Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Have y’all forgotten? Already? Have you forgotten how hard it was to teach your own children during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when their bedroom was the classroom? When they sat in a chair for hours, watched a laptop screen, then fatigued and frustrated asked you for help?
Help in subjects you haven’t studied for years. Help with scientific theories that have evolved like amoeba since you learned them. Help with reports on novels you never read.
Help with math.
By the time they returned to school, most of you were ready to kiss the floor upon which your kids’ teachers tread. You were ready — eager even — to feed a GoFundMe to elevate underpaid teachers’ pay.
There were a few of you, though — a few who decided you knew better than teachers. Knew better what your kids should learn, better than the folks who craft curriculums for a living. Better than people who wake up every morning sincerely seeking to help your child learn. Help know. Help them grow — armed with the tools to sift through it all in pursuit of their own path.
Their own purpose. Their own passions.
Rather than support educators, you chose to bully them and transform the classroom into a battleground — a killing (minds) field that serves no one, least of all our children.
Your children.
In Tuscaloosa, Ala., Black students staged a walkout this month alleging school administrators don’t hear or see them in a feud over what should have been a celebratory Black History Month program. Emotions elevated such that voters overwhelmingly torched what would have been a historic property tax increase that was slated to raise an estimated $15 million for schools in the woefully underfunded district. The county threw its babies out with the bathwater.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis doubled down on dumbing-down students in the state by hinting he (or his puppet state school board) might ban Advance Placement classes altogether after forbidding Florida kids from studying AP African American history.
Across the nation, lawmakers — Republican lawmakers, let me be clear — are wielding pitchforks and torches at schools. Thirty-five states have introduced or passed so-called parents’ rights bills that would allow mom or dad to review curricula and yank their kids from classrooms whose teacher’s lesson plans they find objectionable.
A particularly egregious one is in my home state of Alabama, where Republican Rep. Kenneth Paschal is sponsoring the party-backed HB6. It says the government cannot “burden the fundamental right of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, care and custody of his or her child.”
Let’s start with the hypocrisy: This is the same party that has spent the past two years trying to burden (outlaw, really) the fundamental right of a parent to direct their child’s health care by making it illegal to provide prescriptions for puberty blockers and hormones for transgender youths.
Then there’s HB6’s political marble mouth — language no one understands, which can create the type of solution-in-search-of-law no one knows how to interpret or enforce.
HB6 allows lawmakers to intervene in classrooms if there is a “compelling state interest and the government uses the least restrictive means possible to further that interest.”
It also codifies “fit parents” without defining “fit.” As such, one person’s fit may be another’s fool.
Paschal calls it a “common sense” bill. Sounds like when Southerners hid behind states’ rights bills to cloak overt racism. In this case they’re using parents’ rights to pressure educators into genuflecting for even a single parent’s objection to a lesson. And let’s be real, not just any lesson.
HB6 takes dead aim at the Republican boogeyman: History.
American history, specifically. With Black history — which is American history — and culture smack dab in the bull’seye.
I’m almost tired of writing this: No teacher is teaching your child to hate themselves. No teacher is teaching your child they’re inferior. No teacher is teaching your child critical race theory (unless the kid is trying to earn an advanced college degree; if so, it’s their business, not yours).
I’m tired of writing this (though I’ll never wane — sorry, not sorry): Keep your unfounded fears and flailing at education at home.
Americans should challenge our lawmakers to actually craft bills that make us better, not bitter. Bills that evaluate lives without emasculating vital livelihoods. Bills that expand health care (and affordability) rather than criminalize it.
Bills that encourage children to strive to know, not hide from knowledge.
Just as I was taught. Maybe you, too.
Unless you’ve forgotten.
Roy Johnson is a columnist for al.com.
