Today she pulled me aside and said that she disagreed with what I had to say. I asked why and she said that she believed what defectors had wrote in their biographies (she didn't name any specific books). I didn't actually get to counter that (or respond to anything really) beyond the documentary (Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang) I linked in my email which she didn't watch apparently. She was respectful I guess. Should I respond with a critique of Escape from Camp 14 and In Order to Live or should I just brush it off?
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Hard disagree. Teachers are professionals in that they sometimes require a great deal of education before they are allowed to work in a classroom. The only exception here is when the state has more or less abandoned students to the prison industrial complex. Teachers without college degrees and various licenses cannot get near rich white classrooms, except as substitutes.
As managers, teachers are 100% there to manage students, even if students themselves are not paid a wage. Students are a class in capitalist society, and the teachers' purpose is to keep them under control (by making them compete with one another, for instance, although there are a million other ways to deaden their class consciousness) and to separate the wheat from the chaff. Students who do well in school (who prove that they are okay with capitalism and are willing to jump through the hoops of the ruling class) are rewarded with more prestige and a better chance of having decent PMC or PB jobs; students who do poorly are excluded from decent employment or even turned over to the police.
I say all of this as a former teacher who has known and liked many teachers in my life. Where I live, many of them are unionized Bernie libs, which is about the best I think we can expect of them for the time being. (So far as I can tell, they have all stopped wearing masks, and their lib union recently failed to get a pay raise that came close to even equalling inflation.) There's definitely a contradiction with teachers as well, because the bourgeoisie has mostly come to the conclusion that they are a waste of money—meaning that teachers are often at odds with local PB landlords and business tyrant shitheads, although teachers are also threatened by the big bourgeoisie who are trying to privatize every aspect of education. Thus the fact that teachers are definitely underpaid. At the same time, any teacher who tries to radicalize students (by even entertaining the possibility that what we hear about North Korea might not always be true for instance), or assist in forming a student union, will be fired and blacklisted.