Burn All The Teachers

A Nigerian Student is Treated after Attack

Adolph Hitler's boys burned books. They burned them in great piles and laughed and celebrated. 

Today, in Nigeria and Afghanistan, and other areas of the world where religious--it must be admitted they are mostly Islamic--extremists roam, they do not burn books; they burn teachers.

Reports from Nigeria describe a school teaching "Western" subjects was attacked by the Bocca Something group of Isalmist extremists,  who locked teachers and students in the school building of a village, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze, shooting any students who managed to escape.

The SS had a similar technique they employed,  as the Wehrmacht rumbled through Poland: They'd push Jews into barns and set them ablaze, picking off escapees with rifle fire.  Brave young flower of German youth: shooting down the unarmed.

A friend, Alan Gross, returned from Afghanistan some years ago and described arriving in an Afghan village where a school teacher had been teaching girls and boys together in a village hut and the Taliban arrived, dragged the teacher and all the children outside, beheaded the teacher while the children watched,  and told the children, "Let this be a warning to those who violate Allah's word."

Today, teachers are the focus. 

And the weaponized self-appointed messengers of Allah or God have discerned something important. They may hate the nudity, the debauchery, the money seeking, the pork eating, the alcohol drinking, smoking, sex obsessed, happy Westerners, but the real problem for the fanatic is the teacher. 

It is teachers who, if they are good, open the minds of children to ask questions when the man with the sword announces he knows God's mind, when he says he has a special connection, a private line to God, not shared by the infidels. 

Maybe these fanatics are on to something. Here in America, we relegate teachers to a sort of red headed cousin status--we tolerate them, underpay them, and we do not invite them to A list dinner parties.  We gather them around politicians for grip and grin photos, and we use them, but we really do not respect them.  They do not make enough money to earn our respect.  We are nice to them when our kids need letters of recommendation to Harvard, but then, once our kids are safely on, we walk past the teachers at Hannaford's with barely a hello-how-are-you? 

In Hampton, there are howls of protest whenever anyone suggests we raise teachers' pay.  The Phantom was hooted when he suggested taxes be raised to pay teachers more. "You don't even have children in the schools. What's it to you?"

 Well, it's about what makes a community.  Good schools. I'd like to think that if a boat load of Taliban unloaded at Hampton Beach, they'd make a bee line for Winnacunet High School, Hampton Academy and Marston School. 

And the townspeople would be there,  with pitchforks and torches, to meet them.