A teacher made a phenomenally bad argument about why only teachers should have a say in shaping curricula. My colleague Becket Adams pointed out aptly that under her analogy, surgeons should be able to do whatever they want to your children without your consent.
The teacher, Christina Wyman, apparently intended her surgeons to teachers analogy as a reductio ad absurdum of the populist notion that parents should have a say, but she accidentally wrote a reductio of the elitist notion that regular people need to sit down and shut up.
Terry McAuliffe blew his governor race by attacking parents who objected to pornography in school libraries. McAuliffe angrily proclaimed parents shouldn’t be telling schools what they should teach. Conservatives, as they tend to, pounced. Those in the media who saw how deadly this was to McAuliffe tried to pretend he didn’t say what he said.
Many on the Left, however, reiterated McAuliffe’s misguided honesty. Georgetown professor Don Moynihan rolled out the Left’s favorite cartoon and compared it to the idea that parents should have a say over their children’s education.
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1445542065748643846That is, they really don’t believe parents have any knowledge in how to educate children. That’s where Wyman is coming from with her awful argument.
“Parents think they have the right to control teaching and learning because their children are the ones being educated. But it actually (gasp!) doesn’t work that way. It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child,” she wrote.
“Teaching, too, is a science. Unless they’re licensed and certified, parents aren’t qualified to make decisions about curricula,” Wyman added.
The clear implication is that if someone is a subject-matter expert, they get to do to your child what they want to do to your child, regardless of what you want. That she extends scientific expertise to rearing a child shows the limitless nature of this ideology. In short, parents have no say over what happens to their children if some expert somewhere has a prescription.
This is merely an extension of what we’ve seen from the nanny-staters during COVID-19. They tried to close private schools. They used the pandemic to rail against home schooling.
They told us that health authorities — experts, you see! — should dictate what we do with our lives.
It’s not only an incursion into individual liberty — it’s also an attack on democracy. If you pretend every situation is like the inhabitants of an airplane, with one or two people who know what to do and everyone else who is fit only to sit sedately buckled into a chair, then you have to hate democracy.
Check out Wyman’s first sentence: “Parents and politicians across the country are interfering with the curricula that public schools use to teach students.”
“Interfering” is an amazing word choice there. That is, only school boards and teachers properly have a say over how to educate a child. The “interfering” folks are parents, who are, properly, the primary educators of their children, and “politicians,” who are the people’s representatives in a democracy.
Public schooling is a partnership between the public and parents, and Wyman thinks both need to butt out. That’s where the technocratic Left is taking us.
