We strongly opposed a package of bills purporting to enhance parental consent and involvement in their minor’s academic interests, but which instead sought to dictate curricular and educational decisions in ways that are not only censorious and contrary to fundamental pedagogical principles, but impractical to implement in all but the most arbitrary fashion. Among the provisions of these bills was language which would allow for parents to remove any curriculum material that they deemed harmful to “morality”; a requirement that “all sides” of a topic be taught, presumably including, for example, both “sides” of human rights atrocities like the Holocaust or the presentation of conspiracy theories like “flat-earth theory” in the course of a natural sciences lesson; and a prohibition on any books that “center any race, ethnicity, gender, religion or viewpoint,” which is such a vast and amorphous ban that it is difficult to imagine what could be allowed to be taught. All of these bills positively died in committee.
