Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation?
I was recently delighted to write the foreword to this important report by Joanna Williams for Civitas, in which Joanna charts the 'mission creep' in UK schools, and if you're interested in what's going on in our schools, I'd encourage you to read it.
Foreword to Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation?
This excellent and timely report articulates why the raising of children has become so highly contested in the United Kingdom.
It used to be widely accepted that parents had authority over their children.
Mothers and fathers were responsible for their children’s physical safety, for feeding, clothing, and sheltering their offspring, and raising them with a moral and spiritual foundation according to their own beliefs and traditions. Schools existed to teach children to read, write, and add up, and to impart the skills and knowledge that they would require for adult life.
Anyone who has set foot in a British secondary school recently will have observed that the remit of our education system has expanded far beyond teaching the ‘three Rs’. From ‘diversity week’, assemblies encouraging climate action, or adverts for the lunchtime LGBTQ+ club, British schools have become increasingly concerned with promoting social action to children.
As the report attests, in addition to their academic responsibilities, schools have always played an important role in ‘socialising’ children to prepare them for adult life. We take for granted that through their school experience, children will learn important virtues and ‘soft skills’ such as patience, tolerance, hard work, self-control, and how to work collaboratively with others.
But as this report so clearly sets out, over the last decade or two there has been a concerning ‘mission creep’ in many schools: responsibility for socialising children has morphed into a determination to drive social, moral, and even sexual change, often against the wishes and values of parents and the wider public.
Many parents are concerned that teachers are undermining their right to raise their children as they wish, and teachers feel unsupported in their role by parents.
These tensions will be familiar to anyone who has recent experience of education, and this report brilliantly articulates the cause of mutual distrust; namely that the boundaries between parents’ rights and teachers’ responsibility have become blurred. On the one hand, many parents are failing in their responsibilities, with alarming numbers of children starting school without being potty trained, and many are failing to instil in their children the standards of behaviour and respect for others that are necessary for school – and adult – life. On the other hand, many schools are encroaching on the authority of parents, from issuing patronising instructions about what to feed children or when to allow them to walk home from school alone, to serious and shocking instances of schools keeping secrets from parents about what children are being taught, or about their son’s or daughter’s decision to ‘change gender’.
This blurring of boundaries between parents and schools is not a minor problem that can be muddled through; it is fundamentally undermining the collective authority of adults in Britain. When teachers tell children that parents who hold traditional views are bigoted, the authority of the parent is weakened.
When parents criticise a child’s teacher in their hearing, the authority of that teacher is weakened. Yet many parents now feel they have no choice but to warn their children that what they are told by their teachers about certain topics may in fact not be true. A whole generation of children is being deprived of the security of being able to trust those who care for them and of the certainty of knowing what is expected of them in adult life.
In addition to providing much-needed clarity about what has gone wrong and how, the report offers inspiration for where to go from here. Joanna Williams suggests we must be far clearer about the demarcation of responsibilities between school and home. We need a collective acknowledgement that ‘the primary role of the school is the transmission of knowledge and the primary role of the family is nurturing children, including their moral and spiritual development’.
The challenge is going to be to persuade schools – and the government – to let go. To let go of the insistence that children need to be taught about contentious ideas in which schools are not expert and for which there is little evidence of benefit. And, apart from in extreme cases, schools will have to let go of taking responsibility for children whose parents are not fulfilling their duties. If schools continue to allow children to turn up in nappies, parents will continue to send them to school that way. We must understand that when responsibility is taken away from people, people become irresponsible.
There will be a period of pain as both parents and schools readjust. But readjust they must, because without the protective shield of collective adult authority, our children are far more vulnerable to both people and ideas that mean them harm.
As Joanna Williams writes so compellingly, we don’t want schools and families to be ‘competitors’ or even ‘partners’; rather, parents and teachers should be firm ‘allies’ in the vital task of raising and socialising the next generation.
Find Joanna on Twitter @jowilliams293
