Just how much say should parents have in their child’s lives? Where does that influence end? Are there limits on it? These questions are now being dissected across issues, particularly questions of vaccination against COVID-19 and with regards to education. Just like many issues in our society, this topic is divisive, and my goal is to handle it with care, but also lay out what I believe are some key issues and considerations. I will discuss them separately in this post but connect them at the end.
PARENTAL RIGHTS - EDUCATION
The debate around education heated up as Terry McAuliffe (D) in a debate against Glenn Youngkin (R) in a race for the Virginia Governorship, declared “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” adding, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” in response to concerns parents had brought up about sexualized books kept in the school’s library. School boards are increasingly facing resistance from concerned parents and guardians over the content being taught to their children. A former teacher as well as a parent alleged that the books at the school library contain sexually explicit content and depictions of pedophilia. These books have been removed while a committee made up of parents and educators makes the decision on whether they are appropriate. Youngkin has capitalized on such messaging from McAuliffe because all parents across the political spectrum desire a good education for their children. Parental influence and school choice are often a key talking point for conservatives and liberty-minded individuals.
The premise around not allowing parents to have a say in the content of their child’s education, especially when there are few affordable options aside from public school, especially for those facing economic hardship, is that the self-proclaimed educators and experts know what a child needs more than the parents do. The notion of “it takes a village” has gone beyond simply the community contributing to the upbringing of children, but that a small bureaucracy of the village can dictate what is best for children, cutting out the parents completely or at least attempting to silence and minimize their influence. However, it is not the school system that puts food in children’s bellies, provides clothes for their bodies, provides emotional support, and other much needed guidance needed to develop responsible citizens. It is the parents, in general, that want what is truly best for their child.
However, as parents lose their influence to impart moral values onto their children, more focus is being placed on moral relativism. Moral relativism essentially argues that there are no absolute truths and that different cultures have different truths and therefore different morals. It essentially dismisses any objective set of standards by which a society can judge good behavior from bad, rendering it fluid to the feelings of the day. Though the thought exercise of exploring why something is wrong can be useful, the dangers here are obvious. Many students are simply being taught that what they feel is true, regardless of any objective measure. This is being taught across schools and graduate level programs. For example, Gad Saad, a Lebanese refugee and psychology professor in Canada, recounts a discussion he had with a graduate student who identifies with post-modernism (a fancy term for a moral relativist) who went so far as to suggest we cannot even declare that the sun is called the sun or that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Moral relativism simply argues against established facts, even what language means. One could see how teaching children and graduate students to reach the conclusion that not even language is an objective truth would burn the bridge needed to agree on basic premises to even begin to discuss ideas. If one cannot agree that up is not down, or that up is even called “up”, we have already lost the means to exist amicably and solve problems.
What this has led to is what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff refer to as the coddling of the American mind. We are gearing education and society around the feelings held by students in the classroom, violating the most basic tenet of psychology, according to Haidt and Lukianoff, by encouraging individuals with anxiety to avoid the things that cause them anxiety and instead shape the world around their anxiety, a behavior that indicates severely distorted thinking. Rates of mental illness and distress are at record numbers since the introduction of such teaching methods (and social media doesn’t help). People need strong moral value foundations from which to operate and know right from wrong, or risk being left with fragile footing and an inability to examine facts as they are. Haidt and Lukianoff refer to this as emotional reasoning, where an individual associates their emotional responses with absolute truth and assigns high importance to their opinion based on this. One need only look at college campuses to see resorts to shouting down speakers and occasionally more violent means, such as the events that occurred at Evergreen State College to silence dissenting opinions that they did not agree with and experienced “words as violence.”
In a New York Times opinion piece written in 2011, entitled “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts”, Professor Justin McBrayer investigates his child’s classroom assignments where they are asked to sort facts from opinions, and “without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion.” Some of these value claims, for which an absolute truth can’t be determined, he encountered include:
Copying homework assignments is wrong
All men are created equal
Drug dealers belong in prison
He summarizes that “our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp, that there are no moral facts or truths. These teachings can place common sense morality in the dumpster. If “murdering an innocent person is wrong” cannot be labeled a moral universal truth then we must ask ourselves how far have we let society go. The author gives credit to the schools for teaching children that they must treat one another with respect, but at the same time they are teaching that there are no absolute truths, and thus deprives students of a “consistent intellectual foundation”. One can see the glaring problem with teaching students that there is no absolute truth. We are not providing children with the tools to use their intellect to help them guide their emotions and solve problems, but rather to use their emotions to guide their thought process and opinion.
