Christina Wyman is a “public intellectual” and academic who specializing in teaching critical theory. This is about all you need to know to realize she knows nothing about teaching and/or surgery.
It is disheartening to see so many people “liking” this argument because it may be one of the most ignorant statements about education since Terry McAullife’s election-destroying comment: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Let’s start with the easy part: parents ARE involved in surgery. What happens is that the doctors involved in the surgery come to the parents and give them options. I can tell you that the surgeon himself (or herself) will usually discuss the situation with the parents. No surgeon can force the parents to do the operation, and the parents are always allowed to get second and third opinions. Depending on the type of operation, many parents do get second and third opinions, so they are indeed “interfering” with what the surgeon may want to do. And sometimes parents decide not to get surgery at all because the condition makes surgery optional. Very often, surgery is more dangerous than the other options.
Once the surgery starts, it is necessarily closed off for reasons of health and security, but the strict parameters of the surgical process have been set by parent involvement. It is not as if surgeons have the freedom to say they are going to do heart surgery and then decide, mid-operation, to perform transgender surgery.
So, to sum up, it appears that Christine Wyman knows nothing about what happens during surgery.
But unfortunately she also knows nothing about public education. By design, the public school system necessarily involves parent involvement. (Whether or not parents take advantage of this is another question — most of us do not do the due diligence we should). Parents are involved in electing the school board, which sets curriculum and other policy. Parents are involved in seeing the grades that their kids get, these days via on-line portals, and teachers rely on parent feedback to make sure kids are getting assignments done on time. Teachers are available via email or other on-line systems for interaction with parents. And of course there are the old-fashioned parent-teacher conferences that actually are essential to the educational process.
So, in fact, the public school system relies extensively on parent involvement and feedback. I get daily emails from multiple teachers regarding my three kids still in public schools. I get opt-out forms for various classes all the time, meaning the school recognizes that I as a parent can decide whether or not my kids will participate in certain subjects that I might find objectionable.
Need I mention that according to recent US Census figures, 5 to 6 percent of kids nationwide are homeschooled, meaning the parents and the kids together do all of the schooling without government involvement in any way?
The alternate world of the Christina Wymans is a dystopian nightmare in which your children are owned by the state system and are programmed by the critical race and gender theorists to believe a long list of woke talking points. This is what the Christina Wymans of the world want: complete control over your kids so they can be brainwashed away from the influence of parents.
Before we began to homeschool our children in 1994 we studied the process, visited with other homeschoolers and prayed about it. The impression came to me that it would be important for us to proceed with homeschooling so I’d know how to because in the future it would be unsafe to send covenant children to school. Welcome to the future! One of the best outcomes of our experience is that I have had close relationships with all our five children, including through all the turbulence of the teen years. Now that they are all adults I count them as my best friends.
It is my opinion that education needs to be completely privatized to get the government out of it and give parents the opportunity to choose the kind of school they want for their children.
Rozy, amen! We don’t homeschool and in fact our kids nearly went crazy during the 4-5 months they could not go to in-person school last year, but we have a lot of respect for people who do homeschool. And, yes, another vote for completely privatizing education.
Oh this article …
Myself and another sister in my ward have been going back and forth with the principal and librarian at our neighborhood elementary school about inappropriate books supplied as part of a “Rainbow Library” grant from the radical LGBT activist group GLSEN. Two years ago I met with the Asst Superintendent (now superintendent) and another woman who runs the district’s “Safe & Healthy Schools initiative” — which is a nice way to say, “we’re sexualizing our children” also provided with “free” curriculum materials by GLSEN. The Safe Schools program promotes “Kindness, diversity and inclusion” but only in the context of LGBT stuff. We never address the other, and very real needs of kids in our school district eg: academic burn out, social/peer pressure to do drink/do drugs/have sex, porn addictions, eating disorders, kids from broken homes, or who have been abused, native kids, Hispanic kids, and I could go on…
My biggest Frustration is that other sisters in the ward will not step up to help. Second is that all of the school people literally do not see the problem with introducing sensitive topics w/o parental notification.
If Covid did not wake you up to the rot in public schools then you are asleep at the wheel or ignoring the problem. Get involved, even if that means you only attend the school board meeting and give a summary out to your friends.
Having said all that, this has been hard for me as a 5th generation public school teacher. When I was 10 I decided I wanted to teach social studies and that’s exactly what I did. This trial and loss of my faith in public education has been quite hard to digest.
I do currently homeschool my youngest child, turns out when you’re 5, wearing a mask 7 hours a day is actually akin to abuse and causes lots of other problems. My older kids have chosen to stay in school, but they know they are there on a very short line and that I will yank them if needed. In New Mexico we are still under full Covid precautions as well: masks in schools, remote school if Covid cases pass a pre-determined % of the school population, social distancing, eating outside in the dirt on cold fall/wintry days, contact tracing and testing for students if they are exposed, quarantine etc. If you live in a “free” state, count that as your biggest blessing this season.
