Teacher knows best
The relatively short history of the United States is well populated with soul-stirring movements designed to expand the rights of various groups, but only because it’s equally well populated with bigotry, discrimination, and some way nastier stuff. These movements’ adjectives were varied – civil, workers’, women’s, LGBTQ – as were their success rates, but the noun was constant.
Now there’s a new entry that promises to carry none of the progressive positivity of the above-mentioned struggles for social, political and economic equality: the parental rights movement. It is, like all of the most hysterical figments of the right-wing(nut) news machine’s imagination, a solution in search of a problem – and great for ratings.
As a parent with 27 years’ experience, I believe I am on solid ground when I assert that parents have more rights than damned near anyone. We need all these rights to balance out how annoying children can be, otherwise nobody would sign up. For example, in most states in the US, parents can name their kids anything they like. Can’t do that in New Zealand. Want to name your baby Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii? Sorry, someone tried in 2008 and ran afoul of the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 1995.
The parental rights movement has been turbocharged of late by the inexplicably addle-minded uproar over the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in our public schools, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t actually happen anywhere. CRT, in case you’ve been lucky enough to miss all this, is a decades-old academic theory that argues that racism is a social construct, embedded in our political and legal systems, as opposed to the product of individual bias or prejudice. But don’t worry, nobody’s seven-yearold is coming home with a CRT colour-by-number workbook.
Florida (state motto: “If it’s stupid and crazy, it probably started here”) recently enacted the Parents’ Bill of Rights, which mostly aggregates rights parents already held, but does give them access to all of their children’s records, meaning if a child reveals their sexual preference or preferred gender identity to a teacher or counsellor because they’re afraid to do so at home, the parents in question now have the legal right to find that out.
Florida has a dire teacher shortage, as does the entire nation. One in three current teachers surveyed said the pandemic has made them more likely to quit or retire. But that’s a trickle compared with the mad dash for the exits you’d see if parents got even minimal control over curriculum and/ or the classroom. Can you imagine? Want to know if parents have the objectivity and temperament to effectively design and implement their children’s school-based educational and social experiences? Just go to any youth sporting event and instead of watching the kids on the field, check out the lunatics on the sidelines. While we’re at it, why stop at schools when giving parents authority over activities they know little or nothing about? Let them make all medical decisions, like whether or not to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases. Oops, bad example.
The parental rights movement has been turbocharged by the uproar over the teaching of critical race theory.
Don’t get me wrong, parents are really important. I had some, and my kids still do. But in any situation involving kids and conflict, if a parent isn’t the direct cause of the problem, the introduction of one can be counted on to make things worse.
Almost everything my wife and I know about parenting we learnt from our children’s wondrous, wildly underpaid pre-school teachers. We lucked out and bought a house across the street from a two-year programme run by a true early-childhood savant, and got a four-year class in how to not mess our kids up from an all-star band of educators.
Instead of screaming obscenities at school board meetings – as much fun as that might be – how about parents try supporting teachers and schools as much as they hopefully are supporting their kids. We love them way too much to be trusted with something as important as their education. ▮