Building on last week’s discussion about decisions to ban books and conversations in schools, Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the APM Research Lab recently released a “Mood of the Nation” poll. They asked adults across the country who should decide what young people learn about potentially controversial topics like race, evolution, and sex education.
The good news is that most people in the poll think that the current cheerleaders for censorship—state legislators and governors—should have very little say. When it comes to sex ed, for example, only 9% of respondents think these elected officials should have “a great deal of influence.” More good news, health teachers are relatively high on the list of supported decision makers with 40% of respondents saying they should have a “great deal of influence.” The not-so-good news in this survey, however, is that most respondents think parents should have a lot of influence over how sex education (and race and evolution) are taught which will undoubtedly add fuel to the GOP’s so-called parental rights movement.
I get it, I’m a parent. I want control over most aspects of my kids’ lives and definitely care about what they learn in school. But for the most part, I’m not qualified to tell a school what to teach or how to teach it. I’ve forgotten 83% of what I learned in history, have no idea how to balance an equation in chemistry, and have no artistic or musical talent to share. I believe myself to be a good writer, but I don’t know what an acceptable fourth grade essay should look like or how many pieces of supporting evidence a high school English teacher should expect in a literary analysis.
I think elementary school math is a good example of why parents shouldn’t be making teaching decisions. Our kids are learning it in an entirely different way than we did. In the last few years, adults who function perfectly fine in a world of numbers (whether it’s using coupons or doing their taxes) suddenly found themselves unable to help with third grade math homework. Sure, they could find the answer, but only over the screaming protestations of an eight-year-old declaring “you’re doing it wrong!”
I’ve heard many parents complain and ask rhetorically why “they” had to change a perfectly good way of teaching math into something so confusing. Only it’s not confusing to kids. My kids love and understand math in a way that I never did. They have developed math instincts that I will never have because professional educators with years of training came up with new and better pedagogy. If parents were asked whether they support this new method, I’d bet many would say no because they don’t understand it and adults are hardwired to be uncomfortable with things we don’t understand.
That goes double or triple for sexual things we don’t understand because sex is more taboo than math and science. When adults get uncomfortable, they get scared and start to believe the worst. Take the rumor about schools making safe spaces for furries. It’s been circulating on social media and apparently in local school board meetings since 2008. At a January meeting in Midland Michigan one speaker told the crowd: “Yesterday I heard that at least one of our schools in our town, has in one of the unisex bathrooms a litter box for the kids that identify as cats.” This was picked up by the head of Michigan’s GOP who wrote on Facebook: “Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom. Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools.”
For those who don’t know, furries are a subculture of people who like anthropomorphized like your run-of-the-mill Gund bear or Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony. They may dress up in furry costumes, attend furry conventions, or develop their own “fursona.” Or they may not. For some, this is part of a sexual fantasy or fetish, and there is plenty of furry porn available on the interwebs (but there’s porn for everything). For other furries, this is a purely non-sexual aspect of their personality. To be clear, however, these people do not think they are animals any more than people who get dressed up to go to Comicon think they are Vulcans or Wookies.
The rumor that schools allow kids to identify as cats and go to the bathroom in a litter box or eat lunch off the cafeteria floor isn’t really about furries—it’s about transgender kids and unisex bathrooms. These parents don’t understand what it means to be trans or non-binary or gender fluid and that makes them uncomfortable. Instead of learning more or trusting the school to know more than they do, they lash out in their discomfort, latch onto the most outrageous version of a school letting kids be themselves, and demand more control. It’s not a stretch to believe that if/when these parents get more control of the school, they will make life harder for trans kids under the guise of protecting their own kids from—as the parent in Midland put it—“a nefarious agenda.”
The truth is that most parents agree with me about what should be taught in sex education. The new poll found consensus across politics and religion with 88% of Democrats, 63% of Republicans, and 55% of born-again Christians saying that kids should learn about contraception as a way to avoid pregnancy rather than just about abstinence. That’s great. But it doesn’t change my mind about who should make decisions.
I believe that parents are important sex educators of their children. Whether you agree or disagree with what schools are teaching, it’s your job to augment it with your own values and opinions. You better believe that my then-8th grader got an earful when she came home carrying an egg-baby as part of some warped exercise in preventing teen pregnancy.
Sure, I shared this opinion with the teacher, principal, and director of health education for the district because parents have a right to make their opinions known, but that’s not the same as saying parents have the right “take back the school.” Teachers and school administrators are trained professionals who know more about educating kids than most parents. We should let them do their jobs.