There are a lot of good teachers, and a lot of bad teachers. As with any category of human being quality and behavior are widely distributed.

So please don’t read my coming screed as a comprehensive bashing of teachers. Read it as a selective bashing of teachers. Lots and lots of selections to choose from, of course, but keep in mind this caveat: there are good teachers. Really. There are.

Now, on to the bashing: a whole hell of a lot of teachers suck, and the profession as a whole is a dumpster fire. The education degree itself is a total joke, a PhD in education is a marker of shame that ought to be disavowed by all decent teachers and educators, and vast swathes of the profession are engaged in grooming children for political and sexual exploitation by predators seeking to satisfy their sick desires.

Whew! Glad I got that off my chest.

It is in this context that I present you this gem from the National Education Association, which along with the American Federation of Teachers makes up the union duopoly for educators in America.

Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive.

— NEA (@NEAToday) November 13, 2022

This tweet, all one sentence of it, is a dump truck filled with horse shite. I think it’s OK is you use the British slang, right?

First of all, “educators love their students” is happy talk, not a serious statement. But they have to throw that in there to buttress the second assertion that teachers “know better than anyone what they [students] need to learn and thrive.”

It is that second phrase that matters, because in the view of the Left and the NEA it is not just happy talk; they are deadly serious about the assertion that they, not parents and family, who know best and should have the last word in what your children are taught both intellectually and morally. They have made this clear again and again, and are determined to mold your children into compliant social justice warriors with flexible genders, a desire to strut sexually in front of adults, and fight capitalism.

They are even willing to sic the Justice Department on dissenting parents, asking the FBI to investigate parents as terrorists for dissenting. Object to your daughter being raped in a school bathroom? Terrorist!

It is trivially obvious that teachers cannot love their students in any meaningful way. They can love students in the same way that a person loves all dogs, but as any dog owner knows you only really love your dogs. You like being will all cute doggies, but you will spend emotional energy on your own before all others. Even vets who go into the biz because they love animals can maintain objectivity when they see another’s suffering, but break down when their own dog is in pain.

That is how we are built. No human being can love 30 children equally, or invest emotionally in their well being. How many students does a high school teacher see in a day? 90? 100? 150? She loves them all?

As for knowing what children need, even intellectually? Again, crap. The curricula in education schools is heavy on ideology, light on pedagogy, and directed at a 3rd grade level it seems. Many teachers barely know their subjects, and if you ever watch teacher videos on TikTok you understand that many of them have emotional diarrhea. Vast numbers seem to be less stable than your average teenager going through puberty.

Yet they assert the right to go behind parents’ back and groom them like this:

Jennifer talks about how her school socially transitioned her 10-year old daughter behind her back. https://t.co/eFgMFeRxIG pic.twitter.com/Sg8u4Sh3wk

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 10, 2022

Dr Jill Biden is a “doctor” of education. Now the ladies of The View may think she should be Surgeon General, but the rest of us have a pretty good idea that she tops out at “average” on the intelligence and wisdom scale.

Whoopi Goldberg says Jill Biden should become Surgeon General: “She’s an amazing doctor.”

Jill Biden’s doctorate is in education. pic.twitter.com/Y0t2wzZEWO

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 26, 2022

After that performance you can understand why Whoopi is a proponent of public schools. It is inconvenient to have your audience catch on to how stupid you are.

The claims of “expertise” are utterly absurd. Teachers are now acting like counselors, psychiatrists, parents, and cult leaders. Yet they often barely even know their own subject matter. It would be ridiculous, except it is actually dangerous and harming thousands of children. Teachers who in many cases refused to show up for work during COVID simultaneously claim to both love children more than parents and to be moral arbiters of everything.

Having had the privilege of working with a ton of home-schooled kids here in Minnesota, where home schooling got going earlier than most places, I can tell you that they impress in a way that few publicly schooled students do–or even students from elite private schools. They are not only well educated, but also extremely impressive personally. They act like adults, not self-indulgent children.

It’s refreshing.

I am certain there are exceptions, but if you put together two groups of kids distinguished solely by being home schooled or publicly educated, not a single person could fail to distinguish between the groups, and it would be difficult to find an employer who would choose the public school students first to work for them. Even parents of modest intelligence wind up educating their children better, on average, than public schools do. And it isn’t even close.

Homeschooled students perform better on standardized tests, graduate college at higher rates, and are much less likely to be crazy Leftists when they graduate. All good things.

It is often said that Leftists love humanity, but hate people. Most teachers “love” students in the way that Leftists “love” humanity. It is abstract, not love in the sense of desiring wholeheartedly the best for each individual and sacrificing mightily for it. This doesn’t make them bad people; it makes them people. We don’t love wholesale, only retail.

As for being “experts,” let’s just say the evidence from academic achievement in the public schools calls that into doubt. America spends vastly more on education than almost any country in the world, yet our results are mediocre. That is unforgivable.

If I had my druthers there would be no teachers’ unions and teachers would be easy to fire. They should be paid for performance, face consequences for failure and misconduct, get many fewer benefits for longevity in the profession, and fewer penalties for leaving early. Many a good teacher stuck it out beyond burnout due to the penalties involved in leaving before fully vesting in the pension system.

Teaching is not an easy profession, and good teachers deserve all the praise they get and more. Bad teachers, or even so-so teachers, are a bane on society and should be weeded out. I would be thrilled to see great teachers paid like doctors, good teachers paid like most professionals, and bad teachers run out of the profession on a rail.

But the pay structure doesn’t work like that. And here we are. If I were a great teacher I would bail from the profession. It is an embarrassment how badly our schools do.

UPDATE:  Let me add this question to those who think I am being too hard on teachers (and I am not–good teachers deserve all the praise in the world, as I said multiple times). Assume your kid has the best teacher in the world, and that they do indeed love them to death: how long is that person their teacher? Can somebody who spends a few hours a day for the maximum of a year replace a parent? If not, they should not even try.