Richard Cohen nonsensically points a finger at parents:
You will notice that in all the finger-pointing — the students, the teachers, the administrators — not a digit is aimed at the parents. Their children are accused of hounding a classmate to death and the parents apparently knew nothing. Not only that, they are somehow not expected to know anything. The teachers are supposed to know what’s going on. The principal. Maybe even the school nurse. But the parents? No. They’re off the hook. Not as far as I’m concerned. This tendency to blame teachers or administrators for all that happens in the schools is both unfair and unrealistic.
This is the sort of pure and unadulterated illogic that is so reliably produced every time an American liberal expresses her opinion. After laboring without cease to remove American parents from the child-rearing equation for forty years, they then have the gall to complain that parents are not doing the very job that liberals have been attempting to prevent them from doing for literal decades. Parents aren’t expected to know anything about the school lives of their children for the very good reason that many teachers are not only encouraged, but trained, to actively prevent parents from knowing what their children are being taught at school, from having any influence upon what their children are taught at school, and from interfering in any way with how the school district elects to raise their children in loco parentis.
Cohen mentions the school nurse in what is apparently supposed to be a comedic ad absurdum. And yet, the school nurse is the very individual who will be prescribing medicines to school children without the consent or the knowledge of the parents. The devotees of the state cannot cheer on the state as it seizes the parental power, dictates mandatory schooling and medical interventions and bans corporal punishment and religious activity, then turn around and complain that parents no longer effectively perform the responsibilities that have been forcibly taken from them.