Teachers Are Also Babysitters. That’s Perfectly OK.
The President of Oakland Unified School District has resigned after backlash to school trustees mocking parents who push for schools to reopen as just “wanting their babysitter back.”
Good. Public officials making fun of their constituents is abhorrent.
But parents do want their babysitters back, as they should!
Having worked in early childhood education for almost 2 decades, I know that few things make preschool and elementary school teachers bristle more than being referred to as “caregivers.”
“This isn’t daycare!” a young colleague working with 1 year-olds piped up in a team meeting once.
Of course it is.
Until high school, and arguably even then, most of what teachers do is care for children. We literally attend to the messy physical needs of young kids, even past the “bathroom independence” stage: we wipe tears and blood, remind them to eat, model deep breathing, soothe physical and emotional distress, break up fights, clean up messes and generally make sure children go home in as many pieces as they came in.
I am no fan of safetyism, but keeping kids alive and healthy is the literal primary responsibility of a teacher. Imagine saying to a parent, “Hey, sorry, we lost your kid on a field trip today, but she did learn a lot about life in Colonial America, so pat on the back for the teachers!”
We are caregivers first. That’s OK. At least until high school, education is closer to a blue-collar trade than a white collar job. It requires a practical skill set rather than rarefied intellectual ability. This doesn’t make the profession any less valuable, admirable, or worthy.
The shrill assertion that “teachers’ job is to teach, not babysit” is used to support the claim that, by offering online classes, schools are fulfilling their mandate to provide every child with a quality education. This is an insulting obfuscation.
Going to school, understood as attending an education program outside of the home, for the greater part of the work week, has been the norm for the overwhelming majority of American kids for over 100 years. Government asserts the power to compel families to send their kids *to school* via truancy laws. School districts assert the right to act in loco parentis by feeding kids, providing medical care and therapeutic services, and keeping a watchful eye over how they are parented via mandated reporting. Schools have even been known to keep children from parents for safety reasons.
For the past century, US public education has insisted that children leave their insular homes every day in order to come into literal physical contact with the fundament of American democracy: future citizens working and playing together, shoulder-to-shoulder. The Melting Pot grows out of literal closeness in a shared physical space. To suddenly pretend, after 100 years of such rhetoric, that schools’ job is just to transmit some information to kids somehow is galling.
People whose kids are school-aged now conceived their children with the expectation that taxpayer-supported education would be available to their kids. Parents made career plans around this expectation. They moved their families to particular locations around this expectation, often at great cost.
And, while parents are now having to provide 6–8 hours of child care that they were not planning for, every day, in addition to their own work responsibilities, closed school districts maintain that they don’t see the problem. Of course parents want their babysitters back!
