and sex-ed to children as young as six while in other states, they’re required to learn about LGBT history. In California, it’s illegal to opt your student out of the social justice education they’re going to force on your kid.

That’s not even covering the teachers with their own personal agendas. One video recently exposed that college-aged kids hardly knew a thing about American history but absolutely knew that America was a racist nation built on slavery. By the end, a woman who teaches children squarely admitted that she doesn’t focus on American history but instead teachers her students that America is a racist country.

In my own experience, I personally witnessed professors take small breaks while teaching in order to get up on their soapbox and begin preaching leftist opinions and deriding those who disagreed with the approved narrative. For them, the front of a classroom is a stage for ideological expression, not an area for teaching facts.

Speaking of ideological expression, how come most of the teachers who preach ideology to their students support leftist narratives and talking points? It’s almost as if their definition of “education” serves political purposes.

The truth is, teachers are just as liable to be corrupt and selfish as anyone else. Teachers’ unions have so bastardized the profession that they’ve created an army of greedy people for whom educating children has become a tertiary concern.

Speaking of money, how come most of the teachers’ unions out there support Democrat politicians and causes? It’s almost like the money-grubbing serves political purposes.

Pile on top of that the fact that they’re loading our children’s minds up with useless, if not damaging material, and you have a group of people in America who aren’t worth the endless amount of dimes they allegedly require to teach your kid…if they teach your kid.

To this day, I hold that I’ve learned more about reading, writing, math, and more from experiences I’ve had outside of my public school education. If you ask me to recite any lesson I learned growing up, the ones that really stuck with me that I found useful I could probably count on one hand.

It’s time we pull back on the idea that teachers are some kind of all-knowing, holy, and infallible entity in our society. We need to start celebrating the real teachers who love their jobs and do it because they have a passion for it.

By their fruits, you shall know them. These are the teachers whose students love to be in their classrooms. The kids under their tutelage leave smarter and carry that very real and useful knowledge with them for the rest of their lives. Whenever their names come up, the students talk glowingly about them and may even share a few stories. They can make a student who hates a subject or has trouble in it understand it and make the student more confident about it.

Notice that these teachers stand out as individuals. They aren’t just lumped in as a group, and that is part of the problem. We think “teachers” are great as a whole. They aren’t.

Teachers can be great and their importance can’t be understated. It sure as hell can be overstated, though. Too many of them are absolute trash and could hardly be considered teachers at all. They would fall more accurately into the category of “activist” and activists aren’t educators, they’re propaganda pushers. Their students usually leave their classrooms with hatred of certain groups and a complete mischaracterization of our society, history, and traditions.

You can find their students wearing black, throwing bricks at windows, and setting cars on fire while they scream about how evil you are.

Celebrate teachers, not propagandizers. Pay teachers, not activists. Reward them by merit, not by a label. Venerate them by their individual passion and talent, not because they fall into a group.