There are many truths about being young and growing up one can only realizes years later. Sometimes you want to kick yourself for not having realized them sooner. The Sandy Hook atrocity and its fallout have confirmed for me one of these truths I had suspected, even as a second grader, although back then it was naturally just a small, underdeveloped intuition unable to be articulated by a seven year old.
But now in the aftermath of Newtown this “small, underdeveloped” intuition has become a firm and blaring certainty: many of our public school teachers are really Nazis in disguise. … Actually, scratch “Nazis,” for that denotes a specific political/racial agenda. Instead, they fall simply more into the category of “control freaks;” people feeling the need and having the opportunity to exert their micron of power over those with even less power: children.
From banning the drawing of pictures of guns, to suspending a child who brings a water pistol to school, to threatening to expel some poor kid who made his hand into the shape of a gun, many public school indoctrina … I’m sorry, “educators,” are showing not only their true political colors, but more so their deep, underling psychological troubles as well. It’s these psychological issues I’m tackling here.
We all remember teachers who were kind, gentle, yet firm and commanded respect. They left our schools each day prideful that they had actually taught us something, like simple division, how to work in groups to solve problems, or how to write a complete sentence. They went home happy they had done their true jobs – teaching.
But then there were “other teachers.” My elementary school’s feared Mrs. Dubois comes to mind, as she was what I see are a frighteningly growing number of teachers, not so much interested in bestowing basic knowledge upon us as she was about tyrannizing over helpless, impressionable kids. There were others like her, but old Mrs. Dubois stands out the most. We weren’t bad kids in 1980s’ Howard County, Maryland, yet Dubois treated us like criminals, with her draconian rules, her face always a frown, never daring to utter a compliment, her eyes dark and disdainful; beady windows into her soul. She was feared and hated, and not just by us, but other teachers as well. She was not interested in teaching. She was intoxicated with power. Power over whom, the already and naturally powerless — children? How pathetic!
Today the Mrs. Dubois of America have renewed, revamped excuses not to teach — that comes secondary, if at all — but to tyrannize over children who are just doing what children do: playing, play fighting, drawing pictures involving guns, playing “war” during recess, poking fun at one another; simply being kids.
Teaching is hailed as a noble profession, and rightfully so. Standing before a classroom of adolescents who don’t want to be there and telling them information they’d rather not hear is an aggravating job. But when you suspend a 6th grader for drawing a picture of a gun or bringing in a water pistol, or wearing a shirt supporting the U.S. Marines with rifles on it, it begs the question: are these people we deliver our children to each week day really there to “teach” or to act out their own subconscious, psychological fears and torments; irrational fears of powerlessness; fears of leaving no legacy, fears of not being remembered, fears of having accomplished nothing with their very lives – nothing?
