Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as a solution. /1 https://t.co/92vSeqPFek

Already 20 years ago and even earlier, teachers could have told you our current disasters were coming. They were struggling to get kids to want to learn a single thing, and managing increasingly outrageous student behaviour was becoming their main job. But it was even worse. /2

Because the things that drive many out of the profession, including me, is the sense that the entire institution is futile. Society stopped investing anything meaningful in education and schooling, and a fish rots from the head. People are just marking time in schools. /3

You’re child-minders. That’s it, the full job. Keeping kids out of parents’ hair so they can be good employees and work. And keeping kids out of the unemployment queues. Society as a whole really doesn’t give a shit now about anything else, with schooling. /4

Or to be fair, it cares about what it cares about everywhere else, in high school society. Status. In Australia for example ‘aspirational’ libertarian politics drove huge numbers of parents to enrol their kids in expensive private schools or selective public schools. /5

Not for the quality of the education there, but because of the status of being there. The best teachers are still in the State schools, just as the best doctors are still in the public teaching hospitals. But that doesn’t sway anything when status is at stake. /6

There’s a lag with education, through to wider social effects in the adult world. We’ve now arrived at the terrible disaster this shift produced. If you want to know why there are so many pig-ignorant, sociopathic bastards here on social media for example? /7

Meet the kids teachers were dealing with in schools 10-20 years ago. They’ve now arrived in the adult world, knowing nothing, and with contempt for everybody who does. Teachers have been living this social collapse for a long time. Nobody bothers to ask them about it. /8

The role of teaching is, and this is no exaggeration I don’t think, to create civilisation. They take unformed precious toddlers from parents, and shape them into some sort of socially-acceptable people, knowing things and able to function in a society. /9

Early primary teachers in particular. Without them, civilisation would be over in very quick time. That’s the actual truth, I don’t care what other jobs people think are important. The thin blue line between civilisation and chaos is mostly in infants classrooms. /10

And they’re overwhelmed, have been for years. All years of schooling are. By kids who don’t want to be there, parents who have no respect for schools or teachers and are too busy working even if they do care. Or are barely adults themselves, children raising children. /11

Teachers bring the first sense of social authority to peoples’ lives. The first to teach people to follow the lead of an adult that isn’t their parents. That authority is mostly gone, because it was cultural and social, connected with wider society. /12

Decades of ‘economy/market’ politics shredded all of that. Teachers have no authority now, they’re supposed to be seen and not heard. Child-minding services for business. In the pandemic nobody once, that I’ve seen, asked teachers about what should be happening in schools. /13

Instead we got paediatricians and infectious disease doctors, who wouldn’t know a school’s arse from its elbow, pontificating ferociously about what schools need to do That’s a mark of the total lack of respect we have for teaching. But that’s now decades-old. /14

Many I know left 20 years ago because that lack of respect was already dominant. And without it, that critical socialising function of teaching, of steering kids towards a knowledge-based respect, a social relationship with knowledge, collapsed. /15

That’s all your anti-vaxers and lunatic conspiracy theory people today. Those are the kids we all saw in schools 20 years ago, and tried to warn people about. In a society whose social and cultural model is derived from schools, if the schools break, guess what breaks next? /16

The societies themselves. Our social chaos now is school chaos, and teachers knew it was coming, have done for decades. Knowledge is all that progresses human societies, and it does that through education. It’s a long, social process to wean people off social status games. /17

That total lack of respect for expertise now is the lack of respect for teaching, scaled up to all of society. No teacher can really believe all the libertarian freedom nonsense, they recognise it straight away as what kids say in schools. It’s their job to defeat it. /18

To say sit down, shut up, and learn this. Using a fantastic array of pedagogies and social skills. Why can’t we see that a society that has no respect for knowledge now is a society that has lost its education? That’s what education does, knits together people and knowledge. /19

Not as two things, but as one thing. It teaches a society to organise itself around knowledge, and not just social status. But it hasn’t done that in decades, alas. And we’re now living in the ruins. /end