In a recent report for London-based think tank Civitas, Joanna Williams explores the question Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation? Against the backdrop of Labour’s ‘Child Health Action Plan’, which promises school-supervised tooth brushing at fully-funded breakfast clubs, Williams argues that the boundaries between parents and schools have become increasingly blurred in recent years. Historically, the purpose of schools was to provide education in a range of discreet disciplines by expert teachers. Today, schools have assumed responsibility for socialisation and inculcation of values. At the same time, the most ancient and most basic human institution, the family, has been degraded, and parenting problematised by ‘experts’. Williams argues that the arrogation of the perennial rights and duties of parents by professionals has been enabled by many parents’ abdication of their responsibilities.
Anyone who has had any contact with a mainstream school will know that a school’s activities extend far beyond traditional academic studies. Schools have become increasingly politicised in recent years. For example, in 2021, the enforcement of compulsory Relationships and Sex Education in English schools, in conjunction with statutory RSE guidance, officially transformed the traditional focus of sex education beyond the facts of life and sexual health to include the hyper-politicised domains of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual identity’. At the same time, the right of parents to withdraw their children from such lessons was effectively abolished – for children now cannot be withdrawn from lessons on ‘relationships’, which incorporate teaching on ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual identity’. Many school children are exposed to talks from ‘LGBTQ’ activists during curricular time, complemented by school-supported ‘LGBTQ’ clubs at lunch time. In Geography lessons children learn about the ‘climate emergency’ and the wonders of diversity; in English lessons children learn about systemic racism and the need to de-colonialise their thinking; and in History, children are taught about highly contentious contemporary conflicts such as the war in Palestine.
The problem is not so much that these issues are discussed, but that children are inculcated with the ‘correct’ perspectives; they are taught to be ‘good’ citizens. For many parents this emphasis on teaching children to be good citizens is highly problematic. In presuming to instill values and virtues in children, schools have usurped the natural rights and duties of parents; they have taken something essential away from the natural parent-child relationship. However, many schools argue that their encroachment into areas which were always the preserve of the parent is necessitated by poor parenting. Poor behaviour in schools, said to be the fault of parents, is at a record high, and, as a result, teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Pupil attendance is increasingly an issue, and schools claim that parents aren’t supporting their children to go to school. Record numbers of children are turning up for reception class still in nappies and without the social communication skills necessary to access the curriculum. These issues are real, and have a range of possible causes, but afford the state a pretext to assert itself over the family.
One of the reasons for many parents’ abdication of responsibility for their children, argues Williams, is the invention of the parenting ‘expert’. Parenting experts became popular in the 1990s and they caused many parents to view their role as parents through the lens of professional activity – to understand ‘parenting’ as doing something rather than being something. Parenting experts problematised the parent-child relationship, causing parents to doubt their instincts and inherited cultural wisdom, and ultimately their responsibilities and rights. Social workers, health professionals and social commentators have presented parenting as mastering a set of skills (which, of course, parents cannot hope to master to the same degree as the specialist professionals). The resulting loss of parental self-confidence has led to an arrogation of parental authority by schools and other ‘professionals’.
The way forward, the report contends, is not to blame either parents or schools, but to restore the traditional boundaries between parents and schools. Teachers must be respected and rewarded for their subject expertise rather than for their interest in the wellbeing of children. Parents must be recognised as having ultimate responsibility for the wellbeing of their children and their education in values and virtue, and any support for parents from schools and other professionals must not undermine parental authority in any way. This is an approach which ParentPower very much endorses, and we welcome such an important contribution to the debate and call for change from such a prominent think tank.
ParentPower Team
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