Yesterday, US president Donald Trump held a “listening session” at the White House a week after the latest US school shooting. Cameras zoomed in on a piece of paper with his talking points and caught number five - “I hear you.” Cameras also captured the president proposing “conceal and carry” as the solution, after countless people directly affected by the violence at Columbine, Sandy Hook and beyond put forward strong and emotional pleas for gun regulation.
Donald Trump didn’t hear them.
He didn’t hear the tens of thousands of students around the country asking why politicians value guns more than children’s lives.
He didn’t hear the funding needs of cash-strapped public schools asking to be armed with guidance counselors, wraparound services and manageable class sizes. He cut a trillion dollars to give a tax cut to the richest.
He didn’t hear the students who survived the shooting, who watched their teachers become human shields and their classmates killed. Instead, he sent out his surrogates to defame them in the most disgusting display of right-wing media tactics I’ve seen - since the last one.
The threat posed by Trump
For the 32 million teachers and support personnel in 400 unions and organisations from 174 countries that make up Education International, we know his type. Our members in the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Kenya, Russia - to name a few - know his type.
Trump represents self-interest, xenophobia, authoritarianism and greed. That is the filter through which he hears.
He is as much a democratic threat as he is a security threat.
And, although he must remind himself to hear at a listening session on gun violence, there is no reason to believe he will - unless the collective call for action becomes so deafening that no wall, no exclusive golf course and no soundproof cone at the Environmental Protection Agency will be sufficient.
I am proud of the students and teachers of my country for their courage and their resolve. I am floored by the great leadership that the teaching unions continue to provide during one of the darkest periods in our country’s history. As I take the helm of Education International, travel the world and work with teaching union leaders and activists I am often asked if the US, my home, is going to make it out of its current slide.
Expose ‘entrepreneurs’
To see the US from abroad at this moment fills me with anger and concern - but I also sense something is happening. I think back to my student days in western Pennsylvania and my friend, to my mentor Tom Gaither, who was a freedom rider in the South during the civil rights struggle. I hear his passion, purposefulness and clarity of speech in the young activists who are saying: “No more. It ends here.”
I hear the resolve in the voices of parents who want schools to be safe for their children. Whether that is in Syria or Nigeria (where Boko Haram recently abducted more school girls) or anywhere on Earth - that is a universal human right and a collective responsibility.
The organised and democratic teacher unions and association that constitute our global teaching profession, our Education International, are increasing their organising and mobilising to ensure that every child has the right to a free, inclusive quality education with a qualified teacher in a safe and secure classroom. We expose “entrepreneurs” who want to make a profit out of poor kids in Africa paying to attend filthy chicken coops staffed with untrained personnel. We call out tyrants who jail teachers who dare to criticise them and seek to form unions. It’s who we are as teachers and it’s what we do.
We will not be silenced and we will not be stopped.
David Edwards is the general secretary of Education International
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