I'm A Teacher. Here's The Shocking Truth About The ‘Woke' Indoctrination Of Students That Terrifies Conservatives.

Yahoo

01-04-2025

I'm a bit of a masochist. I can't help but read the comments whenever the local news posts anything political on social media — especially when it's related to public education.
I've spent most of my life building a career as a public educator who emphatically embraces and promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, and I live in Florida, where public education is very much on the chopping block and our pouty, petulant goblin of a governor has made the classroom the front line of his culture war.
In recent years, whenever I read the comment section of these stories, there are scores of MAGA folks screeching in chorus about evil liberal teachers indoctrinating kids with vegan transgender socialism.
'Their [sic] teaching are [sic] kids CRT [critical race theory]!' insists one commenter. 'They want white kids to feel guilty about their race!' cries another. On and on they go — affirming, commiserating and spreading their noxious grievances.
And almost none of what they claim is true.
Although I'm in public higher education now, I was a public high school teacher for over a decade. I worked at three radically different schools in three radically different counties. Most of my social circle is made up of teachers. If indoctrination were occurring at scale, I'd know about it.
It's just not happening.
Almost every teacher I've ever met (and that number is in the high hundreds at this point) is exceedingly careful not to discuss politics or religion while at school — even with other adults, even in the relative privacy of the break room, even one-on-one in their own classrooms during lunch or planning. It's a simple matter of self-preservation — if a single student were to hear you say, 'God, I hate Gov. Ron DeSantis,' they'd tell their friends, those friends would pass it on, and by the end of the day, you'd be in the principal's office explaining that no, you do not, in fact, have a 'Fuck DeSantis' tattoo on your chest.
There are exceptions, of course. In the 13 years I spent teaching high school, a handful of teachers have been openly political. I was helping a fresh-out-of-college teacher set up his classroom in 2014 when he asked me, 'Can you believe they let these Muslim kids wear their habibs [sic] in class?' This was within 15 minutes of meeting him for the first time.
'I guess the dress code doesn't apply to them. I don't know why we bend the rules for them,' he continued. He had no idea if I was Muslim. He also didn't know if I was an immigrant — even though I'm visibly Hispanic — before he then went on a rant about 'the ESOL kids,' aka students in an English for Speakers of Other Languages program, who were 'probably illegal.'
Another teacher I worked with at least had the patience to ratchet his way up to vocal bigotry. He started off slow, talking about the kids with 'crazy hair colors,' and later, 'the alphabet kids,' his way of labeling students who identified as LGBTQ+. Within a few weeks, he had started complaining about 'how sick and stupid' pronouns are. 'They can call themselves whatever they want,' he said, 'just don't expect me to play pretend too.'
Those two cases are essentially the extent of educators expressing their personal beliefs at work that I ever encountered. Most teachers simply don't want to risk termination by talking about potentially contentious topics at work. To this day, aside from teachers who I've befriended and spoken with outside of work, I don't know the political or religious affiliation of nearly any of my former colleagues. Teachers are that averse to potentially career-ending conflict.
Of course, that's my experience with teachers interacting with other teachers. But what about inside the classroom? I couldn't possibly know what happens in every other class while I'm busy teaching my own, right?
Wrong.
Students talk a lot about what their teachers do and say — and they particularly love to focus on the bad stuff. Is some of it rumor, hearsay or even deliberate lies? Sure. But when you hear the same things about the same teachers week after week, year after year, from different students — including trustworthy ones — you learn to separate fact from fiction.
Students told me about exactly two instances of deliberate classroom indoctrination. The biggest repeat offender was an unassuming social studies teacher. Socially, she was reserved but kind, unerringly courteous and wholly nonconfrontational. Yet in her classroom, she focused intensely on the War of Northern Aggression and the idea that it was based on 'states' rights,' but specifically not slavery. Another offender — one I mentioned earlier — routinely ridiculed the idea of pronouns and gender identity in class, refusing to acknowledge students' gender identities. He eventually lost his position because of this behavior.
Despite how all of this might sound, I am honestly not claiming that scores of conservative teachers are indoctrinating our students in the classroom. Over the course of my 13 years of personal observation and dozens of discussions (outside of work) with teacher friends, those are the only two instances that I have personally encountered. The fact that these two teachers held right-wing views appears purely coincidental to me. The bigger takeaway is that like in-person voter fraud, political indoctrination in public schools is incredibly rare.
And there's a good reason why it's so vanishingly infrequent ... and it honestly might shock you. It's because almost every teacher out there is spending every ounce of their energy and patience trying to get their students to read just one paragraph without looking at their phones. They're too busy trying to get students to complete just one math problem without saying, 'This is too hard.' To write just one essay without using ChatGPT. To turn in just one assignment on time. And that's when they're not revising their lesson plans to align with the state's new Best-Ever Evidence-Based Data-Driven Standards That Are Guaranteed To Promote Mastery and Cultivate a Growth Mindset This Time. (Note: These will be deemed outdated and obsolete within two to four years, and replaced with Even-Better Standards, which will be functionally indistinguishable.) These revisions, of course, have to be scheduled around their student data chats, individualized education program meetings, professional learning communities, parent-teacher conferences, morning duty, hall duty and afternoon duty, all of which occur outside of mandatory faculty meetings (that always could have been emails).
Of course, rational people know that there isn't rampant classroom indoctrination, but 'liberal teacher indoctrinating your children' has been a favorite bogeyman of the right for at least as long as I've been alive — part of a decades-long fight against public education that so many people have been sounding alarm bells over — and now I worry it's too goddamn late.
Too many voters believed that schools are chopping off kids' genitals during recess. Too many voters believed that schools have litter boxes for kids who identify as cats. Too many voters believed that teachers promote feelings over facts.
The most gullible among us voted for Donald Trump (he's a good businessman, after all!), and now the Department of Education is dead, graduate schools can no longer afford to bring in the next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, lawyers and journalists, middle-class people are seeing their student loan monthly payments double, triple, or quadruple, and state and local public education funds are being gleefully snatched from public schools and funneled into for-profit corporate charter 'schools.'
The generation of children and young adults whose education was already heavily disrupted by the pandemic is now left with far fewer, far worse post-secondary options than any generation before them in the modern age. And that's aside from rising unemployment, rising inflation and a housing market that is outrageously unaffordable.
But hey, at least eggs are cheap now.
Oh, wait...
Marco Vanserra is the pseudonym of a professional educator and public school advocate. He specializes in making mathematics relevant and accessible to underserved communities in Florida.
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