Like if a principal or parent knew I was a card carrying communist would I be fucked?

  • AverageStudent [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    If your union local is half decent, no, but that is not necessarily the case. As a rule of thumb, public schools are far more likely to be unionised than charter or private schools. Urban districts tend to have stronger union locals than rural ones, but this is not always the case. There are exceptions going both ways.

    If you are in a district without a half decent union local, you will still probably be fine to teach communism, as long as you don't explicitly say you are a communist. For example, I know a history teacher who is forced to teach an incredibly reactionary and anti-communist textbook. He counteracts this indoctrination not only through supplemental readings, and quietly just not teaching entire chapters of the textbook (which doesn't raise any eyebrows, as no history teacher ever has time to teaches the entire textbook). He also does an activity where he responds to the anti-communist propaganda in the textbook "as a communist would" and thus debunks it. However he never calls himself a communist, flies an american flag, and The hogs have never seriously complained about him (same district had a whole thing of chuds braying about "CRT in the English department", which went nowhere but was still a worrying sign). Teaching accurate information about racism or civil rights is going to be more dangerous, with the current hysteria about "CRT" but again if you frame it in a way chuds will not recognize, you will be ok.

    And above all else, yes being a communist teacher in the USA can have serious career risks, but christ knows its important. I believe A very large percentage of us are here today in part because some teacher helped break the chain of indoctrination.