Hear, hear! I just finished reading a comment about an article I wrote the other day about anti-LGBTQ bullying in public schools. The commenter suggested, apparently earnestly and with good intent, that the most effective solution to the bullying problem is for parents of LGBTQ students to leave the public school system.
Setting aside formidable practical obstacles to that “solution,” I would point out that members of minorities have as much right to public education as any other child in the United States. And that means, inescapably, that some parents are going to have to swallow their ideologies sometimes – recognizing that they live in a pluralistic nation with many different kinds of people. That’s supposed to be one of our strengths, and I believe it’s one of the reasons our nation became as strong as it did, despite the fact that we’ve never lived up to our equality ideals in full.
Giving all children a quality education (or striving to) at public expense empowers us to do great things.
Sadly, we don’t always recognize that children must come first. For example, in the Supreme Court decision of Wisconsin v Yoder, Amish parents were awarded the right to not only keep their children out of public schools but to not educate them to high school equivalency standards. The justices reasoned that Amish parents’ religious rights must take precedence over the rights of the children.
Many people applauded the decision then and continue to do so today. But I live in part of Michigan with a heavy Amish population and I see the tragic consequences.
Roughly 40% of people born into Amish families do not end up joining the church, do end up leaving the traditional Amish life after they become adults.
Given that Amish families have lots and lots of children, that’s a lot of people leaving the church. That’s a lot of completely uneducated people leaving the church.
They’ve only gone to school until they are 14 years old, they have almost no general education beyond basic arithmetic, and they are practically unemployable. Around here, they make up an impoverished underclass with few prospects. Some are able to scramble for a high school level education at their own expense, the vast majority can’t. Nobody pays adults to go to school, after all.
This is what it means to let individual parents dictate education in a way that harms their children very badly.
This is the end result of what conservative parents are urging today.
