Americans aren’t stupid.  Some are a lot more clever, or educated, or skillful, or depraved than others, however.  Some, who have seen their greatest personal opportunity within a legalized government employee union environment, now tightly – and politically – protected by law, eventually gain both economic freedom and inordinate influence.  Most Americans, perhaps 98% of us, never gain similar advantage and, until the Covid “plan-demic,” never grasped what we have allowed to happen.  Our subservient position is becoming clearer.

There are multiple tyrannies at issue.

Not only taxpayers but every parent and other providers of product to “public” school systems, has awakened to the tyrannies of public employee unionization, made sharply clear by the machinations of teachers’ unions.  We who PAY for public schools, by law and state police powers, have learned that we have no control whatsoever, personally or through our elected “representatives” or through the “experts” we have hired to “manage” “our” governments.  It’s humbling.  The people “we” have hired and pay lavishly to “educate” our children, are exposed as our education “rulers.”  They, not we, will determine both curricula and process.  No longer shall our children be reinforced in the best of life’s lessons as we impart at home; they will learn what odd theories of social reformation and anti-American psychology that they, our education rulers, agree with.  No longer will the routines of school and vacation be followed if we, your education rulers, don’t like them.  No longer will your children be permitted into the same rooms that we inhabit if we, on our own, decide that there may be the slightest threat to our health or safety… and you will pay us according to our negotiated contract, including scheduled raises, while we ponder our next demands.

Well, that’s a fine “how do you do?”

Suddenly, teachers have become more powerful than our elected “representatives,” so-called, and the government created by we the people, is powerless to correct this destructive imbalance.  To whom can an economically assaulted citizen/parent turn for redress of grievance?  Well, no one.

Let us imagine, then, an actually representative government.  Can you imagine what such a rare construct might do on our behalf?  Can you imagine what it might do with regards to “public” education?

First, (and one can only dream of any government in the United States today, having the testicular fortitude) such a government representing the values and interests of its citizens, would arbitrarily de-certify its local teachers union on the basis of an undeclared and illegal strike.  That is, since the jurisdiction had not failed to uphold the terms, financial and otherwise, of the existing contract with teachers, it had within its inherent rights the power to suspend a collective contract and offer individual contracts to teachers who were prepared to go to work at the next earliest opportunity.  That jurisdiction would also have an obligation to fulfill state laws requiring a set number of days of school attendance by every school-age child in residence.  At the same time, the jurisdiction would assume the obligation to protect any individual and family thereof from retribution in any form under the guise of a negotiated “contract” that was abrogated by union-enforced action.

In the event that not enough formerly contracted teachers agree to go back to work to fill basic minimum teaching slots, the jurisdiction could temporarily open up teaching slots to anyone with sufficient background in or love of subject matters to enable a temporary fulfillment of educational minimums as part of an emergency declaration.  Meanwhile students would return to classroom instruction, do homework, pass tests and matriculate as able.  Between school “years,” certified teachers could be hired individually to round out the teaching staff as appropriate.  A lot would be expected of a highly compensated Superintendent and his or her staff to make sure that proper education was accomplished, but, but… just imagine.

Superintendents and other supervisors who are incapable of managing the system without kow-towing to a teachers union, could be replaced.

Then, we might imagine that every student would be taught to read, comprehend, write logical, well-constructed sentences and coherent essays in legible longhand, and to calculate and reason algebraically.  Simultaneously those same potential adults would learn American and World History, civics and citizenship and the truth, good and bad, about our exceptional Constitutional limits on central government.

Unfortunately, that last paragraph is a dream too far.