You Shouldn't Have to Be at War with Your Child's Teachers
Parents actually want their kids to learn history, literature, and even age-appropriate sex ed. Just without the agenda.
The short portion of my life that I’ve spent married now, I’ve spent married to a 5th grade English teacher. Through the unique lens of us being active Republicans in the Charleston area where the county parties keep a close eye on local school boards, we’ve been given a front-row seat to the culture wars raging within America’s schools and the increasingly adversarial relationship between parents and their children’s teachers. My wife hears one side from her coworkers, and we both hear the other side from activists at local GOP meetings.
One illuminating moment that’s come from this dichotomy happened while we were at a tri-county event. We do not currently live in the district where my wife teaches, and at this event we had the opportunity to meet some of the involved parents in her district. During a conversation with one parent who was listing some books that she found objectionable, she mentioned the classic young adult dystopian novel, The Giver (my wife insists I begin the next sentence with a spoiler alert, as it reveals the central, pivotal plot point). The parent specifically mentioned a passage where it’s revealed that among the authoritarian society’s strange rules to maintain their utopia, in the instance of twins being born, one child is “released,” which is the euphemism they use for killing, as they also do with the elderly once they’ve aged beyond their productive years. Her objection was simply to the dark nature of the material, given that children these days are experiencing higher levels of mental illness than ever before.
My wife and I were both taken aback. We both loved The Giver (along with the other YA dystopias that had film adaptations in the mid-2010’s) for its exploration of how centralized government granted excessive powers during a time of crisis can wind up as a violent surveillance state that teaches revisionist history. The protagonist of The Giver is a young man who realizes that atrocities are being committed while bread and circuses keep the people compliant, and fights back against the regime. We stated as much to our new friend. “Well, maybe that’s how you teach it,” she responded. The comment struck me as odd. I know we are far from alone in our interpretation of the book. Authoritarians on the left have long been opposed to the messages of these books. Ewan Morrison writes for The Guardian that “The Hunger Games, The Giver and Divergent all depict rebellions against the state, and promote a tacit right-wing libertarianism.” He also believes the books to be unsuitable for children, suggesting that “if you see yourself as a left-leaning progressive parent, you might want to exercise some of that oppressive parental control and limit your kids' exposure to the ‘freedom’ expressed in YA dystopian fiction.”
Nevertheless, the comment stuck with me. Months later, as we were watching the tail-end of Virginia’s historic 2021 gubernatorial election cycle come to a close, I heard about McAuliffe’s accusation that Glenn Youngkin wanted to ban celebrated Black authors from Virginia’s schools. The book Youngkin had mentioned that had caused McAuliffe to assert this was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If I’m being honest, I have never been much of a fiction reader, and was entirely unfamiliar with the book. I took to the internet and got the SparkNotes version by watching some YouTube videos of the kind you’d watch if this book had been assigned reading and you were anything like I was in high school. The book is dark. Very dark. The plot centers around an act of infanticide committed by the main character. However, I can see some value in its vivid portrayal of the atrocity of slavery. I must admit even simply watching those plot summary videos, I felt my stomach turn in a more significant way than other times that I’d read or watched depictions of that era in TV or literature. I felt there was certainly value in the perspective that the book offered.
As I understand it, Beloved was only assigned in 12th grade advanced-placement English classes. I thought to myself, if I had a 17 or 18 year-old, would I be opposed to them reading this book? I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t. I then asked myself a second question — if I had a 17 or 18 year-old, would I trust the average public school teacher to teach this book to them? The answer was an immediate and resounding no. That’s when the activist’s comment from the county where my wife teaches started to make sense. While certainly there are some times when the curriculum is the problem in American classrooms, the issue goes much deeper than that. Parents have lost faith in the willingness of our nation’s teachers to leave their personal agendas outside the school’s walls.
