I know it's a year later but still seems relevant, so please forgive my being late to the party (?)...
A couple of things.
Maybe Trump wasn't admired by teens in the 80s where you were (teaching?); are you saying that the survey they are referring to was faulty? The 80s has often been referred to as the Greed Decade -- I was 17-27 years old during the 80s and certainly remember it as a time when greed became very fashionable/socially acceptable. It doesn't seem like such a stretch to imagine teens buying into that on a large scale, it was a time of Young Republicans being ascendant... the Reagan era. Seemed like sort of a backlash to hippies to me.
Let's try to avoid the "blind men and the elephant" problem which lays waste to most social discourse in this country. You and Frank can both be right about the parts of the huge issues of the day that you experience.
I agree that teachers are in an absolutely impossible situation no matter their politics or morals. I don't think Frank is picking on teachers. He says it is a failure of US education -- which I interpret to mean the system, which also fails teachers.
I also don't know that he is saying it's something that US education fails to DO, so much as a failure to STOP doing what it does, to teachers and children and parents alike. I think the education system is not designed for children, it is designed to serve capitalism. Probably not always very consciously, more as a consequence of the forces at work; though, as has been noted in research, rich people who drive policy often demonstrate some psychopath-like personality traits. It's designed to force teachers to teach to tests, and children to accept that shit without complaining.
It is not designed to work for the common good, to further the cause of human happiness. Teachers individually and in general probably for the most part DO want to further those causes, but are handcuffed. Would you disagree? Did you not feel like you were kept from doing your best work, from being as caring and effective as you can be, by the system? Children are increasingly forced to spend more and more time, at younger and younger ages, in environments that are not designed to help them learn about who they are, what is powerful and important about them, what they are truly capable of, or that they have a powerful and natural inherent ability to learn and to love learning, independent of forced activities. This is not good for them.
Schools do some important things well, and provide a safe and relatively caring environment for many whose homes are hellish in some way or other. That cannot be taken away from schools, and thank god for that!
I think there are a lot of unspoken teachings that schools transmit, so that if teachers tried to teach morals around money it would probably create a sort of double-bind for children, a cognitive dissonance which they would struggle to find words to describe. Basically I think the school system creates a sort of rats-in-a-cage, everyone-for-themselves competitive system where you have to somehow know and accept the unspoken rules in order to emerge on top, semi-intact, all based on an artificial model of scarcity inherent in the design of the system.
Mommy and Daddy are in tough positions too, but of course they have to do their best as well. I just think there's a bigger picture here... I don't think it's just about who is or isn't "teaching" what. A lot of what children learn and don't learn, in school and elsewhere, doesn't have much to do with teaching. But schools are a HUGE force in children's lives and the system can't wash its hands of how their lives turn out. And its not on the teachers, who are doing the best they can with the hand they're dealt, to fix it.
/my 2 cents
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