Classroom Cameras Won’t Stop Big Education

American Thinker:
By Petra North

As a veteran high school teacher, I find the current pushback against CRT both encouraging and alarming — encouraging because it reflects a growing concern and willingness to fight back by parents, alarming because it reflects a naïveté about Big Education.  The idea that, as Tucker Carlson suggested, putting cameras in classrooms will put a stop to — or even minimize — the indoctrination in those classrooms is, on multiple levels, both impractical (how many hours would we have to expend monitoring these cameras?) and dangerous, because we no longer can afford to underestimate our enemy.  And it is, ladies and gentlemen, our enemy.

During my forty-plus years of teaching — both inside the classroom and outside as a tutor — public education has morphed into Big Education, and it is as protective of itself as are Big Tech and Big Media.  Big Education is no longer largely populated by people who believe in teaching critical thinking and knowledge, people who encourage innovation and creativity by modeling those qualities in their own classrooms.  Rather, it is populated with generations of teachers and “educators” who worship at the altar of the latest “approved” pedagogy, methodology, and ideology, and who work hard to keep everyone in line.

Big Education, again like Big Tech and Big Media, is particularly adept at repelling foreign invaders and is willing to repel them with great ferocity.  These invaders are defined as Anyone from the Outside (those people who have not taken the right courses and don’t have the right certificates) and Any Outside Ideas (any ideas that did not originate from within Big Education).  For example, in Texas, public school teachers are paid according to the number of years they have taught in public school classrooms.  The state does not “count” — it actually ignores — any other type of experience.  Thus, my own classroom experience as a public school substitute teacher and in private school classrooms, not to mention my tutoring (for all of my forty-three years and with thousands of students), does not get “counted” when I fill out an application for a public-school teaching position.  My experience is listed as just ten years. more