Teaching — and living — wisdom in our schools

Congressional Republicans are introducing bills they are calling a “Parents Bill of Rights,” with the stated goal of increasing transparency and communication between parents and their children’s educators.

We don’t need to consult any bigtime political experts to see what’s going on here: The Republican Party thinks it has caught lightning in a bottle in the rise in parental anxieties over surprising or seemingly unaccountable school policies and curricula. This proposal is meant to capitalize on those anxieties, and to put their Democratic opponents in a position to oppose “parents’ rights.”

The midterm television ads almost write themselves.

Now, we certainly support making curricula, reading lists and so on readily available to parents. But debates over the specifics of the proposal miss the forest for the trees. The real differences of opinion aren’t about the details of educational transparency, but rather something much more fundamental: What is the purpose of institutional education?

Some people seem to think that the purpose of schools is merely to impart knowledge. 2 + 2 = 4. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

On this understanding, the facts are supposed to be morally neutral, and all questions of values are left to parents.

This tidy theoretical division of labor turns out to be unworkable in practice. The facts taught in schools, and how schools choose to teach them, necessarily have moral and, yes, political implications. It’s easy to say that teachers should teach “all sides” of contested questions, but then which questions are contested? Evolution? The Civil War? The Protestant Reformation?

Then there’s the alternate pole, where institutional education is thought to be responsible for the entire formation of the child. This is schooling as liberation, where teachers are the experts who are tasked with unshackling their pupils from the ignorance and parochialism of the family, in the same way a doctor frees a patient from pain and disease.

This is also unworkable, for the simple reason that children (generally) live with their parents, and will be formed by their beliefs and habits no matter what happens in class. Not to mention, the natural relationship of parent to child simply cannot be hijacked in this way.

We would propose something at once radically old-fashioned and timeless: Education is about wisdom. It’s more than “just the facts.” But it’s also more than liberation and indoctrination.

Wisdom involves the everyday business of drawing conclusions about what is good and true, and then acting on those judgments. It involves both what to think and how to think. And it is, first and foremost, the role of parents to demonstrate this virtue, and to form their children in it.

The school, however, supports the family in innumerable ways — handing down knowledge, yes, but also traditions and stories and controversies. The school brings the child into a wider world not to supplant the family, but to supplement it.

One of the ways parents and institutional educators can demonstrate wisdom is to recognize that their relationship is necessarily collaborative — and requires compromise. Instead of declaring their rights against their children’s schools as if they are antagonists, as the Republican bills would have it, parents should engage teachers as partners. And so should teachers consider their pupils’ families not as meddlers or, in corporate speak, merely stakeholders, but as the backbone of their own mission as educators.

There’s no perfectly neutral way to teach, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an agreeable way to teach. It just takes a little understanding, a little compromise, and a little wisdom from all the grown-ups who care about their children’s futures.