Union Teachers Advocate for Marxism in the Classroom

Video from a New York City teachers forum March 20, 2011.

Sarah Knopp, a Los Angeles teachers union leader (in the "Tax the Rich" shirt) and Megan Behrent a New York City teacher affiliated with the International Socialist Organization, explain how to push Marxism in the public school classroom.

TRANSCRIPT:

Sarah Knopp:

If you want to really achieve the goal that most teachers set out to do when they first started out as teachers and really be part of the process of human enlightenment...human emancipation, love of learning-- they have an awakening that happens in people, which is the reason why a lot of us get into teaching. (in-audible)...get to do that. We have to be involved in struggles for economic justice and to change the economic priorities of this system and to change the economic system as a whole, because so many of us teachers spend so much time and frustration, we get to the classrooms to empower our student and within the context in which we're teaching it's nearly impossible to task. To give an example of some of the things we can do to be empowering: I was just talking to (in-audible) from (in-audible) Teachers Association. There was a big student university strike in 2009-2010 in Puerto Rico. He pointed out to me that most of the students involved were students when the teachers went on strike at the high schools in 2008. So in terms of thinking about what we can do to empower students to fight for justice, fighting for our own justice is one of the best things that we can do to set an example.


Megan Behrent:

How do you act as a teacher...in a classroom promote ideas of Marxism or kind of begin to fight for that change? Ya' know, I think part of it is, particularly at the high school level or at an elementary school level, you have to be careful, because your job...they want you to stick to fairly narrow things and that can be fairly frustrating about it, but you can do that wherever you possibly can.

Part of it is just actually allowing for room for critical thought in the classroom and allowing for students to think for themselves to talk about issues wherever it's possible to bring in history and radicals, and people from the past who fight for that kind of thing. And I think there is space to do that. There is limitations that we have to do to try to provide that room in our classrooms. I think that radicals and socialists have a particular role to play in fighting for that type of education and bringing it whenever possible, but I also think that it's extremely important as a teacher for me to think that its not just what I do in the classroom, its about the future of my students as thinkers, as actors, etcetera..., but its actually what I do outside of the classroom that's even more important.

It's organizing the teachers, It's organizing the parents and working together, actually to fight for an entirely different kind of educational system and for our world where my students aren't confined to jobs at McDonalds but can actually, ya'know, learn, and what to learn because it matters to them, so it will be a way for them to decide for themselves what their world looks like and what they want to do. And that's the kind of...We have to be able to do both of those kinds of things. Fight for that kind of world for a complete transformation.

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