On Tuesday, The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about some recent comments made by Michigan Democrats regarding the education of children.

The article reports:

Michigan Democrats were heavily criticized over the weekend for telling parents that they are not ‘clients’ of public schools and that public education teaches kids what society ‘needs them to know.’  

A Facebook post on Saturday shared by the state’s Democrats on their official page blasted the idea that parents should be involved in what public school teach their children. The post was taken down on Monday morning following heavy disapproval.

This is the post that was taken down:

In case you can’t read the small print, this is what it says:

‘Not sure where this “parents-should-control-what-is-taught-in-schools-because-they-are-our-kids” is originating, but parents do have the option to send their kids to a hand-selected private school at their own expense if this is what they desire.

The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public”

There was a time when elected officials considered themselves ‘public servants.’ It seems as if we have lost that concept. The parents have every right to tell schools what to teach. Almost all parents want their children to graduate with a basic knowledge of math, reading, and history. It is not too much to ask that our schools prepare our children to become contributing members of American society. By the time a child graduates from high school, he should know how to fill out a job application, how to balance a checkbook (manually or on a computer), how to create a budget, and generally how to take care of himself. That’s why home economics and shop used to be taught in school. We need to go back to the concept of actually teaching our children things that are useful in navigating the world around them.