Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
At the end of the second hour, Carmichael emphasized how teachers’ unions and the thugs who run the unions’ interests are only in populating the so-called government-run school systems and not with good teachers. He argued that children were not being taught critical thinking skills and instead were being indoctrinated with left-wing propaganda.
Leahy: Crom sometimes I think our listening audience would be delighted to hear some of the conversations we have during the breaks. (Laughter) The word of the day Crom is hypocrisy.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: Now you were saying that the Democratic Party takes an oath that sounds a little bit like…
Carmichael: The Hippocratic oath that sounds like hypocritic. (Laughs)
Leahy: A doctor would take the Hippocratic oath. The Democrats take the hypocritic oath. (Laughter) Examples abound.
Carmichael: When you look at this back to school thing, by the way, the teachers’ unions as you were talking about when I was driving in, all of them. Teachers do not agree with the leadership here. I would guess that if you could get an honest poll of teachers. And I’m talking about in the classroom. By the way, you did make one mistake.
Leahy: OK. Only one.
Carmichael: When you said that the unions’ lookout for the teachers. No. They lookout for the non-teaching bureaucrats. That’s who they lookout for.
Leahy: I accept the correction.
Carmichael: Let me explain how this works for our listening audience. The unions get about $600 a year from each union member. So for the unions, they would rather have a whole bunch of employees teachers and non-teachers because they are collecting 600 times whatever that number is than have a small number of bureaucrats and better paid in classroom teachers.
Because if they have better paid in classroom teachers and far fewer bureaucrats who are not in the classroom then their union dues go down. So the unions’ interest and the thugs who run the unions, their interests are in populating the so-called government-run school systems, not with good teachers. And not even with teachers at all.
But with non-teachers, because that’s where their money comes from. Their money comes from the size of the population and not the quality of the workforce. When you said that they look out for teachers I just want to point out that for example, in Davidson County our problems in education are because we have so many people who are not classroom teachers that are on the payroll.
Leahy: Absolutely. I stand corrected. By the way, I want to bring to your attention Crom a terrific article at americanthinker.com.
Carmichael: They are very good.
Leahy: It’s’ by T.R. Clancy. I’ll just read the first couple of paragraphs of it and get your reaction. Headline. The Riots in Portland Started in Public School. Think of the rioting in Portland as our national graduation party. The kids got permission to have an open house and now its all gotten out of hand except when a traditional open house gets out of hand the police still show up.
None of this should come as a shock. The nightly attacks on statutes, on a federal courthouse, and on police are the proofs of Solomons injunctions, train up a child in the way he should go and when he is older he will not depart from it, but the principle applies no matter what you teach.
This is the moment, he writes that America’s teachers’ colleges fed by them have been working towards since the 1960s. That’s when “the education schools began conditioning teachers’ to peddle impossible social and economic theories to captive human sponges in K12 classrooms.”
Carmichael: Yes. And that’s what all these curriculums like 1619 and the other one Bill Gates was pushing.
Leahy: Common Core.
Carmichael: Common Core. And so its all of this which is not teaching children to learn how to think. And to learn how to make good judgments based on the facts. There are three-levels You have knowledge. You have understanding. You have wisdom. You cannot have wisdom without understanding.
You cannot have understanding without knowledge. Knowledge is simply the facts. If you don’t have the correct facts you can’t possibly understand what they mean in the proper context because you are dealing from a fundamentally false premise.
And wisdom doesn’t necessarily follow that if you have the correct facts and if you have understanding it doesn’t follow that you will necessarily have wisdom. But if you don’t have those two you can’t have wisdom. So what the teachers have been doing and also in universities is they’ve not been teaching the facts. They’ve been teaching the opposite of the facts. I’m not going to say that all teachers do this. But all it takes is a few teachers throughout your time with a curriculum that makes an impact on you.
Leahy: That’s quite true.
Carmichael: And in higher education, you have the dominance of really bad bad characters as professors are much higher than classroom teachers in K-12 in terms of just bad people.
Leahy: It’s interesting that you mention that. I look back at my own K-12 career as a student and as it turned out each year I can remember from seventh grade on there was one particular teacher that influenced me for whatever reason. The other teachers are a blur.
But some teachers could be quite compelling in providing you sort of a framework for life. Now fortunately I had teachers back in the 1960s in upstate New York who had not been part of this propaganda machine. But now the poor kids, I feel sorry for the kids. Their defenseless I think against the left-wing propaganda that’s just poured into them from the teacher, from the society, and from their peers. It’s very difficult.
Carmichael: It’s difficult to find a place to get the facts. And that’s the basis of having good judgment.
Leahy: On a positive note. I do want to say again you’ve been to this school here that’s opening up. Thales Academy in Franklin which is a fabulous school that uses directed instruction and classical education that follows the pattern of classical schools which is basically logic and rhetoric.
Vice President Pence went to visit their campus in a suburb of Raleigh on Wednesday. And got a lot of promotion nationally for this fabulous school. And I think there are schools that do the right thing. They are either charter schools or they are private schools. That’s kind of where we are right now.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Fund Our Schools” by Charles Edward Miller. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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