A parent’s first duty is not complicated. It is to love a child, form a child’s character, and prepare that child to be a productive member of society.
Schools exist to help with that work by teaching children. They do not exist to replace it.
That distinction is now under pressure. In some academic circles, a new language has taken hold. Adults are recast as “oppressors.” Children are recast as “the oppressed.” Ordinary parental guidance—to wait for mature intimacy, dress with dignity, respect the rules of the house—is treated as a kind of tyranny called “adultism.” Once that frame is accepted, the family is no longer the first school. It becomes the problem schools seek to correct.
This is not an argument against teaching history, culture, or justice. Children should learn the full American story: its sins along with its astonishing capacity for self-correction. They should learn about other peoples—without being taught to sort the world into permanent camps of victims and villains.
Studies of non-Western cultures, at their best, can widen a student’s knowledge. At their worst, though, they are used as a ready-made story of grievance in which individualism is suspect, parents are obstacles, and the state becomes the guardian of the child.
Materials now circulating in teacher networks make this danger concrete. Tool kits offer plug-and-play lessons. Unions supply packets that fold current politics into the school day. Publishers follow the demand.
None of this requires secret meetings. It requires only a closed loop: activists write the framework, unions distribute it, publishers profit from it, and busy teachers are handed the path of least resistance. The child, meanwhile, is taught to see authority at home as something to be interrogated rather than trusted.
A free society cannot survive if that lesson is internalized. Children need parents who set limits. They need to learn to control themselves before someone teaches them to control the world. Healthy limits are not cruel; in reality, they help children grow into virtuous adults.