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Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible article.

The proposed bills are clearly directed at vetoing teaching of race and gender issues by manufacturing discontent. It’s not like republican lawmakers are trying to hide it - it was quite literally part of their 2020 agenda. The ACLU is not asking for _less_ transparency in schools, but _more_ transparency and accountability by lawmakers weaponising public opinion.

The case handled by the ACLU in Alabama is about constitutional rights and the separation of religion and state. It’s not remotely the same.

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The bills require schools to post syllabuses for their courses and information about any assigned textbooks, readings etc. online. How can people conflate this with "vetoing any teaching about race and gender"? The two issues have basically nothing to do with one another.

> The two issues have basically nothimg to do with one another.

Again, this excludes both the political climate and the republican agenda.

In a town or city with a republican majority, these laws would enable parents to exclude any textbooks deemed “not appropriate” from children curriculum.

Regardless of the effects, if you are compelled to hand over your children for N hours a day to a state institution, it seems like an extremely reasonable and modest request to at least be informed of what they are taught.

"If you knew what we were doing, you'd try to stop us" is not a good counterargument.

It would also allow parents to notice a lack of attention paid to race, class, and other issues and strive for more coverage of these topics.

All this is, is transparency. What parents do with this knowledge is up to the parents. Should parents not be made aware of what their children are being taught?

Shouldn't parents, regardless of political affiliation, have the ability to decide what's appropriate for their own kids?

In general (i.e., with certain exceptions), I'd say NO. Especially in STEM areas.

This would be taking control form specifically educated and vetted professionals and giving it to a group who are as a whole opinionated and uneducated as to how to transfer knowledge.

Worse yet, the most opinionated, who are strongly correlated with the worst educated or most intellectually malevolent, are the ones who would wind up in control, regardless of the left/right wing bias.

Especially when it gets politicized, it would not be long before control by the parents with veto power for any parent in the district, would result in it being literally worse to have school than to disband it and abandon schools altogether.

> specifically educated and vetted professionals

Come on, degrees in Education are a dime a dozen. They do not give you a specific education in the subjects you will be expected to teach, unlike an actual subject-specific major. How that can be called "professional" is beyond me.

I agree that a lot of it is very lame compared to other professions.

Nevertheless, it is VERY far above the uninformed and often willfully ignorant rantings of parents, and there is some serious academic and real-world work done to improve teaching & curriculum.

While parental input should certainly be considered, as a whole, parents haven't got even the first clue of what is needed for a sound education suitable for a highly complex society. Their expressed preferences are to shut down things they don't like, ignoring all consequences. And those shut-it-down impulses come from all sides.

To reduce schooling to the lowest & loudest common denominator of parental preferences would be a disaster on the scale of societal collapse.

We have the most complex society ever in the history of at least the solar system - and it is barely runnable as things are. The only way out of this will be to maximize the intellectual capabilities and scope of every generation.

Increasing qualifications and especially requiring education in your teaching subject? Absolutely. But substituting a push for that with turning it into a "Parent's Choice Greatest Hits"? Nope, it'd likely be better to just shut it down.

> They do not give you a specific education in the subjects you will be expected to teach

Is this something US specific?

I recall that in many countries in Europe, to be certified as a high school teacher, one has to have a degree related to the area of teaching, plus a master's degree in teaching.

Yes, transparency enables people learn about things they don't like and take action to stop them.

That these people hold disagreeable or even wrong opinions doesn't make it not transparency

The transparency push would effectively veto race and gender teachings--the bet being that any teacher pushing leftist doctrines would be buried under parent complaints. Needless to say, this has been a very successful bet thus far! The ideas in question are evidently too repulsive to survive even the faintest sunlight.

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