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Home – Education Policy & School Reform News – Children Should Not Be Trained to See Parents as the Enemy

Children Should Not Be Trained to See Parents as the Enemy

A parent’s first duty is not complicated. It is to love a child, form a child’s character, and prepare that child to be a productive member of society. 

Schools exist to help with that work by teaching children. They do not exist to replace it.

That distinction is now under pressure. In some academic circles, a new language has taken hold. Adults are recast as “oppressors.” Children are recast as “the oppressed.” Ordinary parental guidance—to wait for mature intimacy, dress with dignity, respect the rules of the house—is treated as a kind of tyranny called “adultism.” Once that frame is accepted, the family is no longer the first school. It becomes the problem schools seek to correct.

This is not an argument against teaching history, culture, or justice. Children should learn the full American story: its sins along with its astonishing capacity for self-correction. They should learn about other peoples—without being taught to sort the world into permanent camps of victims and villains.

Studies of non-Western cultures, at their best, can widen a student’s knowledge. At their worst, though, they are used as a ready-made story of grievance in which individualism is suspect, parents are obstacles, and the state becomes the guardian of the child.

Materials now circulating in teacher networks make this danger concrete. Tool kits offer plug-and-play lessons. Unions supply packets that fold current politics into the school day. Publishers follow the........

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