Things changed in the Commonwealth, however, after a year and a half of school shutdowns, heated disagreements over masking policies, debates over whether Critical Theory should be taught in the classroom on issues of race and LGBTQ, a horrific cover-up by the Loudon County school board, and, especially, Governor McAuliffe’s comment during a September debate that parents ‘shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.’
As shocked as Virginians were by the statement, the view of education it reflects has a storied history. The late sociologist Christopher Lasch described it in his 1979 bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Lasch believed that when industrialization took labor outside of the home, many Americans began to question whether other responsibilities should leave home, too. Lasch quotes two national education officials who, in 1918, said, “Once the school had mainly to teach the elements of knowledge; now it is charged with the physical, mental and social training of the child as well.”
Around the same time, Sigmund Freud was psychoanalyzing parenthood, often casting parents in the role of villain. This was also the era in which the modern concept of social work was born, and when America launched the juvenile justice system. Entire industries were built upon the premise that parents were largely unqualified to raise their kids, or at least needed a lot of help from the state. In the late 1800s, Ellen Richards, the founder of modern social work, suggested that “in a social republic, the child as a future citizen is an asset of the state, not the property of its parents.”
A few decades earlier, Dutch theologian, statesman, and philosopher Abraham Kuyper outlined a very different theory of the relationship between the family, the state, and other aspects of society. With his view of “sphere sovereignty,” Kuyper suggested that government was only one of the God-ordained governing institutions, each created with their own purview and scope of authority. Though they have a vested interest in the education of citizens, governments don’t bear the responsibility or the right to usurp parents’ authority.
Kuyper believed that societal breakdown was inevitable whenever a God-ordained authority either abandoned or exerted authority outside of its ordained sphere. That’s an ominous analysis today when so many, including elected officials, see the state as society rather than as a mere element of society.
