My fellow blogger, Arclightzero, had a great post this evening, about schools playing the role of ‘parent’ in our American society.

This is a big topic today, with news stories breaking  about eleven year-old girls in Maine being offered birth control pills, and condoms in ’school supply’ bags are being handed out to visiting high school students at the University of South Florida.

A good parent’s reaction is to be angry that schools are attempting to instill certain moral – or immoral – values in our children.  I know that if my child came back from a college visit with a condom, I’d be on the phone faster than you can say “family planning”. 

However, we need to always look at the premises.  Why are schools delving into the most personal and intimate lives of our children?  Is it because they desire to indoctrinate them into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking?  Possibly.  But in order to fully understand why we find ourselves, as a society, in our current predicament, we need to understand how we got here in the first place.

Over the past thirty or so years, the family unit in America has been disintegrating.  Divorce, casual sex, abortion, and acceptance of the “baby daddy” syndrome have created a culture of parents who are more concerned with themselves and their own indulgences than they are with raising their children to be responsible adults.  It could be argued that a good deal of parents these days aren’t responsible adults, themselves.

As a result, many kids these days are monsters.  Their parents are too busy with their careers, partying, drugs, boyfriends and girlfriends, etc, to even think about the fact that they are ignoring their single most important job: Raising their children.  As a consequence, the children have no guidance, and often find themselves working out their own morals – or lack thereof – on their own. 

Enter the public school teacher. 

For those of you who are teachers, I have to say that I can’t begin to understand what you deal with on a day-to-day basis.   Granted, I’ve given teachers a hard time about a good many things, but I can’t deny the fact that they have to deal with a lot of children who don’t have the tiniest bit of guidance at home, and that many of them are terrors in the classroom.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a teacher.  Every day, you have to make children listen, who aren’t made to listen at home.  In fact, many of these children’s parents don’t even talk to them.  You care about them, because you see the defiance and pain in their eyes that only comes from living in a home where they are treated casually as a nuisance, but you aren’t their parent.  You can’t change their situation.  The best you can do is care about them, try to teach them, and hope for the  best.

Now imagine that you are that same teacher, and you’re at your wits end with frustration, because it’s nearly impossible to teach these children without punishing them. You only have a few options available to you, because again, you aren’t the parent.  You give them detention, and hope that they don’t come in with a shotgun the next day.

Our schools see every day the lack of parenting in America, and they see a need.  They see the need for someone, anyone, to attempt to help or restrain these kids.  They also see a need to do what they’re being paid to do; teach.  Yet, it’s nearly impossible to teach when you can barely get a handle on your classroom.

It starts with a breakfast program, because too many kids are coming to school hungry.  Then, an after-school program, because so many kids are going home to an empty house.  Soon, five girls in the tenth grade are pregnant, and the school is offering condoms to the entire high school.

It’s easy for us, as conservatives, to blame the schools for attempting to raise our children and for pushing things on them that we never would.  It’s easy for us, because we’re actually doing our job of parenting.  However, the schools are simply responding to what they perceive to be a need.  Since they can’t be the acting parent, they are doing everything in their power to be a ‘passive parent’.  And because schools and teachers’ unions are for the most part liberal, it seems only logical that they would attempt to fix the problems with today’s children via their morals, or lack thereof. 

This problem is bigger than any of us can wrap our minds around.  To fix it would involve convincing parents to actually do their jobs and raise their children.  But how are they supposed to do so, when they aren’t fully ‘raised’, themselves?

The best I can do is to teach my children right from wrong, love them, and hope and pray for the best.  I can’t change society, but I can help mold their view of it.  I can raise a ruckus if my child’s school decides to hand out condoms, but in the end, I would hope that I have instilled enough of my values into my child that he will know what’s right, and what’s wrong. 

In the meantime, we still need to stand up for what we believe to be right.  If enough parents voice their anger and frustration towards schools for handing out condoms and attempting to push their values onto our children, we can actually change things.  But at the same time, we need to understand that there are a lot of parents out there who really could care less, and the school is only attempting to do what they perceive as the best thing for the child. 

“The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world”, is the saying. Well, if parents aren’t going to “rock the cradle”, you’d better bet that someone else will.