by J.M. Schell

Created on: July 24, 2008

We've been told for decades that we as parents really don't know enough about education to have much to say about what goes on in the schoolhouse. Indeed, this was extended so far that in California a few years ago, a court decision came down that essentially said that the schools "own" our children. We've been assured for the past 40-50 years that since teachers "know what's best" that it's best if parents mostly just stay out of the way. That's how it was when I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's even more the case today. Still, whenever the schools are found wanting, when it's discovered that in fact, they are generally and nearly universally (in the United States) not doing what they are supposed to be doing, namely educating our children, these same schools then desperately cast about for some excuse-any excuse-for why that might be.

The most pernicious and specious to say nothing of dishonest of these has to be the "it's the parents' fault!" canard.

Beginning in the 1960s, the schools came to regard themselves as la petit academe, small universities. No longer were the American public schools to be places where parents could send their kids to be schooled in the basics, the so-called "three Rs." Rather, the "new schools" were engines of social change, places where young minds would enter filled with the boorish and dangerously archaic values of traditional America, to be reshaped. Teachers, according to one president of the NEA in the 1960s, were no longer simple "dispensers of information" but were to become instead shapers of values; they would hasten the social change certain socio-political perspectives of the time saw as necessary to move American society to take a more "responsible" place in the world.

By the mid- to late-1970s, when parents, horrified that their children were coming out of school unable to read, unable to perform the simplest mathematics, unable to identify in which century the American Civil War took place, but able almost like trained parrots to spout rhetoric about the "evils" of America, parents began to revolt. The schools reacted not by taking stock and re-examining their customers' (parents and students) desires but instead by circling the wagons, preparing the cauldrons of Greek Fire and, as is appropriate in academe, producing a truly astounding volume of "research" and other works that, typically, working backward from pre-determined conclusions found numerous ways to in essence proclaim "it' not our

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