The Two People a School Should Trust Most

K-6 grade: arithmetic. 7th grade: pre-algebra. 8th grade: algebra I. 9th grade: geometry. 10th grade: algebra II. 11th grade: pre-calculus. 12th grade: calculus.

From a natural perspective, who cares more about a child's education than their parents? Some argue that government officials or teachers have a greater stake in children's educational outcomes than parents. Tell that to any mother, if you will. I wouldn’t dare. While there are exceptions, of course, these exceptions actually reinforce the general rule that parents are the most invested in their children's education.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children (CCC 2222-2224). In fact, the very purpose of marriage, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, is the procreation and education of children.

In the early years of life, parents form their children in manners, language, culture, religion, and character. As children grow older, parents may partner with schools and teachers to assist in this task. But parents can never hand over the responsibility entirely.

Schools should seek to work with parents, and parents should stay engaged with the education of their children. Otherwise, education and even parenting begin to break down.

Schools depend on teachers to be the heart of education. A good teacher cannot be replaced by a curriculum, a textbook, or a standardized test.

Yet for nearly two centuries, American education has been built on the assumption that most teachers cannot be trusted to teach well on their own.

In the 1800s, reformers like Horace Mann doubted the competence of local teachers. To solve this problem, they created teacher training schools. These institutions were designed to standardize what teachers taught and how they taught it because poor teaching should not be tolerated. The problem is that this should be taken care of locally, school by school. Teachers were no longer free educators making professional judgments.

This shift from trust to control accelerated through the 20th century. As states took authority over education, they built elaborate standards, curricula, and assessment systems, absorbing what little autonomy teachers had. Federal involvement only tightened the grip. Performance metrics, standardized benchmarks, and scripted lessons became the norm nationwide. Teachers who wanted to teach well, responding to their students, following genuine curiosity, adapting the lesson to the class, were given a checklist to follow instead.

Horace Mann wanted better teachers, but the system he set in motion selects for compliant ones. Schools that micromanage teachers end up with teachers who execute orders rather than think deeply about education. The teachers most likely to think for themselves and to teach their students to do likewise are the ones most likely to leave.

Real education doesn’t come from following checklists or prepping for tests. It comes from teachers free to teach what their students need, when they need it.

Parents and teachers were sidelined gradually over the span of nearly two centuries, and it is unlikely that those who took over intended any harm.

1. Mann and his contemporaries built normal schools to train teachers to a state standard. Distrust of the local teacher became a permanent institution rather than one man’s opinion.

2. Compulsory attendance laws made the state’s judgment about a child’s education override the parents’. Massachusetts passed the first in 1852. By 1918 all the states had followed suit.

3. Dewey and Thorndike recast schooling as a science that requires experts. Neither mothers nor teachers qualified.

4. Federal money arrived attached to nationwide standards in reading, math, and behavior, and to performance on the benchmarks that measured them.

5. Private schools adopted the same methods anyway, on the grounds that this was how it was done.

We are left with a system where the methods are nearly universal and questioning them is a risk few are willing to take. The reformers who built this system ruled out parents and teachers and put their confidence in school boards and standards committees instead. Nearly every structure built since has assumed they were right.

The remedy for all this is not going to come from a movement, but rather from the two people closest to the child making their own decisions.

As a parent at home, the freedom you already have is broad and deep. Don’t worry if your daughter is nine and still counts on her fingers. She is nine. If your son finished the arithmetic book in February, the next book is not the only place to go. Euclid is sitting right there and has been for two thousand years. View the scope and sequence as a recommendation, not a hard line you have to follow.

For a teacher at a school, there is less latitude. It’s unlikely that you can rewrite the scope and sequence, but you can decide that this class gets three more days on fractions because they need it. You can teach the geometrical origins of trigonometry so that your students actually understand the mathematical definitions. You can answer a student’s question instead of dismissing it because of the textbook’s pacing guide.

Parents and teachers may be told that these are decisions for people with more training, but you know your child better than them.

What Schools Forget is reader-supported. Paid subscribers get the Timeline of American Education in Primary Sources, an annotated reading list running from 1720 to 1987, with a note on each source explaining what it is and why it matters. I revise and expand it as I find more. They also get Euclid in Color.