“Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.”
What a headline, huh? The recent Washington Post Op-ed “says the quiet part out loud,” as the saying goes. Articles like this, along with other recent developments, reveal just how un-taboo the idea of limiting parental influence over schools is in the educational world.
The issue has been brought to the forefront by the Virginia governor’s race, where Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe has been an advocate for keeping parental influence out of the school system. At a debate, he stirred up controversy by saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The question arose in part because of parental backlash to sexually explicit materials being taught in schools and placed on library shelves.
It’s not just Virginia, though. As Covid sent students home to learn via online classrooms, clashes suddenly began to arise between parents and teachers. One school district in Tennessee tried to get parents to sign an agreement to not listen in to classes. Some teachers publicly lamented the scrutiny their progressive lessons received from parents who were overhearing them for the first time.
Of course, this mindset is not new. In 2012, Bill Nye (the science-ish guy) told parents they have no business teaching creationism to their kids. The following year, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry created controversy by saying, “we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
However, as I point out as often as I can, this is not even a development of the last decade. Rather, it’s a foundational piece of our educational structure. In 1786, before the Constitution even existed, Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence) wrote, “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.” A generation later, Horace Mann wrote, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
It would be a mistake to believe the nature of education suddenly changed to an anti-parent movement in the last 10 years. Rather, what it was intended to be all along has been revealed. Add in our society’s clashing cultural values and what had always existed is suddenly far more visible.
The people who accuse us of wanting to “indoctrinate” our children have spent decades infiltrating the hearts and minds of young people through their efforts. They’ve been working hard at putting LGBT books into school libraries, sexualizing children’s television all the way down to Blue’s Clues, hosting Drag Queen Story Hours, teaching children to hate themselves and their families, teaching the equality of all religions, sponsoring LGBT “Day of silence” events, pushing pronoun declarations in classrooms, and more. Accusing us of attempted indoctrination is mere projection.
As for me, of course I want to indoctrinate my children. I have a God-given duty to do so, actually (Deuteronomy 6:1-7; Proverbs 22:6; Ephesians 6:4). So, when these people who hate everything I believe in want to indoctrinate my children, too, it would be bizarre to sit down and negotiate some kind of compromise with them. No, my duty is to make sure they don’t ever have the chance.
“But our school is different.” Somehow, parents in every school district seem to believe this. If every school is “different,” where are the bad ones?
“But kids should go into the schools to be lights.” How’s that working out?
“But I’m a teacher and I would never teach these things.” That’s a blessing, but you are but one cog in a gigantic system, one of potentially dozens of teachers a child will have. If the system itself is intent on forcing ideas on children, one Bible-believing teacher here or there is not enough to stem the tide.
What more will it take before Christians realize the hostility their children face from these organizations? How much worse will it have to get? I have been beating this drum for the better part of a decade, long before the release of my book “Failure” in 2014, but the issue grows more pressing all the time: if you have any way to make it happen, get your children out.
I urge you to truly take a look at it before you dismiss the idea as unfeasible. Look at every possibility, because it’s that important. If, after examining it every way you can, it’s still not possible, determine to take every measure in your power to know what your child is learning, to have influence over the classroom, to help your child know how to navigate the ideas they learn from their teachers, books, and classmates.
We can talk all day long about claiming the culture back for Christ, pushing back against the evil in the world, and reaching the lost, but so long as Christians keep handing their children right back to the world, any progress we make will die out in a generation.
