Parents’ Rights

The Right’s elixir for our ailing education system and the folly of “rights.”

I want to start with something you need to hear: you, as a parent, do not have and should not have rights in the curriculum of your child’s education. I know that’s a hard thing to swallow. We are so used to being able to control everything about our children’s lives. What time they wake up, what time they eat, what time they sleep, how much screen time they get at home, and what they get to watch or read are all things that parents are used to being able to have control over when it comes to their kids. At home, this is normal and this is to be expected. That’s parenthood, right? We all have ideas about the kind of person we want our child to grow up to be, and we use our values and our beliefs as the adults in the room to contextualize the information our children come into contact with during their days and weeks as burgeoning people.

But when it comes to education, and what happens in the classroom, we have a problem. There are a series of groups of parents and adults who believe that they know better and that no child should be learning certain topics. This is, of course, rooted in a sort of politics that has seeped like poison into our communities and neighborhoods and is based on pushing a specific worldview to our kids by limiting their exposure to important parts of the world, its history, its art, and its culture that are not present in the majority of our communities. These parents use their status as parents as a cudgel, wielding that word as though it grants them special status or power over the rest of us because they believe that their power in their home should be their power over the rest of us and our homes.

We saw this in earnest as a political force in 2021 and 2022 when these parents attempted to wrest control of our school boards, and in 2023 when billionaires and malignant leaders of our nation forced out qualified leaders of colleges and universities because of the color of their skin and the ideas they believed that color, black and brown, embodies. Throughout our nation, we are faced with the scourge of these maleficent parents using their kids and their education as a crowbar with which to wrest the wholeness of education out of the hands of the rest of our children. They’ll use terms like “wokeness” and “DEI” and “LGBTQ agenda” to whip people up into a frenzy that schools are teaching deeply political and radical topics to five-year-olds, or that drag queen story hour is an incredibly sexual time for students to be exposed to something heinous or unseemly.

There have been hundreds of essays written on the folly of these specific ideas from these idiotic and controlling parents, and so I will not be addressing those concerns directly. This is simply meant to be a critique of 21st Century parenthood as it intersects with education. As such, I think it’s important to reassert what I stated at the beginning of this essay: you, as a parent, do not have and should not have rights in the curriculum of your child’s education.

My basis for such a statement is simple. First, anyone can become a parent, and becoming a parent does not grant you special status or rights in society. It is simply the natural consequence of intentional procreation or irresponsible recreation. Your desire to have children or your inability to control yourself while you enjoy some intimate time with someone of the opposite sex does not and should not mean that the consequences of your actions become, at any point, the rest of our problem. Education is not a personal issue based on our personal values. It is a societal good, based on shared and agreed sets of facts and enacted by trained, educated professionals who study not only the course material they are disseminating but also the science of how that information is learned by our children. They are, by every measure, experts in human development and how children soak new information. You, as a parent, are decidedly not that. You are simply someone whose body has completed the necessary requirements to pass on your genetic code to a new generation. Congratulations on keeping them alive long enough to need an education.

Second, your rights end at your front door as a parent. How children are disciplined in school, how they are taught, what they are taught, and who teaches them is up to the rest of us as well as you, collectively. I know this is a difficult concept for some to understand, so I’ll try to state this as cleanly as I can:

You are not the center of the universe, your child is not the only child in the school, and your child’s education is not more important than anyone else’s.

You can hold your values, you can believe what you want to believe and act on that however you wish within the law. But your rights to dictate your child’s education end when they walk through the schoolhouse gate. The “why” of this conversation is simple. Because my child has rights too, and my family has rights too. As a progressive leftist, I have just as much say in what my child learns as you do. I want my child’s education to be more comprehensive than the current school system is, but I have to live with an education system that is bound to the titanic ego of parents who believe that their desire to control their students’ curriculum supersedes my desire for my child to learn about other cultures and ideas that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to in my own home. My belief that it’s important that for my son to learn about the history of other cultures and how those cultures have interacted, both positively and negatively, is something I have to teach at home because there are groups of people who can’t handle their child learning something that might get them to ask questions at the dinner table that make their parents answer “I don’t know,” because it makes those parents feel uncomfortable or inferior to have those conversations.

But I’m not the one screaming at school board meetings or trying to shell curriculum because I want to have those conversations with my son.

Third, and finally, we do not have rights as parents, but we do have rights as citizens. We can have these conversations, but the use of “parent” as a measure of power drags people like me into a conversation during which I do not want to be placed on the side of the loud, angry, ignorant parents. This conversation needs to be had in school board meetings without all of these people shouting down explanations or ideas they don’t like. Education is supposed to be challenging. It’s supposed to break down the ideas our children are raised with so that they grow up with an open mind and learn to be tolerant of people with different values, which is something their parents clearly did not get.

Truth be told, I want to leave education to the people who have been trained to teach. I want a Lasseiz-faire parental involvement in which I can check my students’ grades and go to conferences and talk with their teachers about how they’re doing and what we can do at home to help in the education process. I don’t want books taken out of school libraries because groups of parents are “concerned” with their content. Just because something makes you uncomfortable in your child’s education, that doesn’t mean it’s not an important part of an education. Learning about the Civil Rights Movement may make some people uncomfortable. Sexual education might be an awkward time for dinner table conversations. When your child is reading Of Mice and Men or The Kite Runner, it’s going to lead to some weird questions. But these conversations aren’t meant to demean parents, they’re meant to build the minds of kids. We used to believe that we wanted our kids to be better than we were, and growth almost always comes with discomfort. Generational growth creates friction between ideas as older ideas and methods are challenged. If we really want better for our kids, we need to get more comfortable as parents with being uncomfortable.

And the uncomfortable truth is that this isn’t the fault of teachers, administrators, or any educator. They’re doing their job in trying to challenge minds and create uncomfortably difficult situations that forces children to grow beyond the perception of the world that they get at home. As parents, our job is to allow that to happen the same way we have to let our kids fall of the couch periodically when they’re toddlers because pain is an unfortunate lesson. We’ll comfort them, we’ll give them space to process, and sometimes to fall again, but we’re not there to make their lives easier. We’re there to make sure they grow up to be good people, and that means we need them to be well-educated and well-rounded.

We need to stop allowing charlatans and con-men to politicize the things that we fundamentally agree with each other on. Like the fact that we want our kids to have good, challenging, and comprehensive educations. If you don’t want your kids to read something, go talk to their teacher. Go to conferences, spend time with your kids, read it together, and add context. Read it yourself and challenge yourself. Talk to other parents who may or may not agree with you, and create parent reading groups with other parents. The fear of what our kids are learning comes from a lack of familiarity with what’s being taught in reality. Many, if not most, school districts publish their curriculum online. Every public school offers conferences. Teachers are yearning to work with parents and not against us, and they long for us to get more involved in our children’s education rather than stomping about and getting angry when we don’t understand. Be a collaborator in your child’s education not simply a bystander, or worse, actively working against the teachers trying to make your child ready for a rapidly-changing and difficult world.

Let’s work together. Let’s work with teachers and administrators. Let’s stop trying to assert our rights as parents and start recognizing our children's rights to a quality and challenging education that we are actively participating in. When we do this, and we stop allowing our kids to be negatively politicized, we can start solving the real problems in education like outdated materials, a lack of quality technology in schools, and building infrastructures and staffing problems that make schools untenable.