Parents: Got a life?

by David Benjamin 

“Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

MADISON, Wis.— Let’s try to overlook the screaming irony of the Republican Party fighting for “parents rights” after winning a fifty-year crusade against women’s rights to control their own bodies. Rather, let’s ponder the vague, slippery invocation of something called “parents rights.”

This is a pretty recent formulation. It played no part in my school days. Neither my mother nor dad ever set foot in schools I attended. Neither commented, even once, on subject matter, reading materials, faculty or curricula. In thirteen years of parochial and public pedagogy, I cannot recall any of my fellow pupils’ moms or dads showing up in school, even when a kid got in trouble.

I didn’t cause much trouble, but when I did, it was over something I wrote. In fourth grade. my first stab at “satire” made fun—lovingly but inexpertly—of Mrs. Ducklow. This required reproof, in the hallway, by Father Mulligan, who barely managed to hide his amusement. My penance was to copy out, by hand, several pages of Webster’s dictionary, a punishment which, for me—and I suspect Mrs. Ducklow knew—was like pitching B’rer Rabbit into the briar patch.

My parents didn’t know this happened. Nor would they have known if I had offended again—and again. This is because personal rights of any sort, except in the abstract, were never a major focus in the American common school. 

Kids had precious few rights to start with. We surrendered them when we bumbled timorous and dimwit into kindergarten. We learned swiftly that we’re marionettes jerked around at the whim of teachers, principals, priests, nuns and the faceless functionaries of the diocese and the department of education.

We had recourse, if we had the nerve, to take the law into our own hands. But you had to be fairly crazy. An example of how crazy was recorded in an 1899 news item, revived by historian Michael Lesy in his classic, Wisconsin Death Trip:

“Miss Mary Jeffrey, a teacher in one of the schools of Centerville. was badly beaten by one of her pupils, a 14 year old girl … The teacher, in attempting to avoid the [first] blow, dodged, throwing back her head, with the result that her hair caught on a hook in a hat rack and held her. While in this position, the girl rained blow after blow on the face of the defenseless teacher, who was not a match for the strong, husky country girl … She had just been pounded into unconsciousness when people attracted by the teacher’s screams ran in and released her.”

I like this story for its ambiguity. Is Miss Mary Jeffrey the victim of inchoate teenage rage? Or did she have it coming? If so, what did she do? And, is that why none of her pupils tried to save her? 

Since before Miss Jeffrey, of course, parents have had a whole bunch of unalienable “rights” provided by the Constitution. But these liberties apply indiscriminately to both the fecund and the childless No document assigns extra rights to people with offspring. For a long time, even if some parents believed they had privileges accruing to their fertility, none seemed inclined to assert them. They preferred what might be termed laissez faire parenthood, which freed them from oversight duties when they lent their kids to supervision by surrogate adults. “Out of sight, out of mind,” might well have been my mother’s child-rearing motto.  

That system seemed fine. Having consigned their issue to the tender mercies of schoolmarms and headmasters, parents like Mom were more than willing to offload the aggravation posed by their mozniks and to endorse, tacitly, any discipline the school saw fit to impose. 

And they’d rather not be told. What happened in school stayed in school. 

I understood this code from kindergarten on. At the hands of my stronger, huskier classmates, I developed a certain intimacy with the range of schoolboy cruelties. I rarely complained. I never reported, especially to Mom. I was not a rat.

Again, an exception: I remember in my class a boy, Michael, who was mentally handicapped. He could barely speak and he was painfully awkward. Unable to grasp anything taught to the rest of us, he got special care from each teacher as he followed his brother Jim from grade to grade. Michael should have been a perfect target for juvenile ridicule. But not one kid ever spoke ill of him. We regarded Jim, the patient, attentive brother who was sacrificing his childhood as Michael’s caregiver, with a respect that bordered on awe. (This anomaly in our behavior at least suggests that schoolboys, one of the most predatory species in the animal kingdom, have a hidden moral core.)

If any kid merited a measure of parental meddling, it was Michael. But in my years at St. Mary’s, neither his mother nor father ever appeared. They trusted Jim and the teachers, and the kindness of his classmates, to watch over Michael. 

Nowadays more than then, there seem to be two types of parents—have-a-lifes and get-a-lifes. Most parents, thankfully, have lives beyond their kids. For the sake of their children’s education, they willingly cede control to other people who, for the most part, have more experience with kids than most parents. 

Get-a-life parents, who appear to be proliferating like mildew, can’t bear to loose their talons, even in circumstances—like school—where kids are tasked to test their limits, risk discomfort, expand their horizons and explore the unknown.

My first encounter with parental intrusion into their kids’ school life was in 1966, when a faction of pious moms in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, found out that an impetuous teacher at the high school had assigned to an English class (a probably expurgated version of) J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. 

Then, as now, there were two kinds of high-school English students: a) kids who didn’t read anything longer than a sentence that wasn’t stuffed down their throats, and b) kids who read everything, but were drawn seductively to books we were told not to read. 

I belonged to the latter group. Two years before senior English with Mrs. McKinney, I had long since read and re-read Salinger. I had consumed, also, the forbidden 1984, and the supposedly insidious Brave New World. I had dabbled in Vonnegut, I loved Alas, Babylon and I could cite passages from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. So, when I attended a basketball game between the kids from Fort Atkinson and the urban upstarts of Monona Grove High, I sang along with the MG kids as they chanted mockingly, “Fee fum fo fi!/ We read Catcher in the Rye!”

The get-a-life parents of Fort Atkinson not only brought adolescent mockery down upon their kids and themselves, they ultimately failed to stem the tides of either literacy or curiosity. Every kid in Fort Atkinson who was disinclined to read anything was cool with censorship. But the ones who had not heard of Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22 until they’d been banned by the militant mom minority … well, those inquisitive kids not only read the books. They passed them on to friends and, years later, made sure their own kids read them.

Like most uprisings among get-a-life parents, the Fort Atkinson movement petered out—inevitably. Fighting any establishment is hard, especially when your villain is the First Amendment, especially when the politicians who joined the cause glom onto a hot new issue (like abortion) and stop taking your calls. Fighting to protect your kids from something that poses no actual danger is even harder, especially when the kids themselves aren’t cooperating. Controlling kids—which is what “parents rights” is all about—gets harder with every year they grow, with every time they say, “No.” 

School boards can’t repeal parents rights. 

Kids can.