Joyce, people like you are making a big difference in fighting off the wokesters who want to brainwash our kids. I know it is frustrating because so many people are apathetic, but we must continue to fight the good fight.
In the 1850’s and again in the 1890”s Protestants pushed “Citizenship” education very hard. It was an attempt to enculture Catholics into proper thought patterns with respect to governance. This led to lots of Catholic separate school systems (like the one enshrined in my Province’s constitution).
I keep warning my teacher’s association that their bubbled approach to these issues (woke-based moral ed, Covid) is leading to the same place. Ed is splitting.
As a quasi-counterpoint, I’ll offer that the original tweet is correct, if and only if you presume that people having surgery are just dropped off at the hospital with the assumption that the hospital will of course do the right thing, sight unseen. Regrettably, many (many!) parents have felt this way about public education: it’s set-it-and-forget-it social activity that “everyone” assumes is fine. It’s not, and never has been. As has been said above, many parents have now noticed that the public schools are performing the educational equivalent of elective surgery that nobody expected them to be performing, and parents are rightly upset about that. But the slippery slope of outsourced parenting is what got us here, and it’s valuable to remember that when reading a tweet as silly as the one that leads here.
Re: set-it and forget it style abdication, parents, and the raising up of children.
That kind of “false tradition” takes a generation (25 years) or two to correct.
The Brethren have been trying to correct the false-tradition of parental-abdication in the church since 2002’s Raise-the-bar and the reworking of youth teaching and programs, including home-church, ever since.
Too many LDS parents had generally abdicated gospel instruction to Sunday classes and youth programs. Many parents had even shrugged and supposed that they could abdicate/wait for a fulltime mission to provide a testimony for their children.
Seeing a mission as a “last chance” eventually morphed into too many parents seeing a mission as the primary vehicle or chance/oportunity for obtaining gospel knowledge and a testimony.
But the leaders of secular academia and media did not make course corrections when the fruits of the changes of the 1960’s manifested themselves a generation later in the 80’s and 90’s.
In fact, media and academia was complicit in the corruption. And the 60’s radicals became the administrators and tenured professors of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was the left’s “march through the institutions”, Gramsci and Alinsky-style.
Leftist academia has brainwashed two+ generations since the 60’s, and leftist media has kept them brainwashed.
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Does anyone remember my “outrageous” predictions here on M* in the 2014-2015 time frame about what SSM would lead to? like the “younger = gayer” stuff?
I was not “outrageous” enough — it’s worse than I predicted.
A word, too, on fighting the fight and generational repair. People like Joyce are the exemplars here and we would all do well to follow that example, particularly in the growing realization that this fight *will not end*. This is the crippling weakness of the broad conservative (and libertarian) outlook: you hate politics and would rather not get involved in the mud-wrestle of governance. You find it distasteful and silly at the very least, and soul-staining at worst. You’re not wrong to think that, but you are wrong to let it keep you out of the arena. The rules get made by the people who show up. If you don’t show up, it doesn’t matter why you chose not to. Rules will get made anyway, and the rules will get made in your absence by people who *love* being in the arena and view it as the highest expression of their self-appointed elitism. You must conquer your fear. You must overcome your distaste for the process and institutions. You must get in the arena. If you do not, everything you love will eventually be legislated away–down that road lie ghettos and camps. While representation is possible, you must be represented. And you must see to that representation yourself. The days of outsourcing your freedom are over. Get in the arena and fight, or kneel and be slain.
If I let my child into surgery for an appendectomy but found out they were going to amputate her leg instead, you’d better believe I’d intervene!
For my job, I’ve been having to anticipate which way public Ed will go in my province. We’re anticipating a major leftwing reactionary swing once our conservative government gets the boot in late 2022. A number of us see blended (hybrid) school models getting lots of traction as a way for people to avoid indoctrination. In most of these models, face-to-face (or synchronous online) instruction happens once a week. That means teachers only have time to focus on the most essential skills. That leaves parents free to control secondary outcomes, like moral Ed, during the other 4 days of “at home work”.
Parental control is then just a function of whether the program has worksheet heavy assessment or not. Ed theorists currently hate worksheets. So, I think the result is a defanging of radical indoctrination. If you don’t want to force your kids to do a Woke assignment, you don’t have to. The kids aren’t physically present to force it onto them. And blended face-to-face time has to be hyper-focussed on essential skills.
More to my point above. If only someone had intervened…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59498082
John Perry, yikes! What a nightmare.