One of the arguments that keeps coming up in the fights about teaching “gender fluidity” and “sexuality” in schools is what I call the “expert” or “professional” claim.

It is the same type of claim made about how racial theories should be injected into other parts of the curriculum. Race in math. Race in science. Race in tying one’s shoes. The “experts” know what kids should be taught, so shut up.

Systemic shoelace violence or something. You get the idea. Teachers are experts not only in their subject fields, but in teaching itself. They know their students. Know what they need to know and how it should be taught. And, just like doctors, we should defer to their expertise. This is one of the more successful lines of attack when schools are criticized–parents don’t know about education, so shut up and let the experts do their work.

The claim on its face is absurd for many reasons, but let’s start with the most obvious: almost all the teachers making these claims are dyed-haired freaky looking millennials who are experts in pretty much nothing at all except claims of oppression. They are obsessed with spouting off poorly understood ideologies, sexualizing children to the point of grooming them, and separating children from their parents.

They are experts at anything like AOC is an expert legislator. They hold a position of responsibility, but don’t belong there.

The maximum amount of time any of these teachers will spend with the children–and they will be dealing with tens at a time–is a few hours a day for a year or at most two. That amounts to spending a few hours with any child individually a month, if that. In most cases the individual attention a student will get from a teacher will be measured in minutes a day.

Yet people are making the claim that they could possibly know what is best for that particular child? Absurd on its face.

Please tell me what I’m missing here. What are we doing next? Putting patients in charge of their own surgeries? Clients in charge of their own trials? When did we stop trusting experts. This is so stupid. pic.twitter.com/VZRMZpp234

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) November 10, 2022

Parents are not likely to be “experts” on all the subjects taught, but they are experts in something much more important: their children, with whom they have lived and will live with for two decades, not a few hours. They are in a far better position to know what their own children need to thrive.

That is why teachers should be limited in their preaching about moral and intensely intimate subjects: they cannot know what is right for a particular child, so they should shut the hell up. Otherwise you get this:

Jennifer talks about how her school socially transitioned her 10-year old daughter behind her back. https://t.co/eFgMFeRxIG pic.twitter.com/Sg8u4Sh3wk

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 10, 2022

School teachers play a vital role in the development of children into adults, but it is necessarily a limited one. They are or should be a member of the team–a team led by parents–who help a child prepare to become productive and happy adults. The best teachers I ever had helped shape me and in particular made me better by making me think.

The fact that many parents do a poor job of this–and many do–does not mean that it is the role of school teachers to pick up that slack. They have a role in enforcing discipline to the extent that discipline is necessary to maintain order in the classroom, but it is absurd for society to expect teachers to fill the role of parent. If you like the pilot analogy as Rep. Swalwell apparently does, you might trust a pilot to fly a plane, but you leave repairing it to the mechanics who know it inside out.

My teachers never, ever gave me moral instruction beyond how to behave properly in school. Because it was not their role to do so, and not their business. If it were the teachers would be lecturing us about their own religious beliefs, moral codes, and starting religious wars over their students. Or are gender and race the only issues of importance?

If teachers are experts in gender, biology, morality, psychology, and all the other things being claimed in order to justify what is happening in schools, they are being wasted: make them rulers of the world. They apparently know everything better than everyone. A person can be a fine 3rd grade teacher without being an authority on everything, and none of us should pretend they are.

And what made this generation of teachers suddenly experts in these topics anyway? It seems the number of genders and pronouns multiply by the day. Do they get this information through osmosis? How does anybody keep up? I challenge anybody to tell me what each color on that flag represents. It took an artificial intelligence computer to come up with it because there is so much information to pack into it.

Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive.

— NEA (@NEAToday) November 13, 2022

It is unfair to good teachers to demand that they replace parents, and dangerous to allow it with these meddling types of teachers who have a pathological desire to share sexual matters including their own sexual practices with children. They may be experts on teaching, but they are not experts on the needs of particular children in intimate aspects of their life. They can’t be.

Any other adult doing what some of these teachers do with children would be arrested. In fact school boards have silenced parents for reading from library books because reading the pornographic material on TV would be illegal and harmful to children. Any adult not a parent discussing S&M with a child–and, yes, this happens and is celebrated–should be arrested.

In any case, until students are reading at or above grade level and the achievement gap between minorities and white students is closed, none of this should be even up for discussion. The schools are having trouble doing the basics. We need those expert teachers focusing on the basics, and once we have seen that happen then perhaps we can fight about all the rest.