Letters to the Editor: America Doesn’t Respect Teachers

“How can public schools at once be hotbeds of radicalism, yet produce students who are so poorly informed about radical causes?” 

This was the central question of Robert Pondiscio’s piece, published June 12: “How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps.”

His answer is that every day, material that hasn’t been officially approved is put in front of children. Here, the founder and president of the Academy for Teachers, Sam Swope, offers an alternative theory, and argues that Robert’s solution—greater oversight—would only make things worse:

Robert Pondiscio argues that because there’s so little oversight of what teachers teach, teachers do whatever they want, and what they want is always bad. 

There’s more than a grain of truth to that, but his call for stricter oversight and less autonomy for teachers isn’t going to solve the problem. It will make things worse.

Our core problem is that society holds the teaching profession in such low esteem, which has led to a massive teacher shortage, meaning principals are scraping the bottom of the barrel, desperate for any warm body to stand in front of a classroom. Not surprisingly, most new hires don’t last. For kids, this is a disaster: school is a parade of one inexperienced teacher after another. 

Schools are looking for smart, creative, empathic teachers, who can be trusted—indeed, expected—to bring their personal passion and intelligence to the work. Of course the schools provide oversight, but they want to be able to respect their teachers as professionals. (Sure, there will be teachers who are bad actors, but you deal with them.)

And yet, given an increasingly weak teaching force, I understand the urge for stringent, distrustful oversight. I can also understand, even as I cringe at the thought, the urge to mandate curricula. At least then some learning might happen!

But a stringent, distrustful, mandated approach is intolerable for the best teachers, and it will make a teaching career repellent to smart, young, idealistic people eager for a profession where they can shine.

There are two urgent problems in education to solve: how to retain our best teachers, and how to encourage inspired young people to join the profession. 

—Sam Swope

Last month, we gave over an episode of Honestly to one of the most contentious debates of the moment: Is Israel’s War Just? Free Pressers Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan argued yes; arguing otherwise were former Bernie Sanders press secretary Briahna Joy Gray and Jake Klein, editor of The Black Sheep. (The debate originally took place at Dissident Dialogues, in partnership with UnHerd.)

Recently, Rabbi Hayim Leiter was listening to this episode in his car while driving to work. There’s something he wants Gray and Klein to know.

I’m based in Efrat, in the West Bank, but I recently traveled to Tel Aviv for a meeting. As is my practice on long drives, I was listening to an Honestly episode, a recording of a live debate entitled, “Is Israel’s War Just?” Right up my alley.

The panelists were all over each other, passionately debating the issue, when Briahna Joy Gray said Israel should not be a Jewish state. She said all of the Arabs should have the right of return and Israel should become a democracy devoid of religious identity. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Then, suddenly: “CRITICAL—Rocket and missile fire.” A Home Front Command notification appeared on my phone. This meant I had less than a minute to get out of my car and lie down with my hands over my head. Now, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Rockets in Tel Aviv? The middle of the country had been quiet for months. 

BOOM, BOOM, BOOM: the explosions were instantaneous and directly overhead. I hadn’t even had time to pull over. I suppose sometimes the Home Front Command warnings are delayed. Thank God the Iron Dome response wasn’t. No one was killed, but later I heard there was a woman injured by shrapnel not far from where I was.

As the dust settled, my focus returned to the podcast. “The right of return is what will ultimately lead to peace,” Gray reiterated. I wanted to yank her out of the radio and sit her next to me. “Do you see that?” I’d ask her, pointing at the smoke trails in the sky. “That’s a rocket.” 

It’s so easy to argue about this war from the safety of America, where the problem is almost always Israel: if only we’d done more of this or less of that. But very few people spend time thinking about what’s happening here, right now. They have no idea what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Qassam rocket.

I managed to pull myself together and head to my meeting and then to officiate a wedding an hour north of Tel Aviv, in Zichron Yaakov. As we prepared to sign the Ketubah, my phone continued to ring with additional rocket warnings across the country. It’s unnerving knowing that the Huppah could be interrupted at any moment by air-raid sirens. But somehow you press on, praying you won’t have to face that reality.

—Rabbi Hayim Leiter

On Saturday, we ran a piece by Larissa Phillips about what city kids learn at her “farm camp” in upstate New York—important lessons like “Cuts, scrapes, and stings aren’t really a big deal.”

Beneath it, we asked you: How did you spend your childhood vacations? What are the lessons school simply can’t teach you?

Here’s what you said:

My family moved from our prairie home in Saskatchewan to the east coast when I was 5. But every summer we popped on a flight from Saint John, via Toronto or Winnipeg, to Saskatoon. From there it was another five-hour drive north, to where the pavement turned to dirt. In our hometown, we literally lived at the end of the road. 

My grandparents had a cabin, a solitary lease lot in a provincial park, with no neighbors save for the reservation across the lake and a campground five kilometers up the shore. My summers were spent at that cabin with nothing but a canoe, and the odd cousin or friend if I was lucky. There were no cell phones, just loons, leeches, and occasional lightning strikes.

Here, I learned about the forces of nature. I canoed to the middle of the lake, the size of a small sea, during a thunderstorm, and had to make it back against three-foot whitecaps. I discovered that you should not cross the path of a protective mommy beaver, unless you want the bow of your canoe attacked. Most importantly, I learned self-reliance and the value of boredom—to take in the gift of hours alone.

The nights of powwow drumming across the lake while we sat with the campfire will never leave me. Nor the chipmunk that stole my sunflower seeds.

—Jarod Farn-Guillette, Brewer, Maine

I spent seven amazing summers as a camper in Northern Ontario. My family wasn’t rich. My father, an immigrant tailor, only got two weeks of vacation. But my parents knew it was important for me to experience a place different from my home; they sacrificed to send me to summer camp. It was almost six decades ago, but I still remember my mother begging the director for financial assistance.

I learned everything there: how to build a fire, how to swim, how to get along in a cabin with 14 other boys and no bathroom. Peeing off the cabin porch in the middle of the night without waking the counselors was another acquired skill. I not only grew; I grew up. That brief time away from my parents was enough to change me, and they commented on that change every year when I returned home. When I was too old to be a camper, I became a waiter at the camp, my first paying job.

I met my wife at that camp when I was a teenager, and 56 years later we are still together and still talk about our experiences. Looking back, I am amazed at how random choices have such a huge impact on one’s life. Who and where would I be without those summers? When I visit my parents’ graves, I thank them for the opportunities they gave me. I like to think that I raised my sons with the same degree of independence, and that they, in their own time, will pass it on to my grandchildren.

—Sheldon Meingarten, Toronto, Canada

Do you have a unique perspective on a Free Press story? Can you bring your personal experience or expertise to bear on an issue we cover? We want to hear from you. Send us a letter to the editor: letters@thefp.com.

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