Editorial: Parents shouldn’t interfere with public school curriculum

Imagine teaching history to freshmen who haven’t yet learned about the Manhattan Project. Or… Imagine teaching history to freshmen who haven’t yet learned about the Manhattan Project. Or the Trail of Tears. Or the Holocaust. Sound unlikely? Under new legislation, New Hampshire students could enter college with all the aforementioned gaps in knowledge.

Earlier this month, the state’s legislature successfully overrode Gov. John Lynch’s veto of HB 542, which requires public schools to devise alternate lesson plans whenever parents object to the material. That is, if a father doesn’t want his daughter learning the finer points of evolution, administrators must develop an alternate, evolutionless curriculum for her, provided that her father pays for it and it satisfies state educational requirements.

While most educators abhor this idea, one New York Times contributor touted it as a progressive, albeit imperfect solution to an unsustainably diverse student population.

“All people are different, and diverse people cannot be equally served by a single school system,” Neal McCluskey, a Cato Institute director, wrote in a virtual roundtable last week. “The law in New Hampshire is one way of dealing with reality.”

We’ll acknowledge that some instructors pay insufficient attention to the preferences of students and their families. But we don’t think public schools should bend over backwards to accommodate every possible world view. If teachers tailor their curriculum to meet parental criteria, then they’ll cease to impart knowledge that’s unobtainable elsewhere and start to reinforce pre-existing prejudices.

Indeed, the vagueness of the bill itself — which doesn’t specify what kinds of parental objections are legitimate, nor what materials administrators should use while developing new curricula — practically invites abuse. Many schools may soon find themselves overwhelmed with requests to remove a particular book because of a single offensive passage, or simply to neglect crucial historical events. In other words, even if student diversity is in fact a problem, HB 542 is a particularly inept solution.

Unfortunately, such legislation is part of a growing trend in public education. A “parental rights” constitutional amendment that states “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right” garnered 140 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives in 2010. And in 2009, when President Obama addressed American students over the Internet, many parents demanded that schools refrain from airing the broadcast.

If families insist on espousing their own perspectives on history or science, further insulating their children from outside viewpoints, they should do so on their own time — after school. Meanwhile, public schools must teach subjects that will benefit the majority, not individual interests.