Why I'm pushing back against condemning public school
I’m increasingly convinced that Christian conservatives operate according to our own debate calendar of pressing social issues. Somewhere between the evils of yoga pants season and the evils of Halloween season falls September, when we are roundly warned about the evils of public schools. Voddie Baucham thundered the warning this way: “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
Huge percentages of well-known conservative pundits echo the sentiment. From Allie Beth Stuckey to Liz Wheeler, from Libs of TikTok to Matt Walsh, and every figurehead at The Blaze, the message is crystal clear: “If you love your children, you will get them out of public schools post haste.”
Now listen, they aren’t wrong to warn. Way too many parents are checking out and getting caught with their proverbial pants down. Their kids come home from school and boldly announce their plans to change their gender identity, as assisted by a school therapist they didn’t even know their kids were seeing in the first place. If you’re not paying attention to what’s going on at your child’s school, you may very well be in for a pretty rude awakening.
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There are a litany of legitimate concerns about the public school system as it is today, and diligent parents should work to familiarize themselves with the risks if they wish to have any hope of mitigating them.
TikTok is rife with blue-haired teachers with septum piercings loudly broadcasting their commitment to indoctrinate students with pseudoscientific garbage philosophies of gender, sexuality, and critical race theory. I’ve personally spent hours poring over the curriculum, and yes, some of it is, indeed, off-the-charts horrid. Kids need to know where babies come from, how to avoid STDs, and the liberating power of the word “no.” They do NOT need graphic step-by-step tutorials for achieving orgasm, and they should absolutely be protected against science-denying propaganda that confuses them into believing they can be born in the wrong body. Parental involvement and awareness are critically important components of any child’s education regardless of where that education takes place.
If your conscience compels you to shield your kids from this stuff, I applaud and support your decision and your sacrifice. It is not easy to homeschool or private school your kids. Every child is different, and no one knows the unique temperaments and proclivities of individual children better than their parents do. We need to create space for conscientious parents to prayerfully make decisions about what’s best for their own families, and sometimes this will, indeed, look like private education or homeschooling.
But as a mother of two teens enrolled in the public education system, I do want to push back a bit against the broad strokes condemnation of public school parents. I want to encourage parents who, like me, have prayerfully opted to keep their kids in the local public school system. A few thoughts I have on the matter:
Homeschool and/or private schooling are not surefire solutions to the culture wars. I attended private Christian school from kindergarten all the way through college. If I’m brutally honest, I would guess that significantly less than half of my classmates during that time still identify as Christian in any capacity. Many are openly embracing the ideologies we are fighting today. If you think private school is a magic cure-all, you’re blissfully naive.
Sheltering kids isn’t the same as equipping kids. One day you’re going to have to launch your homeschool kids into the same world that’s inhabited by all the public school kids you tried to shield them from. Will they be equipped to engage, or will they be equipped to point and shout “unclean!”? There’s a major difference, and it’s one that matters. I don’t personally think it’s such a terrible thing that my kids have more practice respectfully resisting things like the gender cult than most adults I know. We have robust debates in our living room on a regular basis about everything from abortion to gun control. But one of the reasons we are able to have these debates is because my kids at least know that the issues exist. They haven’t been sheltered from them or the people who espouse them. They’ve experienced them in real-time, as expressed by complex people they actually care about rather than just boogeymen I train them to fear.
Christians are called to take authority, to live boldly, and to conquer strongholds, not to wring our hands or roll over and die. We walk in hope and the belief that we absolutely CAN make a difference. We can run for school board. We can join the PTA. We can show up at district meetings. We can start parent groups. We can actually take an interest in the programs and policies our hard-earned dollars are funding. We can protest and sound the alarm when mismanagement happens. This whole “Your kids are screwed if you send them to public school” mentality runs contrary to the very Gospel we profess.
Christians should care about the well-being of ALL kids, not just our own. Not all kids have the privilege or the luxury to make education choices apart from public school. (This is the part where I insert the obligatory applause for families who homeschool well and who make major sacrifices to do what you think is best for your families. This post is not a condemnation or dismissal of your efforts; it’s a rebuke of the carelessness of those who would condemn parents without other options.) The problems our culture faces aren’t solved the minute you pay tuition at a Christian school. What about the kids left behind? Are you satisfied with the way your tax dollars are being used to train them? If not, what are you prepared to do about it? Will you fight for these kids, too?
Some parents make terrible teachers. I’m sorry, but being a woman does not magically confer teaching skills upon every mother on the face of the earth. (Notice how the bulk of this pressure tends to land on the mothers in these equations. The dads have pressure to bring in a six-figure income to allow for homeschooling or private education, but more often than not, it’s the mom who’s expected to take on the actual instruction.) Some moms just aren’t book-smart. Some moms just aren’t patient. Some moms are just really, really unskilled at communicating information in a way that children can grasp it. Trust me when I tell you that I have no business trying to teach my children things like math, and quite frankly, I have the wrong temperament for teaching anyway. It would be like marching up to LeBron James and insisting that he was in the wrong career, that what he was REALLY made for was gymnastics. He would rightly look at you and say, “But that’s obviously not my gifting,” The same applies here. If the gifts don’t match the work, the work should be outsourced to someone who has the appropriate skill set. We have to be thoughtful about the demands we are placing on people.
A woman in one of my online parents’ groups considered it her personal responsibility to finger-wag me into compliance with her prescription for my family. Her position was that if I cared enough about my kids, I would find a way to homeschool them. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” and all that jazz …
I’ve heard this a million times, and while I don’t personally internalize the ignorant judgments of strangers on the internet, the principle of the mentality always bothers me, and it pains me that other earnest parents have to experience it with such frequency.
No, I don’t want my children to be brainwashed or indoctrinated into radical ideologies I oppose. But you know what else I don’t want them to become? Self-righteous, judgmental Pharisees who lack the emotional or social intelligence to empathize with other peoples’ experiences or situations. I don’t want them hiding under a rock and running scared from the big bad “socialist” world as though it’s going to destroy them.
I do NOT believe kids’ lives are better when their moms are burning the candle at both ends. If you are a single or low-income parent reading conservative hopeless handwringing, take heart. There’s hope. Pundits don’t determine your children’s futures; God does, and He sees how hard you’re trying. There are a lot of AMAZING teachers left in public school systems, and they’re working their butts off to provide your kids with valuable experiences.
But even more important than solid teachers is YOUR involvement. Show up. Be present. Complain when harmful things like CRT and CSE rear their ugly heads. Pray for your children. Pray for their teachers. Know their teachers’ names. Check out their profiles on social media. Introduce yourself to them. Be engaged and involved in the curriculum. Review your kids’ assignments. Teach them to take unpopular stands, knowing that it will cost them popularity points. Teach them to be resilient and kind and fair.
Talk to your kids! Foster open dialogue about topics that would have made you blush as a child. Explain to them why you’re doing what you’re doing, and help them understand the arguments and mentalities that will oppose their own as they grow. Show them the best ways to respond.
I went to the library and checked out a bunch of the books that are most commonly used in drag queen story times. I read them with my kids. I asked them what they noticed. They asked me what they should think and why I didn’t like the books.
The Bible says that “love always protects.” But protecting our kids doesn’t always look like covering their ears and closing their eyes so they don’t see the war. Sometimes it does. Other times it looks like giving them context to understand the war and weapons with which to fight it.
Public school isn’t going to destroy your children if you’re doing your job of actually parenting them well.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
