Parental rights & wrongs

A quick (I hope) follow-up to the previous post.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m all Muh Parental Rights and that PARENTS KNOW BEST.

Because I’m not.

It’s really the way of the world. When we’re on one side, the other side is the enemy, and then when we’re in their shoes – when we’re the customer service provider, the minister, the teacher – well, that’s a different story.

So in brief: go to a gathering of school parents, and it’s all complaints about the school. Sit in the faculty lounge…ouch. Burn after burn after burn.

And all of it probably true in some way, you know?

The 1959 Saturday Evening Post cover over there sums it up.

So, parents and their role and rights in the education of their kids:

It’s complicated, of course, when you outsource this, whether it be to public or private institutions. In both, parents can claim a stake, not only because it’s their children you’re educating, but because it’s their money, too – their taxes or their tuition. And the more tuition is paid, definitely the more entitled the tuition-payers feel.

And perhaps that’s one way to break it down:

Parents’ rights….or parents’ entitlement?

Look. If every parent had veto power over every aspect of curriculum, you’d have an endless nightmare on your hands. At some point, you just have to trust.

But at the same time, there has to be accountability and transparency and respect as well, from the institution’s part.

And perhaps a quick run through educational history might be useful here – not that I’m going to do that. But just consider the history of institutional education: through most of history, when it existed, it did so on a local scale, with communities – aka mostly parents – with all the power to build the schoolhouse and hire and fire the teacher. Throughout most of history, teachers – whether they be in classrooms or individual tutors – have been hired workers, not icons and heroes.

I’m going to return to something I’ve said again and again. Or at least maybe I’ve said it to myself, if not here.

Half – maybe more than half – of these education-related battles would disappear if:

a) Education wasn’t compulsory or at least weren’t as highly structured as it is

b) There was a mechanism for 100% school choice in the public system.

and

c) the role of institutional education in communities and families’ lives were minimized.

It would be a completely different scene if you, living in a neighborhood, didn’t have to send your kids to a specific school with its particular rules all day for half a year, an institution that dictated your family’s schedule, a school that your obligatory taxes support – that whole situation sets up a dynamic of expectation and resentment and ownership on both sides that would not be so deeply built into a freer system.

Not that a freer system wouldn’t have its issues, among them a whole other set of reasons for feeling entitled as well as potential tribalism and uniformity. But I’m talking about these particular battles of curriculum that we’re constantly fighting now.

But that really wasn’t my point, is it?

My point was – no, parents don’t always know best. Of course they don’t. Parents abuse and neglect. Parents screw up massively.

One of my many hobbyhorses is against the contemporary self-assurance mantra of “You’re great as you are!” “You’re doing your best!” whether that be for individuals or parents – especially mothers. The alternative is not a stance of constant self-doubt or self-recrimination, but to position ourselves as parents as people who must always be affirmed that we must, simply because we are parenting, are of course doing our best – well, that’s just a modern form of paterfamilias.

If Mom is always “doing her best” just because she’s Mom – why the heck are so many of us still grappling with Mom and Dad issues into adulthood?

I wrote about it here.

I don’t know where the sweet spot between blinkered guilt and blind arrogance is, but I can say that I think it has something to do with this:

The most important thing you can do as a parent is to give your child the inner resources to overcome your bad parenting.

That means, first of all, reminding them, through word and action, that you’re not God – only God is.

And, to tie this into my most current Issue of the Year: 80% of the “trans kids” situation is caused directly by frankly insane transchausen-by-proxy parents – with the rest of it from greedy and unscrupulous therapists and medical professionals.

So no. There’s an objective standard of care, behavior and humanity that we’re all accountable to, no matter our role. That’s the standard.

Parents do have an absolute right to know every single thing that’s going on in the classroom – every single thing, as well as a role in decision making dependent on the school’s structure – but they don’t have veto power over any of it either.

Rights, but not entitlement.

On both sides.