Once upon a time, we told our kids, “Don’t talk to strangers.” For sensible parents that’s become, “Don’t talk to teachers.” That’s a good policy in general, what with all the pink-haired pronoun pests crowing about their classroom smut collections on TikTok. But the union teachers of the Colorado Education Association [CEA] are a special breed.

That august body has passed a resolution declaring “capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.”

Here’s the best part: the CEA ratified this revolutionary rhetoric on April 22: Earth Day, or as it used to be known, Lenin’s birthday. There could be no more fitting day to lay out the catalog of capitalist crimes:

CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.

It also causes dry, itchy skin; dull, filmy hair after showering; dull laundry; and mineral deposits on faucets and fixtures.

No, wait, that’s hard water. But never mind. The exploiters of the proletariat are just lucky the resolution didn’t survive in its original, ideologically pure state, which called for a “new equitable economic system.”

That document explained that:

CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources and, therefore, the only way to fully address systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new, equitable economic system.

Bracing stuff! Workers taking over the means of production, agricultural collectivization, five-year plans, and CEA teachers up to their elbows in Kulak blood. Heck, in some states we’re already halfway to kids informing on their parents’ counterrevolutionary statements.

The corker is that the original resolution was “introduced by Bryan Lindstrom, a college history teacher.” His reason for submitting it: “We are constantly using band-aids and minor reforms to make things better, which is good, but the system itself is the problem, and it needs to be named.”

Or you could try some crazy stuff like, say, asking history teachers to learn history. There are many benefits to that approach. You learn all kinds of fascinating terminology, like “Holodomor,” “show trial,” “struggle session” and of course – near and dear to any lefty teacher’s heart – “re-education camps.”

History is full of surprises, like how post-capitalist Cuba tackled systemic racism and “gender and LGBTQ disparities.” Pol Pot’s decidedly non-capitalist approach to restructuring Cambodian society ensured the soil got plenty of nourishing fertilizer and that the couldn’t produce greenhouse gasses even if it wanted to. There’s so much to learn about the enlightened governance of Romania, East Germany, and, of course, North Korea.

But we shouldn’t pick on Mr. Lindstrom. Big education is riddled top to bottom with mediocrities desperate to do anything except educate kids.

“For us at the NEA, education justice must be about racial justice, it must be about social justice, it must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things,” president Becky Pringle said. “For our students to be able to come to school ready to learn every day — We can never think of education as an isolated system because everything connects to our students’ ability to learn. So, we have to necessarily talk about housing justice, food inequality, and the reality that we all just went through a global pandemic together and of course it was the most marginalized communities that were already suffering from the inequities in every single social system in this country and every country.”

American public school teachers’ unions do more to advocate for private education and homeschooling than the most impassioned school choice advocate.