The Fight Over What Children LearnMoshe Krakowski
29 Jan 2022
The COVID pandemic has radically changed the ordinary functioning of life across the globe. One of the largest changes has been to education. In the US, schools were closed or moved to Zoom, and those that returned to in-person learning often did so with masks, distancing, and plexiglass shields. There have been many consequences of this change, but one of the most significant is that it brought the day-to-day practices of schools out into the open.
For the first time, Zoom gave parents a window into public school classrooms and many of them didn’t like what they saw. From poor lessons to inappropriate reading material to troubling racial essentialism, parents were roused from their usual passivity to push back against the educational monoculture that dominates school boards, unions, and academic schools of education. This pushback has taken various forms, from ill-advised and authoritarian anti-CRT laws to reasonable transparency laws, and from Twitter campaigns to parent protests at school boards. Parents want schools open, and they want to know what their kids are being taught.
A key moment in this parental awakening came in early October when Democrat Terry McAuliffe insisted that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This was widely seen as a major turning point during the 2021 race for governor in the very blue state of Virginia. McAuliffe had been leading in the polls, but K–12 parents, in particular, abandoned him en masse, and he ultimately lost to Republican newcomer Glenn Youngkin.
This electoral upset exposed—at a national level—the massive gap that had grown between parents on the one hand and pundits, politicians, and teachers’ unions on the other. Parents do want a say in what their children are taught. But not everyone agrees. In December, a New York Times writer stated on Meet the Press, “I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies.”
Well, I am a professional educator. I am a professor of education who teaches teachers, and I can say unequivocally that the belief that one needs to be a professional educator to have meaningful insights as to what ought to be taught reflects a fundamental philosophical and cultural misunderstanding of what education actually is.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/01/29/the-fight-over-what-children-learn/
