Saskatchewan’s “parents’ bill of rights” passed last Friday and cue the protests. It’s also known as the pronoun bill because that’s the only pertinent part, the rest is pablum that doesn’t need saying. It requires parental “consent” if kids decide to change their names and pronouns in a school setting.
You see the problem. This is one of those rights that consists of the right to deny other people’s rights. It’s really a veto, even when it involves one’s name, thrust on you at or before birth. Besides, they aren’t really our kids. We hold them as it were in trust, for awhile. They’ll always be their own people.
In place of a bow, premier Scott Moe attached the notwithstanding clause, dismissing basic human rights. So the bill has no relation to those rights at all.These bills have become loss leaders for Conservative parties across the country: New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, B.C., and nationally, where Pierre Poilievre told Justin Trudeau to “butt out” and “let parents raise kids.”
Rights are always in the foreground on a background which graphs the distribution of power. In this case it’s clear parents have it, kids don’t. It’s true the powerful have rights too, which they use their power to whine about a lot. Still, it’s the weaker to whom rights matter most, since they’ve little else to battle with.
What are kids battling for? Among much else, the right to lie to parents or conceal things. As kids know, parents do that all the time.
So I’d say this isn’t just about gender and schools but is part of an ancient war not just between parents and kids but adults and kids. It pervades classical literature and myth, like the Bible where the conflict is less between Adam and Eve and their kids, than between God and Adam and Eve, not to mention Jacob and his sons, or King David and his beloved Absalom. In Greek myth, the Oedipus cycle is less about sex than about generations.
In this perspective, schools are one front in that long war, where parents and “authorities” are terrified that educators might be unreliable allies. Finland, for instance, has the most successful schools in the world, based on results from international tests. I recall a conference where a progressive Canadian parent asked a Finnish presenter where the parent piece was in their system. She hadn’t noticed it. There isn’t really one, he said, we trust our teachers. There was a shocked gasp. Socrates, sentenced to death for corrupting youth by teaching them to think, might’ve found the gasp familiar.
In my own youth, in the 1950s, I was astounded to find writers like Paul Goodman, who wrote Growing Up Absurd and A.S. Neill, who founded the Summerhill “free school” in England, who automatically sided with kids against all adult authorities. I never met them but I began seeking out adults with that kind of respect for the rights of the young.
When I worked at a summer camp, I tried instituting a Summerhill approach, where kids got to make rules on cleanup or tuck. At one democratic “assembly,” a staff member, who later became an eminent lawyer, sidled by and muttered, “You should put this vote off, you’re going to lose.” He didn’t realize I would consider that a triumph. Neill described a moment at one meeting when a student said, “Neill is talking rot.” Neill clearly kvelled at the thought.
I don’t think love is the crux here. It’s relatively easy to love your kids and most parents do. Respect is harder but essential. Premier Doug Ford, in his brainless way, said, “It’s not up to the school boards to indoctrinate our kids,” implying it’s up to parents to do that.
I’d say no, it’s up to all of us to stand back and let kids figure things out for themselves while we help ward off attempts to control and indoctrinate them. Then they’ll become healthy citizens and even — parents.
This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
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