Teachers’ Unions and Your Family’s Educational Choices

When a teachers' union cheers guillotine imagery outside someone's home, parents are entitled to say: these are not the values I want directing my child's education. The Chicago Teachers Union declared itself "completely in support of wherever this is headed" in a post about a mock guillotine outside Jeff Bezos's home. This happened in August 2020, as contemporary reporting documents; I reshared the incident in 2026 because the underlying question remains. Why should a family owe its trust to an organization whose public judgment it finds morally indefensible?

The objection is to a particular union's public statement, not a claim that every individual teacher endorses it. That distinction leaves plenty of room for a forceful judgment about the organization. A guillotine is an image of political execution, and celebrating its appearance at someone's home does not become an admirable civic lesson because the target is wealthy. Children deserve an education that teaches them to argue about power, wealth, and justice without romanticizing violence against the people with whom they disagree. An educational organization should be able to meet that standard without difficulty.

You can oppose a billionaire's political influence, criticize his company, or argue about taxation without celebrating an instrument of execution outside his home. That distinction should be obvious to people involved in education. If the moral rule disappears as soon as the target is someone your side dislikes, what rule are you actually teaching?

The union's defenders can call it symbolism. Fine: symbolism means something. The point of choosing a guillotine rather than a petition is the association it carries. Parents are allowed to reject that association without first accepting a debate over whether the target has accumulated enough money to lose their claim to ordinary decency.

An organization involved in education cannot claim that its public judgment is irrelevant whenever that judgment becomes embarrassing. It chose to speak, and parents can consider what it said when deciding how much confidence to place in it. That is not a demand that every teacher share my politics. It is a refusal to make affiliation with education a shield from the ordinary responsibility of defending your own words.

The educational response should be to read those words accurately and explain the objection. Give the strongest defense of the symbolism a fair hearing, then ask whether you would accept the same defense if the target were someone you admired. A principle that changes with the identity of the person outside whose home the guillotine appears was never much of a principle. Students are capable of examining that inconsistency without being told which political tribe supplies the correct answer.

A parent can object and still be expected to deliver the child back to the same system on Monday. That is why educational choice matters beyond curriculum preferences. The ability to leave gives a moral judgment consequences. Families should have an alternative to spending a child's school years petitioning an institution to become worthy of their trust.

You do not owe a teachers' union your child's education as an expression of loyalty. If its public conduct gives you reason to withdraw your trust, the organization owes you an answer; your family does not owe it years of continued deference while waiting for one. I want parents to have a useful alternative, because a moral judgment should be allowed to affect what you choose for the person whose life is involved.