Mainstream media talking-heads incapable of perceiving the signal in the noise shout that “Critical race theory is a complex curriculum for law school students and it’s certainly not being taught in primary school classrooms!” Leftists famously berated one Virginia voter for not being able to define CRT when asked. “CRT” at this point is simply the catch-all term for Jesse Jackson-style race-baiting happening in the classroom. Middle schoolers in California are made to read a Huffington Post article asserting that white people are all inherently racist. Required reading in one Tennessee high school teacher’s class was an article that asserted “[Donald Trump’s] ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”
If you’re still saying, “well, that’s not technically what critical race theory is,” you’ve lost the plot. The point is that parents, rightfully, have developed an intense skepticism of public educators. Why wouldn’t they? Teachers are educated in American colleges where according to one 2016 study, the partisan leanings of professors are 11.5:1 Democrat vs. Republican. That ratio gets even worse when looking at history professors, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 33.5:1. The study also mentions that since 2004, these figures have become more lopsided. One doesn’t find it hard to imagine that this trend continues today, as conservative professors watch even their liberal counterparts forced out of their positions should they dare stray even once from the woke narrative. One must also remember that once teachers are in the classroom, they are represented by teachers’ unions, who in addition to being a primary funding source for Democratic politicians, have recently fought to keep kids out of the classroom. In about half the states, that minority of teachers who disagree with their union’s agenda are forced by law to remain dues-paying members.
Parents largely don’t have an aversion to their children learning history, even when it’s ugly. Slavery and Jim Crow existed. They were horrific crimes that some whites in early America carried out against their fellow man, and many more still were complicit to. Their children’s exposure to the societal ills of history and what it took to overcome them does not offend hardly any rational, reasonable parent. What angers parents is taking the guilt, shame, and responsibility from atrocities of the colonial era or even the 1960s, and placing it on the white children of today. Children of all races who have been raised right and never taught to think less of themselves or others because of the color of their skin should not have their parents’ values undermined by their teachers.
The issues of wokeness in the classroom extend beyond just race as well. Teachers in even the lower elementary grades often impose their gender identity propaganda regardless of district policy, such as the young lady (or I guess I shouldn’t assume their gender) in this tweet.
However, sometimes sex ed policies that include gender identity issues are handed down at the district, or even state levels, as well as what most would consider age-inappropriate concepts. If parents choose to teach their children that gender is a spectrum separate from biological sex, that’s their business, and they can teach them about gender issues at an age they find appropriate. Progressive social scientists want very much to declare that “the science” is settled on these issues, and that those who are concerned about the new teachings on gender are simply bigots. Due to this stigmatization, there are likely many more who are not sold on the new politics of gender that are willing to admit to it publicly. The red flags of structuring society’s institutions around gender identity as opposed to biological sex run the gamut from bathroom sexual assaults to the erasure of women’s sports, and increasingly, womanhood in general. This is not an agenda we need to be foisting on children in taxpayer-funded schools, but rather a debate we need to be having as adults. The convenient thing for the culture warriors in academia, though, is that they simply get to bypass parents by passing their views straight to educators and administrators.
So what is a parent to do if they find themselves locked in an adversarial relationship with their child’s teacher? Well, perhaps it’s best to begin with some self-reflection. How did you end up here? Has social indoctrination been taking place at your child’s school for a long time and you were unaware? Or is this a new phenomenon? Does the administration know? Does the school board know? If so, do they endorse it? Or merely tolerate it because no other parents have pushed back yet, either?
My personal recommendation is to start by un-enrolling your children from public school. I know, private schooling is expensive and homeschooling can be time-consuming, and you still have to pay taxes for the public schools whether you use them or not. But here’s the thing — when you send your kids off to Caesar, you can’t be surprised when they come back as Romans. One positive to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic were pods and micro-schools. Parents worked together to pitch in their time and resources as a team to help educate their children in person when teachers’ unions and the school boards beholden to them refused. Get creative and stop sending your child to these abusive institutions where they’ve demonstrated just how much they care about them by taping masks to their faces and making them eat outside in near-freezing weather.
Perhaps, though, you’ve truly tried and can find no feasible alternative to your child attending a public school where social ideologies you find objectionable are currently being taught. Perhaps you’ve already taken your kids out of that school and still want to fight (as you should) for those kids whose parents have not yet come to that conclusion. What do you do? That’s when you become a “domestic terrorist,” and show up to the school board meetings. You raise your concerns about those instances where education becomes agenda-driven, and you find out who is your friend on the board and who is not. If you can, run against one who is not in the next election. Recruit friends to do the same. Campaign like your friends and neighbors and their kids depend on you — because they do.
Ultimately, the goal we should be demanding from our state legislatures is a robust voucher system that enables even parents of limited means to have plenty of reasonable options and allow the money to follow their child. No one should feel trapped in a war with their child’s teacher. In fact, without exception, you should absolutely love them! Because if you don’t, you should always have the option to take your child to a school that you do love, full of teachers who will actually educate your children, rather than undermining your values. When parents are allowed this choice, the market will ultimately weed out those failing institutions that are not providing what parents feel their children need, and the next generation can truly grow and thrive.
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