I always wonder about why teacher's unions are specifically woke. What is it about teaching that makes it more woke than, for example, pharmacists, HVAC repairmen or bank tellers? Originally, I thought is was a public sector problem, but I don't see a lot of fire fighters or EMTs being woke. Could it be that the bulk or at least high percentage of them are female?
I always wonder about why teacher's unions are specifically woke. What is it about teaching that makes it more woke than, for example, pharmacists, HVAC repairmen or bank tellers? Originally, I thought is was a public sector problem, but I don't see a lot of fire fighters or EMTs being woke. Could it be that the bulk or at least high percentage of them are female?
They are woke, because colleges became woke and teachers spend an enormous amount of time in college.
So why are colleges woke, I actually have a really good reason for this. WOKE problems are generally problems that can never be fully solved you can always be working at them. The benefit of that is it also seems incredibly difficult to tell if anyone is even remotely productive. If your job is to get the most lawns mowed and mowed well for a specific budget, that can pretty easily be measured and it can be determined if your department is doing a good job. If your job is to end homelessness or racism, good luck measuring that by any standard anyone agrees about. Spend 40 billion on homelessness and there is more homelessness that when you started, well that must be evidence we needed to spend 120 billion.
What utter unsubstantiated rubbish. Tech is male dominated (hence tech bros) and just as woke, if not more. And I canтАЩt think of a more stupidly profligate industry, ever willing to burn millions or billions of dollars on plainly idiotic ventures like WeWork, Juicero, and most recently, the Humane AI pin. UberтАЩs cumulative losses are $68 billion, with a B, and theyтАЩll never dig out of that hole in spite of their recent profitability. Zuckerberg wasted billions on VR, Bezos on Alexa. I could go on.
I believe this is the most plausible explanation. Having worked in education or adjacent for a decade, (though not in the traditional K-12 public schools), it's interesting to see new ideas, even bad ones, accepted at light speed and promulgated ad infinitum. In male dominated or even moderated domains I've been a part of, individualism provides a bulwark against conformity.
Women are attracted to fields where clear metrics of success are hard to come by. Partly because they like working with "people" and people are less legible than metrics and subject to more social taboos.
My suspicion is that the people who go into ed-school tend to be rather short on intellectual wattage to begin with, and then spend four years being indoctrinated by woke people with postgraduate education degrees. They lack innate resistance to bad ideas, and over their college careers they're repeatedly assured that the premises of wokeness are true, and that part of their special mission as teachers is to fight evil in the forms of racism, sexism, cisgenderism, thisism and thatism...
It'd be interesting to see how strong wokery is among various subgoups of teachers. My suspicion is that it'd be the strongest in fields like elementary ed, and weakest among STEM teachers. But that's only a hypothesisтАФI don't know where I'd go about finding evidence to support or disprove it.
ItтАЩs the educational establishment writ large; step into a college campus 20 years ago and youтАЩd see roughly the same trends as now, if a little less successful. I think the major difference is that in the 20 years interim the most zealous of those students have gained influence in the media (news, entertainment). ESPN and Disney were not explicitly Leftist organizations, now they admit to pushing it. My generation generally did not agree with the broader Lefts narratives, but speaking overall, we certainly did not resist them (typical is when I would argue with a teacher; MANY students would later tell me they agreed but did not want to be seen as challenging the prof). A lot of it goes back to teachers/ the education establishment. I only truly escaped because I loved to read and education *myself*. I never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, in class (the internet was also a huge aid - see attempts to attack YouTube in the New York Times, they had an article claiming you start with Milton, then Ben Shapiro, then turn into a full fledged Nick Fuentes White Supremest).
Without a doubt, the most significant counter to the Leftist Teacher Regime would be a fully private system. Preferably without ANY government aid, but a voucher system is certainly better than what we have now. Unfortunately, even if vouchers became widespread, the next fight would be over who qualifies for the vouchers. I know how this bureaucratic milieu thinks, theyтАЩd just pass all type of laws, regulations, and sic their inspectors on anyone who dissents to block schools they dislike from receiving funds. So I think ultimately vouchers are just a temporary dodge. We need a 100% private schooling system.
The core woke/leftist belief is that nurture trumps nature. Almost all other points of woke orthodoxy can be seen as downstream of this belief. If you believe this it makes sense that the best way to improve humans is to teach them better.
The fact that teachers are leftist is as unsurprising as the fact that people working in the field of eugenics(embryo selection, compiling polygenic scoring functions for various traits) believe in human biodiversity.
This seems to me to be the most likely reason. They might think, we are doing great work but not getting the results that we are working for, so it must be some outside force like systemic racism that is impeding us.
I don't think the nurture-trumps-nature belief is quite as foundational as you suggest. Most notably, wokery insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate rather than learned, and not subject to revision.
Commies used to be quite reliably anti-gay, much more so than the Capitalist Occident, because they DIDN'T believe sexual orientation was innate, nor that gender identity exists at all. Though for some reason this didn't seem to be a barrier for gays to be either outright Commies or Commie supporters. (Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk.)
