It's May Day. Kids should be in school, not "on strike"

National Day of Idiocy comes to a school near you...

In case I needed another reason to despise the largest teachers’ unions (and I didn’t: between their opposition to charter schools, keeping our kids out of in person learning for way too long during the pandemic and causing irreparable damage, and their wacko pro-Hamas terrorist stances/harassment of Jewish students, teachers and parents, I was all set - thanks!), the National Education Association is all over today’s May Day day of protest, which is to include a national school/work/shopping “strike.”

I’ve written elsewhere about how kids already spend way too much time out of school. Between summers, celebrating every religious or cultural holiday that is observed by almost anyone (except the places that don’t celebrate Jewish holidays) and snow or other weather emergency days, kids experience far too many interruptions in instruction. Maybe you have to be a parent or a teacher to see what this does to kids. Every day missed means at least one day getting back in the swing of things, and for those in poor and dangerous neighborhoods, it’s one more day in the streets and not in the classroom, or one more day absorbing social media and playing violent computer games.

The last thing teachers should be doing is encouraging children to skip school. For any reason. But certainly not because of a made up “strike” that is supposed to target billionaires who are behind every evil that the NEA can think of, judging from their website. (I’m not going to drive traffic to it by linking, but if you want you can google it as easily as I did.) They don’t explicitly tell kids to skip school - not that I could find - but there are tons of articles and how-to guides about planning May 1 actions. It would be hard to miss that this is planned as a national school/work/shopping strike.

A strike, for those not familiar with the labor movement, is supposed to be a tool workers use to gain better wages, benefits and working conditions from their actual employer, not a collective temper tantrum. People fought for the eight hour day, and for many other wonderful things that are commemorated on May Day, or should be. People also fought for an end to child labor, and putting kids in mandatory school was part of that fight. Replacing work hours with school hours - can’t be in the factory using those little fingers to create piecework if you’re in school learning to read and write! A wonderful idea, it was.

Now the progressives are encouraging kids to “strike” from school. How will this help anyone? It will certainly hurt the actual children, who have enough problems learning to read and write as it is. It’s like if the nurses’ union told patients to take the day off from taking their prescription medication!

I also feel bad for the teachers who need the union’s help with issues actually concerning wages, benefits and working conditions, and who may feel pressured to go along with nonsense of this sort or else risk being bullied by union activists. When I was a member of the union as a full time teacher, before my conversion to being openly anything but liberal, the union helped me with the issues it is supposed to. I am grateful for the help in navigating a necessary medical leave. That is what unions are for.

Fortunately I now work in a charter that does not have the union. I doubt that many kids, if any at all, will observe this “strike” or even know about it. I plan to go to work, do my best to educate children, encourage them to stay in school and maybe even read a book (!) and then just to top off my day of activism against the planned “strike,” I might buy something. Something small, to be sure, but I could use another pair of cat socks.

More at another time on why someone who was a union organizer for twenty years vehemently opposes the two largest teachers’ unions. For now, I have to get to work. There are children who need to be educated… and who need stickers!