The Texas attorney general’s office has created a parenting curriculum for high school students which will become mandatory throughout the state beginning in the fall.
State officials say the goal is twofold: They want to teach teenage parents their legal rights and they want to show other students the difficulties of being a parent in hopes that they’ll wait to have children.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. In one sense, I guess it’s good if the goal is to discourage teens from getting pregnant or to provide resources to teens who already have kids so they can be better parents. On the other hand, is this really the responsibility of the schools?
Should public schools be responsible for teaching parenting courses or sex education or “life-skill” courses such as money management? Ideally, that sort of stuff should be taught at home, right? Isn’t that still the job of a parent? Of course, that’s the problem: the parents aren’t teaching these things to their children; they expect the schools to do it for them.
And this is what we get as a result. For better or worse.
