The right to invite and the right to decline: Parental rights in public schools

Abstract

Parental rights are the subject of heated deliberation and policy-making in local, state, and national governing bodies. These debates are characterized by powerful disagreements regarding the role of parents, schools, and the interests of children and adolescents. Parents’ rights conflicts, contributing to the polarization and mistrust of public schools more broadly, demand a more nuanced and complex rendering of parenting, particularly as it functions as an ethical domain. In this article, we seek to complicate understandings of parental rights by defining parenting as a practice – a socially recognized activity with normative standards and often associated with moral traditions. We describe parenting as a practice using the example of the education of LGBTQ+ students to explore justifications for, and limitations to parental rights claims. The practice of parenting establishes, and helps safeguard, the parental right to invite their children into their own cultural and religious ways of life. We argue that, while public schools in a liberal democracy should be largely neutral in regards to the varied parenting practices seen in US society, and honor the parental right to invite, these schools must simultaneously be preparing students with an education that enables them to exercise their rights to accept or decline their parents’ cultural norms and roles. Public schools thus should prepare students with an education that enables them, if needed, to exercise a corresponding right to decline the ways of life on offer by parents. While parents are key partners in the process, student’s educational interests are the ultimate focus of a public educational institution.