Educators often use the metaphor of the three-legged stool to convey the ideal parent-teacher-child relationship. If one leg is weakened, the stool inevitably becomes unstable. Over the past few years, this three-legged stool has become more and more wobbly.
We want to thank NH State Rep. Arlene Quaratiello for this Op-Ed. Please submit yours to steve@GraniteGrok.com.
Last Thursday, one of the three legs broke as the New Hampshire House of Representatives failed to pass the Parental Bill of Rights (SB272). This bill sought to strengthen the three-legged stool, ensuring that students, teachers, and parents could have cooperated in a partnership that would have worked in the best interests of children. It was intended to enshrine in law that the relationship of these three groups be based on truth and respect, two values that must be highly upheld in any free society.
The House Democrats, along with the help of a few nominal Republicans, “indefinitely postponed” the bill, ensuring that parental rights cannot be discussed again during this current term of the current legislators. Before this motion was passed, an all-ought assault was launched on SB272 as a group of representatives with no regard for parental rights sought to gut it with a number of pernicious amendments.
In addition to those parental rights already codified in law, SB272 sought to grant parents the right to ask questions pertaining to issues of gender identity and to be truthfully answered by school personnel. It would have prohibited the current policies of some school districts which demand that school personnel give parents erroneous information regarding their children, information that contradicts the reality of what is actually going on in the classroom. In other words, this bill asserted that familiar age-old mandate “You shall not lie” upon which free societies have always been based.
The failure to pass the Parental Bill of Rights and to legally uphold the right to get truthful answers to questions will destroy parents’ trust in their children’s schools. Since it sends the clear message that parents are not respected, the defeat of this bill will be “the last straw” for many parents who have been considering alternatives to public education. Now that SB272 has failed, the noticeable decline in public school enrollment that began in response to detrimental COVID policies will likely accelerate as more and more parents abandon a governmental education system that obviously considers their children mere wards of the state.
Since the legislature did not pass the Parental Bill of Rights, the three-legged stool of our public education system can no longer stand. In fact, the use of this metaphor has become ludicrous. If our laws fail to reflect our deepest values as a society, if they don’t assert parental authority, prohibit secrets and lies, and uphold the importance of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” our democracy itself might not survive. We need only look to historical precedent—the Communist Russian Revolution’s “Family Code” of 1918, Hitler’s Youth, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution—to see what happens when parental rights are not upheld and truth is no longer considered essential. We can also look to literature, in particular Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a novel that portrays a dystopian society that seems more believable with each passing day—a society in which the state not only believes that it is more qualified to raise children than parents themselves but in which parents have been completely eliminated. To counteract this toxic mindset, parents must assert their God-given authority. They will have the opportunity to do this at the ballot box in 2024 when they can elect candidates who will truly support parental rights and restore the three-legged stool that upholds our society.
Rep. Arlene Quaratiello
Atkinson
Education Committee Member
