A parent’s first duty is not complicated. It is to love a child, form a child’s character, and prepare that child to be a productive member of society.
Schools exist to help with that work by teaching children. They do not exist to replace it.
That distinction is now under pressure. In some academic circles, a new language has taken hold. Adults are recast as “oppressors.” Children are recast as “the oppressed.” Ordinary parental guidance—to wait for mature intimacy, dress with dignity, respect the rules of the house—is treated as a kind of tyranny called “adultism.” Once that frame is accepted, the family is no longer the first school. It becomes the problem schools seek to correct.
This is not an argument against teaching history, culture, or justice. Children should learn the full American story: its sins along with its astonishing capacity for self-correction. They should learn about other peoples—without being taught to sort the world into permanent camps of victims and villains.
Studies of non-Western cultures, at their best, can widen a student’s knowledge. At their worst, though, they are used as a ready-made story of grievance in which individualism is suspect, parents are obstacles, and the state becomes the guardian of the child.
Materials now circulating in teacher networks make this danger concrete. Tool kits offer plug-and-play lessons. Unions supply packets that fold current politics into the school day. Publishers follow the demand.
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None of this requires secret meetings. It requires only a closed loop: activists write the framework, unions distribute it, publishers profit from it, and busy teachers are handed the path of least resistance. The child, meanwhile, is taught to see authority at home as something to be interrogated rather than trusted.
A free society cannot survive if that lesson is internalized. Children need parents who set limits. They need to learn to control themselves before someone teaches them to control the world. Healthy limits are not cruel; in reality, they help children grow into virtuous adults.
When a school implies that a good mother is an oppressor, it is not liberating the child. It is isolating children from relationship most likely to protect them.
Parents remain the primary educators. That is a fact older than any department of education. Government may compel attendance, fund buildings, and set academic standards, but none of those acts give it the right to reeducate a child’s loyalties. Teachers are professionals. They are not co-parents, and they are not moral substitutes for the family. When public institutions forget that, they invite the very conflict they claim to prevent.
Accountability, then, supports citizenship. Parents should speak up and ask for the actual documents: the lesson plans, the recommended titles, the training slide decks, the union packets. Summaries on television are not enough—primary sources are necessary.
Ask simple questions. Who approved this unit? What is the learning objective besides political sentiment? How does this lesson treat parental authority? Can a family opt out without penalty? If officials cannot answer clearly, that is an answer.
Speaking up does not imply any kind of resentment toward teachers. Most teachers entered the classroom to teach real subjects like reading, mathematics, science, and history, not to referee a child’s relationship with home. Many are as uneasy as parents when ideology arrives prepackaged and labeled as compassion. They deserve colleagues and administrators who protect the craft of teaching instead of turning it into activism.
The encouraging truth is that parents are no longer isolated. Technology has created alternatives. Homeschooling, hybrid schools, charters, tutors, and high-quality independent materials exist in a way they did not even a generation ago.
The existence of these alternatives does not mean everyone should simply abandon public schools. But it is competition, which encourages public schools to regain the public’s trust.
Do not wait for a perfect national consensus. Start where you live. Read what your child is assigned. Attend the meeting. Speak in a calm voice and ask for specifics. Vote. Recruit neighbors who may not share every political opinion but share this one: that a child should not be trained to see his parents as the enemy.
The work is tiring. It is also the most natural work there is. You know your children’s fears, gifts, and the looks on their faces when they test boundaries. No toolkit knows that. No publisher does. No union packet does.
Raise your children. Teach them to think. Teach them to be just without becoming bitter, proud of their country without being blind to its faults, and loyal to their family without being closed to the world. Then hold every public office to a standard worthy of those children.
The future will not be saved by the loudest slogan. It will be saved by parents who refuse to surrender the first classroom, which has always been the home.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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