In Republican county conventions held the past two weeks and in the lead-up to the June primary elections, a constant refrain has been “parental rights” in public education and medical decisions.

We’ve heard it before; it’s not the first time political parties have whipped up a frenzy prior to mid-term elections by proclaiming that parents, not government entities, should be in control of their children.

More than 100 years ago, William Jennings Bryan railed against the teaching of evolution, shouting “Who shall control our schools?” In the end, science, not fundamentalist preachers, won that battle.

Thirty years later, after Black children were admitted to previously white-only schools, Southern legislators repealed compulsory education so that white children would not have to sit next to a Black classmate.  Said a South Carolina governor, “The parental right to determine what is best for their child is a fundamental-driven right.”

The evolution battle centered on science while the Southern segregation focused on physical geography.  In Utah, the current two-pronged fights are medical and history.  

The medical aspect is pretty simple.  Of course parents have the right to decide on the vaccination of their sons and daughters but they don’t have the right to spread disease among the majority of other children.  That’s why vaccination mandates for smallpox and measles have held up, even though few school districts mandated COVID vaccinations due to the delay in recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control. 

But your view of parental rights might change when confronted with other medical decisions. Should a parent have the right to withhold life saving treatment of a child with leukemia?  Should parents have the right to deny a blood transfusion for a child critically injured in an auto collision?  Even for parental rights advocates, the right to injure your own child becomes a little less clear.  

As for Critical Race Theory, my problem with opponents is that they don’t really understand the concept.  In a nutshell, Critical Race Theory is that past racial attitudes and injustices still impact today’s minority students.  It doesn’t say that today’s white children should feel personally guilty about what happened to a minority classmate’s ancestors, only that history should be recognized. Example:  Since many communities “red-lined” neighborhoods to ensure that blacks and Latinos could not get loans to purchase houses, real estate inheritance was often non-existent, leading minorities today having less total assets than whites.  That’s a fact, not theory, not race-baiting.

As a Harvard history professor wrote of CRT opponents, “These parents don’t have a right to choose the version of American history they like best.”  The schools have an obligation, regardless of right-wing radical rants, to teach factual history – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

As the professor notes, with schools open and masks off, teachers are left trying to figure out not only how to repair the damage inflicted by remote learning, but also what to teach and how to teach it without losing their jobs and being harassed by parents.

No wonder schools are having a difficult time finding qualified teachers.