How Schools Are Like Sweatshops

The rhetoric surrounding “children first” is powerful and needed stuff, I’d argue, but not to the point of disregarding the needs of classroom teachers whose needs are often not being met by schools, either. Sherman Dorn makes this point eloquently in a recent post: “Elementary and secondary schools are environments that are about the least adult-friendly you can imagine, outside sweatshops,” writes Dorn (The adults v. children meme). “Where else can adults be vulnerable to being hit by children, be told when they can go to the bathroom, and be told that their own intellectual development does not serve the organization’s interests?” I guess that leaves only administrators to gang up on. Yeah, it’s all the administrators’ fault. Faceless bureaucrats, etc. Get ‘em!