For some reason the question of “do parents have a right to know what their kids are being taught?” is highly contentious. It shouldn’t be. It should be a given no matter the political leanings of anybody that parents ALWAYS have a right to know what their children are being taught.
Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s election largely because Terry McAuliffe said that parents have no right to know what’s taught in schools. This idea that children need to be removed from their parents and “educated” while parents are kept in the dark is totalitarian in the extreme. What McAuliffe, the teacher who said that children need to be educated so they don’t grow up to be like their parents, and the board of ed member in Pennsylvania, and many others, all believe is that children, once of age to go to school, no longer belong to their parents. They become the responsibility of the state at that point.
Of course, all of those spouting this theory (however they explain it) exclude their own children from the equation. I’m confident that if you asked the teacher who said that she wants to make sure kids don’t grow up to be like their parents would vociferously argue with you if you included her kids in that group. She, of course, is well-qualified to raise her children. She’s a teacher after all.
Education is a key factor in molding children to accept society’s norms and rules of interaction. It is such a big key to socialization that the left has been steadily working to control it for decades. They have largely succeeded at this point, at least in public schools and many private schools as well.
One of the only silver linings of the Wuflu panic and shutdowns was that parents were in the same room with their kids during school hours for the first time. And for the first time many parents got a front-row view of what exactly is passing for education these days. There is so little focus on the fundamentals that most colleges and universities run freshmen through a series of remedial classes (they aren’t called that. Oh, no. These classes are labeled as freshman gen ed requirements.) before they are loosed into the general university population.