We must trust our teachers, not Moms for Liberty
Pennsylvania has the second highest number of Moms for Liberty chapters in the United States — 24 county-based groups — so we should not be surprised that MFL’s national convention was held recently in Philadelphia.
The Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes MFL as an anti-government movement. Why? Because a small group of ideologically aligned parents seeks to introduce restrictive conservative ideologies in education by banning books and by imposing Christian nationalist curricular changes in school districts.
It is easy to forget that public schools do not serve individuals. Public schools serve their communities by producing educated citizens prepared to take their place in American society and, increasingly, in the global commons.
We aspire to ensure individual students have the fullest opportunity to develop their intellectual, physical,and social skills to the greatest extent possible. Most of our schools do a better job of this than we give them credit for.
With respect, very few mothers and parents are credentialed to evaluate what’s happening curriculum-wise in their children’s schools. We should not doubt their love or their sincerity but we should question their knowledge of pedagogy and content.
MFL asserts that children are being indoctrinated in “woke,” Communist and LGBTQ ideologies in our schools. There may well be an isolated teacher somewhere in America doing this, but I am sure the vast majority of our teachers in Pennsylvania are not.
Rather than fix what’s broken with isolated and documented cases of individual teacher overreach, MFL seeks to impose state and schoolwide curriculum mandates that date to the rightwing conservative curriculums of the 1950s. The irony and hypocrisy of what MFL seeks to do is that its platform is, itself, de facto indoctrination.
Educators in Pennsylvania are credentialed professionals. They undergo a thorough training program that includes content mastery, teaching methods, lesson planning, curriculum development, class management and school law. This is a substantial skillset that can only be acquired in a university setting.
Earning teaching or administrative credentials in our state is neither easy nor inexpensive. Very few Moms for Liberty members have such a background, and having a child in school does not endow a parent with educational expertise any more than taking a child to the dentist endows one with dental expertise. Moreover, the tenuring process ensures teachers hired permanently have undergone a real-world selection process by school boards that further separates the effective from the ineffective.
Most importantly, what effective teachers do best is to make their subject relevant to students’ lives and the world that they live in.
Unfortunately, the world we live in has topics that can be uncomfortable: suicide, inflation, depression, guns, bigotry, drugs, sexual identity, wars and climate change, for example. These are important national issues and we cannot, in good conscience, ignore or exclude them in our children’s education simply because they are uncomfortable.
Rather, we must introduce sensitive topics such as these and trust our teachers to do so appropriately, using relevant tools at the right time and in the right context. Teachers know that bringing up sensitive topics is delicate and often the best place to engage these is during what educators call “the teachable moment.”
This happens when teachers respond to student inquiry or comments by briefly moving off the lesson for a short time. This, as well as other techniques, is an art form practiced by our most effective educators. This is not indoctrination; it is what we informally call “good teaching” and we should trust our credentialed and experienced teachers to do it appropriately.
What can happen when we do not trust professional educators? Moms for Liberty have already taken control of Pennridge School District’s social studies curriculum and are imposing a Christian nationalist interpretation of America in their schools. This is a slippery slope.
We should not be surprised if Pennridge elevates faith-based creationism and intelligent design to academic legitimacy alongside the evidence-based theory of evolution in its science curriculum. We should not be
surprised if Pennridge backs off Pennsylvania’s commonsense student vaccination requirements by easing its vaccination exemption standards, as state law allows, for “religious beliefs and philosophical/strong moral or ethical convictions.”
What should be taught and when? We must trust educational professionals to determine age-appropriate content and where it fits best in the same way we trust our medical professionals to prescribe medications.
Curriculum development follows an upwardly spiraling
pattern and the best schools coordinate their curriculums vertically and horizontally. It’s very complex, hard to get right, and it’s an ever changing endeavor.
School curriculums adapt and change as the world changes and making them relevant to student development must not be left to well-intentioned but uncredentialed parents. To do otherwise harms Pennsylvania’s students.