What led me to writing this post? A couple of things:

1. I just heard a House Republican press conference touting their great success in passing a Parents Bill of Rights (with no Democratic votes), knowing full well that it won’t even get to a vote in the Senate.
2. Reading articles yesterday about a teacher in Tallahassee who was fired for showing her 5th grade class Michelangelo’s David, after which a parent complained that the statue is pornographic.
3. How Glenn Youngkin won his election for governor of Virginia after his opponent Terry McCauliffe said that parents had no role to play in school curricula, and Youngkin jumped on that.
4. Knowing that the US never winds up near the top on international educational rankings.
5. Reading continually about the elimination of certain books from school curricula or libraries
6. Hearing accusations, without any basis, that Critical Race Theory is being taught in schools, and that the result is to divide students from each other, and make white students hate themselves.
7. All the issues about gay, non-binary and trans kids, how they are treated and how they should be treated.

And so on.

So those are some of the problems. There are also a few obvious facts.

1. Each child learns differently, and that won’t change.
2. Each teacher teaches differently, and that can’t change.
3. Every school district is different, as is every school board and every school’s administration.
4. Every school classroom is different, with children from all sorts of backgrounds and belief systems.

Now, as usual, I am going to attack the Republicans (but only because they deserve it). As I understand the parents’ bill of rights (and I have not paid a lot of attention to it), it would, among other things, guarantee that parents would receive a lot of information about school curricula for their children, including lists of books that would be read in their classes. Listening to the several Republican House members who spoke at the press conference, they wanted to stress that the Democratic Party’s lunatic left (that was Kevin McCarthy’s phrase) was the cause of all of these problems, and the fact that no Democrats voted for this bill is evidence that the Democrats are simply beholden to evil teachers’ unions. In addition, they attacked the Democrats for everything else in the world, all because of the weakness of the Biden administration.

What gets me is that the Republicans just cannot talk about education without talking about politics. They cannot write an education bill whose basic purpose is educational, not political. And this is true not only with regard to education, but with regard to many other things as well.

Just like Republicans have created doubt in scientists and health care professionals for political purposes, they now want to sow doubt in educators for the same reason. Don’t let them tell you what to do, they say, you tell them what they should do. You know more than they do, so you can tell them how to treat your health, and you can tell them how to educate your children. You know best. But guess what? You don’t.

Take the issue of slavery, or more broadly the issue of how Blacks have been (and are) treated in our country. Let’s say that a teacher tells the kids that Blacks were kidnapped in Africa, sold into slavery in the United States, worked unmercifully, split from their families. That they were kept from voting even after the Civil War, not allowed to marry Whites, not allowed to buy property in or live in certain neighborhoods, not allowed into certain jobs, or to eat in restaurants or sit in theaters. And that all of that was bad, wrong.

What would be wrong with that teaching? How would that divide children, or make White children hate themselves? And, from another perspective, how can you education American children if they don’t know that? I think Republican leaders know there is no reason to oppose this instruction, except that they have political reasons for trying to make a big stink about and cast blame on Democrats.

The issues surrounding gender are admittedly more complicated and more sensitive. Isn’t it obvious that children should not be encouraged to think of themselves as gay if they are not, and should not be encouraged to think of themselves as having been born into the wrong gender? Isn’t it also obvious that children who are gay, or who have inbred gender issues, have to be treated with compassion, so that they can succeed without being targets of hate and bullying? I think the answers to both questions are yes. But the two political parties have set their own positions (and the positions of their opposite) in stone, seeming making such attempts doomed to failure, and maybe even impossible to start.

It appears that there is no way to separate health care from politics (and it’s because of the politicians who belittle the professionals), and there is no way to separate education from politics (and it’s because of the politicians who belittle the professionals).

Well, if I ran the zoo…….