Our Public Schools

There are parent groups who would have us whitewash our history in a vain and misguided attempt to spare our children the burden of particular knowledge.

There has been a movement afoot for years that ostensibly wants to allow parents to take our tax dollars and apply them to any school of their choice, including private and religious schools. The movement says it wants curriculum control, but in my experience, and much like the Grover Norquist-inspired anti-tax movement that hates government and wants to make it so small you can “drown it in a bathtub,” this movement’s real goal is to kill off the public schools.

I first heard about the movement on Talk Radio, where a host whose name I childishly and superstitiously refuse to invoke (think Candyman or Beetlejuice) for fear he’ll rematerialize and torture the populace further with his denigration of “The Government Schools.” The movement has never really had legs, because the arguments for—that parental oversight should control everything a child learns in school—are so much weaker than the arguments against—that children are more apt to achieve in a society where everybody is armed with wide-ranging, credible facts about history, math, culture, etc. The movement is relatively small, but as the recent gubernatorial race in Virginia showed, it is politically charged, highly motivated, and well-organized.

Some members of the movement are having success banning books from school libraries. Book banning is an evergreen phenomenon that never seems to lose its charm. A cursory reading/viewing of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is an effective cure.

Parents who don’t want their kids in the public schools have the right to homeschool, or spend their own money on private and parochial schools. The forces opposed to public education advocate curriculum control and vouchers at the cost of sacrificing the greatest educational- and economic-opportunity equalizer we have. We’ve built a technically and culturally sophisticated world in which success requires a solid educational foundation. Unless your last name is Zuckerberg, your economic well-being requires a complete education.

Certain aspects of history, literature, economics, biology, sociology, and even math, will no longer be taught widely if they represent ideas that are contrary to the religious or racial beliefs of a minority of parents. Most of the religious objections represent an incursion upon the separation of church and state. Where race is concerned, there are parent groups who would have us whitewash (no pun intended, although it is apt) our history in a vain and misguided attempt to spare our children the burden of particular knowledge. That seems counter to the purpose of education to me.

There are very good reasons that parents from Beijing to Paris want to send their children to American schools and universities. Our tradition of liberal education (“liberal,” as used here, is not political, but derives from the Latin, “liber,” “for unrestricted”) is different than educational systems in much of the world where personal, state, and religious biases define curriculum.

From the Washington Post, “Our teachers are so overwhelmed,” said Debra Pace, the schools superintendent in Osceola County in Florida, one of the 17 states considering transparency legislation, according to a tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures. “We’re doing everything we can to take things that aren’t absolutely essential off of our teachers’ plates. This [new curriculum restrictions] would be an incredible burden that I think would just send people over the edge.”

There are currently seventeen state legislatures considering these so-called transparency laws. It won’t surprise you to learn that 13 of the top 15 states for Covid-19 deaths-per-capita are also the ones proposing legislation to control curricula.

Cooler heads may prevail as they did in an ill-conceived gambit to take the subject of evolution out of the public schools in Cobb County, Georgia. Advocates demanded the school board put stickers disclaiming evolution in textbooks. The Georgia Board of Regents which oversees the university system, immediately required time-consuming remedial biology classes for freshmen. (The stickers came off as quickly as they appeared.)

There are many extant remedies for the perceived lack of input/oversight some parents are complaining about. In fact, curricula are not secret, and parents already have many resources at their disposal, starting with parent teacher conferences, and published syllabi. That most schools are hotbeds of Commie influence or are unresponsive to parents is a red-herring. It’s all intended to transfer tax dollars from the public sphere to fund private education.

What most people demand of a public school system is a safe environment that prepares a student for adult life by bestowing knowledge of the world around them, its un-blinkered history, and a working knowledge of math, language, and science. It’s objectively valuable to expose our students to history’s great thinkers, and therefore to a wide array of art, science, and literature.

Are schools perfect? Of course not, but we need to work harder on fixing our problems instead of fixing the blame.

©2022 Jon Sinton