College is more than a launch pad to the middle class. It demands intellectual growth and the critical thinking needed to defend against disinformation.

Marching in the rain during our strike a few years ago, I passed a young man standing against a school gate handing out wet copies of a communist newspaper. Why, he asked the striking teachers, waste our collective energies and outrage on salaries and working conditions when the whole global capitalist system needs obliterating?

We marched right past him. We just wanted a little more pay and slightly smaller classes and were eager to return to our students and motivate the apathetic, counsel the emotionally fragile and mitigate adolescent rage.

I think teachers tend to be mostly more pragmatic than ideological. At least I am. When I hear about the battle within the progressive and