A manifesto for parents with kids in school
Katie van Schaijik | Feb 19, 2022
We believe:
1. All children are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Adults are responsible to protect and cherish those rights.
2. Every child is a unique individual. Praise and blame should be assigned to behavior, never to characteristics outside a child’s control. We reject pedagogical doctrines and methods that teach children to judge, shame, marginalize or denigrate themselves or others according to race or sex, economic status, or any innate trait.
3. Parents are the first and primary educators of their children. Public schools are accountable to them.
a. Teachers and administrators must be promptly responsive to parents’ reasonable concerns.
b. All public school education materials and methods, as well as funding sources and expenditures, should be available for parents’ review upon request.
c. Any use of materials or methods that are protected by copyright (or any legal or bureaucratic device) from such review is strictly prohibited.
d. Parents must be given prior notice—with ample time to review—of any new materials introduced into the school curriculum. This includes library books and any electronic materials available to students through the school.
e. Parents have a right to organize themselves and appoint representatives to conduct such reviews on their behalf.
f. Any teacher, administrator or other public official caught deliberately withholding pedagogical materials or deceiving parents about what their children are being taught shall be fired for cause.
g. Parents have a right to veto by referendum the use of materials and/or methods they deem contrary to the welfare of their children.
h. Parents have a right to terminate via referendum employment of any teacher, administer or staff member they deem to have violated the explicit or implicit terms of their office.
i. Parents have a right to review any and all communications between school employees and students, including electronic and social media communications.
j. Communication between school employees and students via avatar or pseudonym or by other methods meant to prevent parental review are strictly prohibited.
k. Teachers and administrators may not address a child by any name or pronoun not known and agreed to by the parents.
4. Humanity comes in two complementary sexes, equal in dignity and value, with recognizable, mutually enriching differences. Those differences should be appropriately respected in school policy and practice. We reject all sexism, androgyny, male-chauvinism, anti-male feminism, as well as gender ideologies that reduce sexual identity to subjective preferences.
5. Children have a right to sexual innocence, and parents have prime responsibility to guide and shape their children’s moral formation, above all in the area of sexuality. While basic biology and reproductive anatomy belong in the high school curriculum, sexual morality is outside the scope and purview of public school teachers and staff.
6. Any employee who exposes children to sexual content including explicit pictures or descriptions of sexual acts (outside the context of basic, age-appropriate anatomical instruction) is committing abuse and should be fired for cause, with parents being immediately notified of the reason. Any form of recruitment to sexual activity is criminal and should be criminally referred.
7. Words are meant to reflect the speaker’s sense of reality. To require persons to conform their words or actions to someone else’s sense of reality is a form of abuse. Neither employees or students at public schools can be mandated to use pronouns or any other words that are at odds with their own sincere perceptions.
8. In a pluralistic society like ours, religious and moral instruction is the prerogative of the home and houses of worship. Teachers and administrators who instruct students in alien doctrines and ideologies or in a manner that deliberately subverts the faith and values of their parents are out of bounds and should be fired for cause.
9. Like religious proselytizing, neither political activism nor gender activism belongs in public schools. Those who present themselves publicly—including via social media—as political or gender activists are ineligible for employment in public schools. Anyone who suffers from gender dysmorphia is likewise ineligible.
10. Teachers and administrators are responsible to uphold by word and personal example virtues commonly recognized by local tradition and public consensus, such as honesty, integrity, respect, courtesy, kindness, personal discipline, service, love of country, hard work, etc.
Schools that fail with respect to the above items shall no longer be funded by public monies.