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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

Once upon a time, when my wife was in her 20's she worked at an organic grocery store. The pay was shit, management were assholes, and the benefits sucked. While this is broadly true for grocery, it was especially true there. Anybody with any sense went to go work for Whole Foods or Trader Joes instead. The people who stayed were true believers in organic food. They'd do all kinds of weird shit, like refuse to help customers find products (like honey) because they were vegan and they didn't think it was ethical.

Increasingly I'm finding the same to be the case with teachers. They are overworked, underpaid, and increasingly the only ones sticking around are the ones with some sort of radical agenda that it's worth sticking around to push. Vaccine mandates, like most ostensibly public institutions, flushed out a huge proportion of the dissenters. Though they occasionally still shitcan a few especially stubborn teachers who've manage to hang on this long over their conscientious objection to trans policies.