I always wonder about why teacher's unions are specifically woke. What is it about teaching that makes it more woke than, for example, pharmacists, HVAC repairmen or bank tellers? Originally, I thought is was a public sector problem, but I don't see a lot of fire fighters or EMTs being woke. Could it be that the bulk or at least high percentage of them are female?
They are woke, because colleges became woke and teachers spend an enormous amount of time in college.
So why are colleges woke, I actually have a really good reason for this. WOKE problems are generally problems that can never be fully solved you can always be working at them. The benefit of that is it also seems incredibly difficult to tell if anyone is even remotely productive. If your job is to get the most lawns mowed and mowed well for a specific budget, that can pretty easily be measured and it can be determined if your department is doing a good job. If your job is to end homelessness or racism, good luck measuring that by any standard anyone agrees about. Spend 40 billion on homelessness and there is more homelessness that when you started, well that must be evidence we needed to spend 120 billion.
What utter unsubstantiated rubbish. Tech is male dominated (hence tech bros) and just as woke, if not more. And I canтАЩt think of a more stupidly profligate industry, ever willing to burn millions or billions of dollars on plainly idiotic ventures like WeWork, Juicero, and most recently, the Humane AI pin. UberтАЩs cumulative losses are $68 billion, with a B, and theyтАЩll never dig out of that hole in spite of their recent profitability. Zuckerberg wasted billions on VR, Bezos on Alexa. I could go on.
I believe this is the most plausible explanation. Having worked in education or adjacent for a decade, (though not in the traditional K-12 public schools), it's interesting to see new ideas, even bad ones, accepted at light speed and promulgated ad infinitum. In male dominated or even moderated domains I've been a part of, individualism provides a bulwark against conformity.
Women are attracted to fields where clear metrics of success are hard to come by. Partly because they like working with "people" and people are less legible than metrics and subject to more social taboos.
My suspicion is that the people who go into ed-school tend to be rather short on intellectual wattage to begin with, and then spend four years being indoctrinated by woke people with postgraduate education degrees. They lack innate resistance to bad ideas, and over their college careers they're repeatedly assured that the premises of wokeness are true, and that part of their special mission as teachers is to fight evil in the forms of racism, sexism, cisgenderism, thisism and thatism...
It'd be interesting to see how strong wokery is among various subgoups of teachers. My suspicion is that it'd be the strongest in fields like elementary ed, and weakest among STEM teachers. But that's only a hypothesisтАФI don't know where I'd go about finding evidence to support or disprove it.
ItтАЩs the educational establishment writ large; step into a college campus 20 years ago and youтАЩd see roughly the same trends as now, if a little less successful. I think the major difference is that in the 20 years interim the most zealous of those students have gained influence in the media (news, entertainment). ESPN and Disney were not explicitly Leftist organizations, now they admit to pushing it. My generation generally did not agree with the broader Lefts narratives, but speaking overall, we certainly did not resist them (typical is when I would argue with a teacher; MANY students would later tell me they agreed but did not want to be seen as challenging the prof). A lot of it goes back to teachers/ the education establishment. I only truly escaped because I loved to read and education *myself*. I never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, in class (the internet was also a huge aid - see attempts to attack YouTube in the New York Times, they had an article claiming you start with Milton, then Ben Shapiro, then turn into a full fledged Nick Fuentes White Supremest).
Without a doubt, the most significant counter to the Leftist Teacher Regime would be a fully private system. Preferably without ANY government aid, but a voucher system is certainly better than what we have now. Unfortunately, even if vouchers became widespread, the next fight would be over who qualifies for the vouchers. I know how this bureaucratic milieu thinks, theyтАЩd just pass all type of laws, regulations, and sic their inspectors on anyone who dissents to block schools they dislike from receiving funds. So I think ultimately vouchers are just a temporary dodge. We need a 100% private schooling system.
Government funding for private Nazi schools too? Lol!
The core woke/leftist belief is that nurture trumps nature. Almost all other points of woke orthodoxy can be seen as downstream of this belief. If you believe this it makes sense that the best way to improve humans is to teach them better.
The fact that teachers are leftist is as unsurprising as the fact that people working in the field of eugenics(embryo selection, compiling polygenic scoring functions for various traits) believe in human biodiversity.
This seems to me to be the most likely reason. They might think, we are doing great work but not getting the results that we are working for, so it must be some outside force like systemic racism that is impeding us.
I don't think the nurture-trumps-nature belief is quite as foundational as you suggest. Most notably, wokery insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate rather than learned, and not subject to revision.
Commies used to be quite reliably anti-gay, much more so than the Capitalist Occident, because they DIDN'T believe sexual orientation was innate, nor that gender identity exists at all. Though for some reason this didn't seem to be a barrier for gays to be either outright Commies or Commie supporters. (Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk.)