May we all stand in authentic protection of our children and align ourselves against all that threatens them, including the madness and inhumanity of arming teachers. — Molly
On the surface, it would seem mystifying that the right wing --
which is openly hostile to teachers' unions and public schools -- would propose
to arm teachers as a response to the Parkland, Florida, massacre. If teachers' unions and
universities are frequently derided by conservatives as fronts for the Democratic
Party at best and communists at
worst, it would seem that Trump wants to arm the enemy.
Of all the right-wing responses to the alarming epidemic of
school shootings since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their classmates
almost 20 years ago, this would seem to be the most counterintuitive -- and yet
it tells us more about the right's agenda for education than any other single
proposal.
For the right, the liberatory power of education has always been
seen as a threat -- from the "loyalty oaths" introduced for
teachers during the Cold War, to the Republican proposal to end ethnic studies
curricula in Arizona. Arming teachers will do very little to stop
the epidemic of school shootings in the US, but will do a great deal to change
the teacher-student relationship. Rather than a teacher or professor who may
aspire to be a mentor and, in many cases, social worker, consoler and caregiver
of last resort, the teacher will become an armed representative of the
state, with the legal right to take someone's life.
One way to make sense of this strange state of affairs is to
consider the right-wing conception of government. As economist James Galbraith argues, the idea of
free-market conservativism has long been a myth. In most right-wing policy
proposals, from Trump's infrastructure plan to tax cuts, the state does not
shrink, as libertarian Grover Norquist colorfully put it, until it is small
enough to be drowned in a bathtub. In reality, the state is transformed from a
guaranteer of the general welfare to a "predator" -- an active
instrument for the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, if need be,
down the barrel of a gun.
The linguist George Lakoff has described this vision of the
state as "paternal," as
opposed to the liberal "maternal" state: a strong father who can protect
the home, defend against enemies internal and external, and maintain public and
private order. Whether it is Galbraith's "predator state" or Lakoff's
father-state, one thing it isn't is
small, weak or drownable. Rather, it is a state of increased power and
magnitude. What has changed is the nature of the expenditure: Money is taken
from programs designed to help the poor and disadvantaged, such as food stamps,
public education and Medicare, and given instead to spend on border security
and the military.
Public education has long been at the center of this debate
precisely because it represents both the repressive and progressive statist
tradition simultaneously. Public education does often serve the coercive
impulses of the state -- particularly in low-income and in majority-minority
school districts in which "zero-tolerance" policies have created what
some education scholars refer to as the "school-to-prison pipeline."
Please
continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43707-arming-teachers-killing-education-why-trump-s-proposal-has-nothing-to-do-with-safety
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