PetrChelcicky wrote: ↑Sun Jul 16, 2023 4:45 am
Ken maintains that "there is nothing about liberalism that is opposed to tradition."
But yes, there is. This is obvious in the fight between liberal teachers and parents about parents' rights in education.
Parents have a natural wish to make their children part of their community and win them over for the common tradtion and for following the common, traditional expectations (role behaviour).
Now I understand that state schools have to navigate between different parents with different traditions.I also think that the individual teacher must have some leeway to express his personal opinions. And of course, if a child at some age starts to protest against parents' influence, the teacher may support it.
But the teachers' unions seem to follow a different model in which individual children should make personal decisions at the earliest age possible in order to forecome any parental influence. Which leads to the idea that six to ten year olds are asked to decide if they are male or female, hetero- or homosexual.
The victims of "school prayer bans" have been poor working class protestant/evangelical parents who - unlike working class urban Catholics - had
no opportunity to send their children to community schools but had to take whatever the state offered them. (Of course someone should have taught them to organisze their own schools, Hutterite-like, but there was nobody to do this, and liberal teachers were definitely the least to do this.)
You seem to have some serious misunderstandings of American education but I guess that isn't surprising given that you live in Germany. What "parent's rights movement are you talking about? The Mom's for Liberty crowd who are basically a front for the Republican party and who seem to do little else but ban books and seek to promote racist and white supremacist messaging?
Yes, parents should be more involved in their children's education. Every teacher would agree with that. From participating in things like textbook review committees to volunteering in the schools. What specific rights do you think parents should have that they don't have now? The right to review all curriculum and curriculum materials in advance? Do you have any idea how far back that would set education and how much more boring and unengaging it would make classrooms? It would completely eliminate the dynamic and creative nature of teaching and force teachers to adhere to what are often decades-old textbooks.
Also, teacher's unions have nothing to do with any of this. Most of these fights are happening in the south where there is no public sector collective bargaining in education. I think there are 19 "right-to-work" states, mainly in the south, that do have collective bargaining in education. Teachers can still join unions if they want to in states like Texas. Unions are not actually banned. But without the right of collective bargaining they have no power to do anything and mostly just do things like lobby the state legislature for things like better health and retirement benefits, more funding for education, etc. So teachers unions have virtually no power in roughly half the country. And in the other half? If you actually look at collective bargaining agreements you will find that they have nothing to do with teaching LGBT rights, or anything to do with curriculum frankly. They are all about salaries, benefits, work hours, sick leave, family leave, required duties, seniority procedures in the event of layoffs, etc. Most every school district posts their collective bargaining agreements on their web site. They are public documents and you can go read them if you want. You won't find anything about teaching sexuality.
And as for "victims of school prayer bans?" Again, you don't seem to understand the history of American public education. in the 19th Century American public schools were essentially Protestant schools. Run by Protestant school boards who hired Protestant teachers and who infused the dominant Protestant ethos into public education. That is the main reason why more recent Catholic immigrants from countries like Italy, Poland, and Ireland in the late 19th Century chose to create their own Catholic schools. It was because the existing public schools were essentially Protestant and in much of the country the teachers, administrators, school boards, and communities believed that one purpose of public education was to convert Catholic children of questionable loyalty into good Protestant Americans. The only way for Catholic immigrant parents to avoid that was to create their own parallel school system.
Protestants did not need their own private religious schools because the public schools themselves were essentially Protestant. Although elite Protestant prep schools did exist, largely in the Northeast, to educate the children of the American elite. They were mostly Episcopal and run in the mold of the fancy British boarding schools that educated the children of British elites.
Regarding school prayer, the Supreme Court ruled that organized official school prayer violates the establishment clause of the Constitution in 1962 in the case of Engel v. Vitale. The case was brought by Jewish parents (led by Jewish parent Steven I. Engel)
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/ar ... l-v-vitale who argued that the state should not impose a one-size-fits-all Protestant-authored prayer on children of many different faiths. Nevertheless, children have always been free to pray all they want in school and always have been. School prayer has never been banned from the public schools and students are even free to lead their own prayer groups and always have been. The only thing that was banned was government-led prayer. Student-led religious groups have existed at every school I have ever attended or taught at and yes, they lead prayers. For example, every school I have taught at in TX and WA has had an FCA chapter:
https://www.fca.org/ If your children attend public schools in the US they are free to pray all they want.
And by the way, if you think that there is any religious purpose to be served by forcing students to recite a bland, generic, government-authored prayer every single morning for 12 years of their lives along with the pledge of allegiance (and Texas state pledge if you live in Texas) then you have never been in a HS classroom watching bored kids mouth the pledge of allegiance every single morning. Nothing will trivialize and devalue actual prayer more than forcing kids to recite some mundane government-authored prayer against their will every single morning.
