‘It’s too Dangerous to Become a Teacher,’ says author, former teacher, and education-freedom advocate Rebecca Friedrichs.
By Eileen Griffin
Concerns are mounting across the country about potential teacher shortages. One of the largest counties in the nation, Los Angeles County, started the 2022 school year with 155 vacant teaching positions, The Epoch Times reports.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is addressing teacher shortages in his state by proposing to recruit professionals from other occupations to fill the gap, reports The Epoch Times.
Heartland Daily News spoke with Rebecca Friedrichs, an education-freedom advocate, former teacher, and founder of For Kids and Country, about new teacher recruitment efforts and the role of the teacher in our current culture.
Heartland Daily News: You’ve said teachers are leaving the profession and they’re being bullied into submission or quitting. What about the new teachers coming up? Are they aware of what is going on, and are many just avoiding the profession?
Friedrichs: I think there’s a few answers to this question. Number one, there are a lot of people who are aware that the teaching profession is now dangerous. It’s dangerous to become a teacher. It’s like the police. Why would you become a police officer, knowing that nobody is going to have your back and that the criminals have all the rights?
A lot of people are avoiding the profession altogether. Who really wants to be a teacher? I resigned. I’d still be in the classroom if it wasn’t so corrupt. My husband retired earlier than he planned.
We know hundreds of teachers personally who have retired early. They didn’t want to, but it’s so dangerous now and it’s so corrupt. If you don’t go along with lying to parents, then you’re under investigation or something. It’s just not safe to be a teacher anymore, and some people realize it’s not safe, so they’re avoiding the profession.
Heartland Daily News: When you say not safe, can you clarify and expand on that a little? Is it that the kids are out of control because of the lack of discipline? Is it the way the unions come after you? All of the above?
Friedrichs: It’s all of the above. When you really understand that they are an education mafia, our educational system is being run by the mafia, a cartel, right there you know it’s not safe. Who are you reporting to? It’s this mafia that’s in charge.
Now, what’s interesting about this mafia is they have control at the national level, at the state level, and a lot of times at the county level, but there’s a lot of people who don’t agree with what they’re doing, like school board members or principals.
Most people are too afraid to stand up to it, or they don’t understand where these problems are coming from, which is why I seek to rebrand them as an education mafia: because people think they’re a teachers union and they’re not. They get away with a lot because they use teachers as pawns. They use our names as a front for their very wicked agenda.
Heartland Daily News: It’s hard to imagine or even to think about schools this way.
Friedrichs: It’s complex to think about the system being run by this education mafia. They’re controlling every detail—curricula, policy—and they get a lot of their chosen people on school boards and in the legislature, so they’re controlling at every level, and they’re bullies.
People like me who push back, we just get bullied more or fired or put on administrative leave, so it’s just dangerous on every level.
It’s also dangerous because of the anti-discipline policies. The discipline is out of control.
Sadly, basically this is how this mafia works: they convince the federal government, in this case [President Barack] Obama, to [propose] these anti-discipline policies, and then they put all this money behind it so if a school district accepts these new discipline policies, they get huge chunks of money.
These school districts, shame on them, shame on superintendents who are doing this, taking chunks of money and then following these disastrous policies that are creating war zones in our schools, making children and teachers and parents unsafe, and undermining the learning environment, and they’re doing it all for money. It all goes back to this education mafia.
Heartland Daily News: Has it always been this way?
Friedrichs: Our founders never wanted any form of government in our schools. They didn’t want the federal government running our schools or the state government running our schools. They wanted the local people to run their schools. They didn’t want tax dollars funding the schools.
It’s a huge explanation [to have to make], because most people think we’ve always had taxpayer-funded public schools. No, we didn’t. It was the education mafia that pushed for that, against the will of the American people, and they got their way and now we have these massive, industrial, school complexes where kids are being indoctrinated instead of educated.
Teachers are being bullied and they’re not able to use their craft in a professional way with excellence. Instead, they’re being stifled and bullied and chased out of the classroom.
It’s unsafe in in every manner. Even the school shootings can be traced back to these anti-discipline policies. It’s dangerous. Your life could be in danger because of policies pushed by the education mafia.
Heartland Daily News: If young people are aware of all of this, you’re probably deterring anyone who would be fearful of entering a very challenging and dangerous environment, so who is joining the profession? Who will take the place of all these teachers?
Friedrichs: This is what’s scary. This education mafia has intentionally, for many, many years, worked to select the people they want running our schools, and these people have to be of a certain political persuasion. They have to be far leftists. They have to be LGBTQ-minded and pushing that agenda. They have to be part of the whole Critical Race Theory [movement].
What the mafia does is they bully and chase out honest, professional teachers who were doing a great job educating kids, and then they replaced them with activists.
I was in sixth grade when I knew I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to be a teacher for all the right reasons. These people, maybe they never even thought about being a teacher, but the mafia comes, the education mafia says, “Hey, you know, you should be a teacher,” and they train these people and they put them in the classroom. This is why you’re seeing these “teachers” teaching kids to be transgender or teaching kids to salute the LGBT flag.
This [behavior] is totally unprofessional. These people should be fired on the spot. They never should have been in the classroom in the first place, but they were hand-selected by the education mafia.
Heartland Daily News: Is this why we see so much activism and so little education?
Friedrichs: I have a friend who came out of the private sector. She was a very successful scientist in the private sector. She decided to become a teacher. She just really wanted to give back. When she was in college—and I won’t name the college because I don’t want anybody to figure out who she is—but when she was in college, she was the only person in the teacher program who was paying her own way. She was the only who had conservative Judeo-Christian values. The rest of them, 100 percent of the rest of them, were on some sort of a government-funded program, and they were all radical-left LGBTQ.
That was a requirement, so this is what they are.
We have testimony from people who work for the union who told our teachers, “You can’t use my name, and I’m not going to go out in the world and be a whistleblower, but I can tell you [that] myself and others have been stepped over for promotions because they only promote LGBTQ.” This is the agenda they are pushing.
It’s not about being kind to everybody; it’s about pushing their agenda and forcing everybody to accept it, and people might not realize it but an LGBT agenda is a communist agenda. It is an atheist agenda. It’s an agenda that’s been used before in other communist countries to undermine freedom.
People have to stop buying into this lie that if you don’t want the kids to be steeped in gender ideology, transgenderism, and stuff, then you’re a bigot. That’s a lie. That’s just propaganda to get you to shut up.
These are people who are trying to undermine our American Free Republic. They’re trying to undermine our Judeo-Christian virtue, which is what made our country great. They are trying to undermine everything we know and love, and they’re doing it by calling us bigots, and we need to stop letting them control the narrative and stop letting them bully us.
Heartland Daily New: That’s how they are getting all these activists in classrooms teaching young children. It’s just shocking.
Friedrichs: Yes, and it’s important for us to note that these activists are not teachers. They’re activists. They are education mafia activists. It’s what communists do: hateful persuasion. What they do is they divide and conquer. What they’re doing right now is trying to make Americans hate teachers, and it’s working.
Heartland Daily News: And teaching Americans to hate each other.
Friedrichs: That’s right. We’re trying to make Americans hate police officers, and it’s working. We are trying to make Americans hate doctors and nurses, and it’s working. It’s really this mafia behind it all, pushing this horrible agenda and getting their activists in place and then calling their activists teachers.
It’s really important that we awaken to this and stop falling for it.
In the third segment of our interview, Rebecca Friedrichs shares her plan for how to combat the “education mafia” and what tools her organization can provide to help.
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