Where will it all end?
As we ponder banning books, critical race theory, state-mandated tests, endless teacher paperwork and parental eyes on every aspect of the classroom, we daydream of a third-grade Chattanooga classroom where the unmarried, 58-year-old teacher with iron-gray hair, smart suits, sensible shoes and granny glasses held sway over 35 or so 9-year-olds.
She taught reading, writing (cursive!), math (multiplication tables memorization!), science and social studies, of course, but there was also time for units on the presidents, Greek gods, the stars and constellations, and England and Switzerland (she’d been to both), and always time after lunch to read passages from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books.
Parents came to the school but only for occasions like PTA, carnivals, parent-teacher conferences and classroom parties.
Can public schools ever again be that critical center of learning, where parents don’t have to worry about what is being taught and where students and teachers have a happy, stress-free coexistence?
Regrettably, that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.
What got us churning on this is a bill introduced into the Tennessee legislature this week called the “Parent Bill of Rights Act” about the right of parents to information about their children’s schooling. On the surface, it seems perfectly logical that parents should be entitled to know what their children are being taught and what kind of content is available for them to read.
But the bill gets pretty detailed. It requires school districts to provide parents access to the names of instructors, titles available in the school library, teacher manuals, and curriculum; it requires parents to provide written consent before a student can participate in any extracurricular activity, family life lesson, field trip, school assembly, or guest speaker event; and it prohibits certain health care practitioners from providing medical treatment to a minor without parental consent or an appropriate court order.
Whew! Our first thought is “poor teacher.”
We imagine the end of a classroom day for a teacher, with papers still to grade, lesson plans still to be assembled and voice messages still to check. On those messages, Mrs. Smith wants to see the teacher’s manual because her daughter can’t work out a math problem “the easy way” that she used to when she was in school. Mr. Jones is concerned because his son is reading a book on baseball player Jackie Robinson, and it talks some about racism. Ms. Jackson wants to know exactly what will be mentioned by a guest speaker on “health care.” And Mr. Brown wants to find out why somebody cleaned his child’s playground scrape and put a Band-Aid on it without his permission.
If such potential additional work is heaped on teachers who are – in many cases – overworked, underpaid and stressed with all that is already asked of them, who would want to become a teacher?
Teachers are among the most critical professionals we have in the country, and it seems like all we do is ask more of them. With so many jobs available in the country at this time, it wouldn’t surprise us to find fewer and fewer students choosing education as a college major. Even a retail job that might not pay as much may seem inviting compared to what is more and more being asked of those in education.
However, we’re not unsympathetic to parents and others who have seen, in places, education turned into indoctrination, basic subjects tied into feelings, and objective outcomes in math and history become subjective.
None of that happened in the third-grade classroom of our daydreams, and that’s why so many parents today are seeking educational choices for their children. They’re not trying to avoid mixed-race classrooms, all history being taught or even the importance of emotions, but they want a place where their child can attend school to learn and grow and become the person they are intended to be.
It’s why Williamson County near Nashville is opening a K-12 charter school – USA Classical Academy, “informed by [Michigan’s private, Christian] Hillsdale College” – in 2023 with a focus on the liberal arts and sciences, moral character and civic virtue.
Its vision, the school website says, “is a teacher-driven classical model that develops independent-thinking young adults who support values of freedom, personal accountability, and pursuit of happiness as espoused by our country’s founders. We wish to bring together families from different backgrounds, ethnically as well as socio-economically, who share a common desire to educate their children on traditional math, science, classical literature and unfiltered history.”
Sort of like the third-grade classroom we remember.
In our traditional public schools, we think there should be a reasonable middle ground for parents to know what’s in their child’s classrooms and libraries without teachers and administrators having to put up with all the minute requests in the proposed bill. But we also know there is a growing sphere of parents across the country who are rightly demanding public schools offer more choice and a return to a more classical learning model. And we don’t see that changing.