CONSENSUS. A Common Dreams essay asks, "When Did Teachers Become Bums?"

When did it become okay to vilify an entire occupation — three million college educated professionals working as hard as anyone to make the world a better place?

It wasn’t that long ago that teachers occupied a quasi-secular-sainthood. It was the underpaid, overworked teachers who guided, inspired, succored, and cajoled every one of us to find in ourselves that bigger person we all long to be.

But lately it’s become acceptable, even sport, to blame teachers for all of the ills of American education.

Let Facts be Submitted to a candid World:

In the past thirty years:

• Most mothers have joined the workforce. No more Mrs. Cleaver at the door with warm cookies and milk and help with Beaver’s homework.
• We’ve surrendered our children’s socialization to television, video games, the Internet, and on-line social media.
• America jails more of its population than any country on earth — a sign of an almost psychotically violent society. One in thirty children has a parent in jail!
• We’ve absorbed the largest wave of immigrants in our history, many speaking no English and with little educational background.
• Many of the best teachers, especially women, have found opportunities in other fields that were not open to them before.
• Forty-five million Americans live in poverty; one of five American children are raised in poverty; one out of every eight Americans are on food stamps. The middle class is dying.

It’s pretty hard to teach a kid who has been raised by the television, when he hasn’t eaten breakfast, when the family has been kicked out of their home, when he has to work a job to help feed the siblings, when the parents have just gotten divorced or lost both of their jobs, when no-one at home speaks English, or when their most alluring role models are dope dealers, pimps, or gangsta rappers. Imagine, then, trying to teach a room full of such trauma cases.

Regular readers will recognize the effect of the Say Aggregation Principle when economic opportunities expand for women, manifesting itself in fewer June Cleavers and ambitious women once confined by social norms to nursing or the secretarial pool or teaching becoming the doctors and controllers and heavy equipment operators. Surely we're not seeing nostalgia from the left side for the social norms of the 1950s? Throw in no-fault divorce and a misplaced interpretation of discipline as a social construction and a form of oppression and don't be surprised when the schools break down.

In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus considers a different aspect of the rising incidence of poverty, one in which the same social breakdown has a different cause.

Do we really want a society in which the stigma of going on the dole has been erased? In this sense [Newt Gingrich is] speaking, not to the 25 million who were on food stamps at the beginning of the recession but the 15 million who've now gone on the rolls and maybe feel guilty about it--and their relatives and neighbors and friends. Us. And not, I think, a black "us" or a Latino "us" or any kind of underclass. He's speaking to veteran middle class polyglot American workers, now in bad economic shape--and asking them if they really want to get comfortable on the dole. And he's playing on their guilt--that lingering stigma.

That is, the habits of the middle class, vanishing or not, matter.

Respecting work means disrespecting non-work, and if food stamps are available to nonworkers they will always be a little unrespectable. People can make their own choices about whether their need overcomes this stigma, without the government egging them on one way or another. The real issue isn't whether food stamp use goes up during a vicious economic slump--that's what they're there for. The issue is whether, thanks to the justified stigma, food stamp use goes down again when the recession ends.

Matt Yglesias concurs, with reservations.

To an extent, the viability of social democratic public services depends on a cultural context that maintains a modicum of bourgeois distaste for dependence upon them. In other words, you want people to have the attitude that these services are available for people who are really in need, but that it’s preferable to earn what you need through work when possible.

Patrick Buchanan also concurs in part.

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society – fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayers' expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

To the extent that policy wonks of varying persuasion sound the same message: the bourgeois habits have the potential to reduce poverty, there is the possibility of developing income policies, and school policies, that might reinforce rather than undermine those habits.