Disrespecting our leaders

And undermining our classrooms

Noise about non-existent pet-eating has obscured one of the most pernicious assertions of this fall’s political campaign: JD Vance’s declaring that childless women should not be permitted to teach.

Unsurprisingly, Vance makes no mention of childless men, many of whom also teach, but whom he seems to assume are exempt from needing to prove themselves by producing offspring. Perhaps he simply thinks that teaching, or anything that has to do with children, is basically women’s work— his opponent Tim Walz’s long career as high school teacher and coach to the contrary. 

Though Vance’s statement is typical of the misogyny we’ve come to expect from him, I’d like to widen the lens. I come from a family of educators, male and female, and have spent much of my career writing about leadership. So I want to focus on how Vance’s view that motherhood is the chief, or even only, requirement for teaching demonstrates both ignorance of what teaching actually requires and a misunderstanding of how policies play out in the real world. This misunderstanding is so great that it seems disqualifying for one who aspires to lead. 

Teaching is a skill, an art, and a profession. Teachers need a mastery of their field in order to convey its value to those they are charged to instruct. They need intuitive skills so they can assess what will be most useful to individual students. They need creativity in order to adapt to rapidly-changing circumstances. And they need the generosity required to persevere in demanding and often exhausting work despite being underpaid and undervalued by those for whom money is the chief measure of human worth.

Good teachers also focus on others, rather than themselves, a predisposition that crosses all gender, class, and racial lines, and ignores marital status.

Vance’s belief that only married women with children should teach is also impractical, unworkable, and unserious. Would it require childless women with teaching experience to lose their jobs? Would recent graduates who have not yet started their families get grace period before they must marry and conceive? If so, at what age would female teachers be required to have a child? And what about other professions that require working with children: social workers, family court lawyers and judges, nurses and doctors in family practice? 

Vance appears not to have given much thought to how his scheme would actually be implemented. Or to the massive labor shortages that would inevitably paralyze the ability of the nation to prepare young people for the future. Such impracticality is the polar opposite of leadership. In fact, failed leaders routinely flounder precisely because they arbitrarily try to impose unworkable policies and systems on the organizations they lead in the service of their own ideology or “vision.”

By contrast, many skillful political leaders actually began their careers as teachers, including not only Tim Walz, but Pete Buttagieg. I mention Buttagieg because he is prepping Walz for his upcoming vice-presidential debate with Vance. So it would make sense if the debate could remind voters not only of Vance’s condescension towards women, but also the impracticality of his ideologically-driven, yet poorly thought-through, agenda. Both indicate a profound disrespect for those to whom we entrust the education of our children, of all America’s children.

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