The Culture War on Public Education
I have a new piece in the current print issue of The Progressive, now available on line. An excerpt:
Groups like Moms for Liberty argue that “our children do not belong to the government” or schools. This is absolutely correct. However, the implication that students actually belong to their parents is not true, either. These real, live, young human beings do not belong to anyone.
Yet we still see pieces like an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Philip Hamburger, head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded law firm, that argued that a parent’s First Amendment rights include controlling whatever speech their child might hear (and therefore anything a school might say). It is a bold argument that sees a child’s rights being “owned” by their parents.
The work of banning books and gagging teachers is really about taking rights from students. Every time access to a book is restricted, the rights of students to read that work are stripped. Every “schools shouldn’t be teaching this or even mentioning it” rule is restricting the rights of students to learn.
Some of this is fueled by a fear as old as parenthood—the fear that comes with turning over your beloved flesh and blood to someone who is not you. Some of it may be fueled by darker motives.
On Twitter, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte suggests that the rise of fascism is powered by “people who ran off their kids by being overbearing bigots, and now are casting around for a way to force their kids to talk to them again.” And there is no question that one culture war goal is to energize the base, drown out the post-Roe backlash against conservatives, and pull out a victory for MAGA beyond this year’s midterms.
Using the culture wars to undermine public education threatens students’ right to a free, quality education. Dismantling public education to replace it with the “educational freedom” favored by powerful groups like ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) means creating a system in which education is a commodity that every family must purchase on their own, armed with nothing but their own resources and a small voucher from a government that will otherwise have no responsibility to help them educate their child.