640 KFI's John Kobylt Seems to Have an Irrational Hatred for Teachers

Full disclosure: My wife and I are both teachers. My wife teaches sixth grade English and I teach community college composition, so maybe I'm biased. 

But my wife and I have also listened to a lot of KFI's John and Ken over the years and John Kobylt succeeds with the following persona: He is the ranting, bullying know-it-all father at the dinner or breakfast table telling his family what's wrong with the world. And one big wrong that really chafes his ass: California teachers are overpaid losers, worthless peons contributing to the illiteracy of today's California youth. 

This isn't exactly the kind of thing I want to hear from one of the nation's biggest AM afternoon drive-home shows. 

Here is what he said on his show last week: 

Teachers should not care about their salaries, John opined with hostile certitude. Rather, they should teach to help the kids and because they're professionals. Money should have nothing to do with it. And he made the point that if you double a teacher's salary, that teacher does not double in performance. 

No teacher ever made that claim, so John is not using any logic. In critical thinking, that's called a non sequitur. Or to pare his words another way, he's using a Straw Man fallacy, creating an argument that his opponent never used in order to make his opponent look bad. 

What kills me, though, beyond the faulty logic, is John's sneering tone. He reminds me of the bully at the playground telling some wimp that he looks dorky in his baggy hand-me-down jacket. 

If John wants to rant about the dysfunctional LAUSD, that's one thing. But his apparent hatred for teachers in general strikes me as irrational and perhaps rooted in the erroneous idea that teachers are civil servants who should be thankful to work for slave wages. 

Comments

[Ed]

John and Ken were cancelled in the late 90's because KFI wouldn't meet their salary demands. They went to KABC and were canned in less than a year, then it took them another year to crawl back to KFI.

[Jeffrey McMahon]

The assert their salary demands but God forbid the teachers "live rich." They're attitude is: "Let's put those peons in their place." Hypocrisy? Oh yes.

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