Considering Our Profession as a Death Sentence

In light of recent violence in Florida, Maine, Austin, and elsewhere, educators and staff must be aware of how education has shifted over decades from a respite of intellectual conversations to a politicized (and often silenced) rhetoric of violence -- physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Managers (politicians, including very local elected or “selected” politicians in the guise of educator administrators) respond to violence as policy and police without the systemic critique how society sees educators and students as threats.

Educator P. L. Thomas addresses this is part of his blog critique of the neoliberal educational complex:

For decades now, many of us in education who believe in the possibility of universal public education have feared the death of teaching and learning, but we have imagined that coming from policy, free market and accountability approaches to so-called reform.

But something more sinister is happening: Schools have always labored under the weight of the communities they serve, and teaching and learning is now dying a slow and horrible death because of America’s gun culture combined with those bureaucratic monsters many of us were mostly pointing to.

To read more, see Thomas’s “The Death of Teaching and Learning in America.”