In his book, Inside American Education, Thomas Sowell, an economist and social theorist, writes about various programs and classes taught to change the values and beliefs of students, different from what they were taught in their homes. He suggests that programs such as drug prevention and sexual education are not what they claim to be, but rather attempts to alter healthy behavior in favor of ones that could be detrimental to a child’s well being and development. He goes on to explain the various brainwashing techniques that are employed in the classroom that include emotional stress or de-sensitization, isolation, cross-examining of pre-existing values and rewarding acceptance of their new attitudes and beliefs. He recounts classic examples such as students taken to morgues and told to touch dead bodies, imagine their own funerals, build their own coffins, imagine who’s life you’d save if you had to make a choice and could only save one, and other potentially emotionally scarring thought experiments. One particular instance of the in-class indoctrination Sowell calls attention to teachers showing a video of a woman giving birth. Sowell’s issue and point is not that children shouldn’t ever learn these things, but that the educators have usurped distribution of this knowledge from the parents and without regard for the various social and emotional maturities that the children had at the time. What one 13 year old is emotionally ready for may not be the same for another. Care must be taken before we expose children with moldable minds and innocence to potentially gruesome thought experiments or explicit images.
Published in 1993, Sowell’s book paints what should be a frightening picture for parents in 2021, where the fringes of society along with many in the educational field push more and more exposure of lewd images to children, or even pushing their political opinions on these minds such as the case in California where a teacher took down the American flag and joked with the students that they could pledge allegiance to the pride flag. Sowell points to parents as the greatest obstacle to the operation to instill moral relativism in their children. Unfortunately, many of these programs tend to be done under parent’s noses, as parents lack visibility into what is going on in schools until their child brings it to their attention or they see it for themselves, as is the case with the library books causing a ruckus in Virginia.
Rather than a reliance on the values of their parents, children are taught that they must individually come to moral decisions based on what feels right to them, never mind that a society and culture cannot constructively exist if half of the population thinks it’s okay to steal and half doesn’t based on their “feelings”. Moral values are one of the few things where a society would benefit from a monolithic standard that is accepted by all. Sowell concludes that “The most general - indeed pervasive - principle of these various programs is that decisions are not to be made by relying on traditional values passed on by parents or the surrounding society. Instead, those values are themselves to be questioned and compared with the values and behavior of other individuals or other societies. This is to be done in a neutral or ‘non-judgmental’ manner, which does not seek to determine a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way, but rather to find out what feels best to the particular individuals.”
COVID-19 Vaccination
In a related matter, discussions around parental rights over the COVID-19 vaccination are heating up as the country prepares to expand vaccination to children. In September, A Chicago judge took away a woman’s child custody rights last month because she hadn’t been vaccinated against COVID-19 and then reversed his decision shortly after. The husband is seeking to reinstate this requirement against her as part of the custody battle. In other cases, where parents are either together or divorced, there are increasing disputes about whether to vaccinate their children against COVID-19. Whose rights supersede the other’s? When does the boundary involve the State as a mediator? Lastly, what if both parents do not want to be vaccinated or vaccinate their child against COVID-19? These are complicated questions that I do not have the answer to but ones we have not previously had to consider in the context of a pandemic, as the COVID-19 vaccine has caused much more skepticism than previously mandated vaccination schedules for children due to the lower risks associated with the age group.
It is likely that any further FDA approvals for use in younger age groups will quell some of these arguments. However, the fact remains that children are not currently at high risk for death from this virus and that must be weighed against the benefits of vaccination by the scientific community, which thus far has not sorted out all of the research. A not yet peer-reviewed research report that sought to establish “the rate of post-vaccination cardiac myocarditis in the 12-15 and 16-17-year-old population in the context of their COVID-19 hospitalization risk” concluded that “post-vaccination cardiac adverse event (CAE) rate was highest in young boys aged 12-15 following dose two. For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate at both moderate (August 21, 2021 rates) and high COVID-19 hospitalization incidence. Further research into the severity and long-term sequelae of post-vaccination CAE is warranted. Quantification of the benefits of the second vaccination dose and vaccination in addition to natural immunity in this demographic may be indicated to minimize harm.” Other studies that I’ve come across indicate that this is not true, however those lump in female teens with males, when the incidence is largely occurring in men, thus diluting the sample. The fact remains that parents must be given the facts and they must feel that these facts are truthful and are prepared with full transparency.
As this pandemic comes under control, we need to be wary of blanket measures and try to tailor this to fit the demographic and people’s circumstances, as the risk of adverse outcomes is not equal among the various demographics. Ultimately, the medical community needs to provide assurances to parents around the research that will give them and their families confidence in whether or not to vaccinate their children against COVID-19. At the end of the day, it should be up to the discretion of the parent to make such decisions.
FINAL THOUGHTS: TL;DR
To reiterate, it is important that we respect the role of parents in both making medical decisions and having input on educational curricula for their children who do not yet have the mental acuity to fully comprehend risks and consequences to their actions. These decisions should remain in the hands of parents, and parents must be armed with the best information possible to make the best decisions for themselves and their children. We cannot allow a society where decisions are made based on peer pressure, threats, shame, or least desirable, feelings which should have no place in an intellectual argument. The burden of proof is on the scientific community and education community to assure parents of the benefits and safety of each, respectively.