Let's be clear: America’s schools are "future" factories. Educators manufacture the future by giving the next generation the skills and dispositions that they’ll need to not only be successful individuals but also contributing citizens, capable of caring about community, duty, and something larger than themselves. To truly believe that the best we can collectively offer our children to keep them safe is to prepare their teachers for armed combat is a future so grim that it jeopardizes our mission as a whole. Teachers currently subscribe to and work toward a much brighter future. It is time for our politicians to do the same.
Viewed from a distance, a classroom can often look like it runs itself. Teachers teach and students learn. Unless you’ve experienced what it takes to teach a room full of children, you might not understand the hundreds of decisions that teachers make both before and during a lesson as they guide their students to success. This is what teachers train for, and to think that this work is any less intense than other professions is underestimating the skill and expertise required to create an optimal learning environment. In the same way we wouldn’t expect a surgeon to be trained and prepared to go from operating on a patient to gunfighting at a moment's notice, expecting teachers to do so is equally ridiculous.
This isn’t to say that teachers lack the capability, courage, or determination to face evil. We do so almost every day. And as we’ve seen in countless school attacks, teachers are remarkably capable under fire. Many put the lives of their students over their own, think of teammates first, and run to the aid of others, even if it means putting themselves in danger. Teachers are heroic on a daily basis, and when it all goes really sideways, that heroism doesn’t falter.