Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children?!
Everyone is using kids to score political points.
The Discourse (™) surrounding the ongoing battle between parents and public school officials on such varied topics as masking, remote instruction and Critical Race Theory is missing one crucial element: the awareness that this, all of this, is a sideshow.
The latest contribution to the cacophony comes from Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berskhire, via the Washington Post. Their piece features more strawmen than my local pumpkin patch in late October, but to sum it up, Schneider and Berkshire draw a direct line between parent involvement in local school curriculum and our democracy lying in a “pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.” To arrive at this grim image, Schneider and Berkshire take a detour through a number of attractions meant to invoke a pleasant amount of seasonally-appropriate horror: “parents’ right” to educate their children, homeschoolers, religious fundamentalism, and education savings accounts (horrifying!), before ending this tour de force with the specter of voter suppression. While I enjoyed the ride, I’m still not sure where either curriculum or children come in. They may have gotten lost in the corn maze.
The United States has a long, rich history of waging culture wars in schools. From fights over the teaching of evolution, to desegregation, to pearl-clutching over sex education and now the pitched ontological battles over whether CRT is being taught at all, both sides in the culture wars have been using the rhetorical trick made famous by Maude Flanders: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
They use this trick because it works: everyone loves children, at least nominally. Nobody can deny that adults’ stewardship of the world is for the children. If you’re not doing good things for the children, what are you even doing? Children are the litmus paper of virtue.
Which is truly unfortunate — for the children.
When kids become pawns in adults’ conflicts, they end up getting hurt. And it is particularly egregious when the adults actively doing harm are the very adults tasked with advocating for children. The current culture war, broadly waged about racial equity, has already amassed an impressive body count, from the dismantling of gifted programs to state legislation that expressly prohibits specific topics of discussion in the classroom. In this contest of one upmanship, any win for any side is a net loss for kids.
But what concerns me even more than bad policy outcomes is the tribal, profoundly illiberal rhetoric that permeates conversations about schools and education. Not only is neither side willing to countenance the opposing viewpoint, but they are expressly seeking to prevent each other from speaking at all. The intensity ratchets at every turn, and in short order we find that we have gone through the looking glass into a world where self-proclaimed education historians will assert with a straight face that parents do not have the right to be involved in their children’s education.
Won’t the adults please think of the children and choose a more suitable arena for their pissing contests?
Another excellent and well thought out article.