Students come to school every day to receive the best education possible, but with the new “Education Matters” bills being proposed the topics they can learn about will be limited. 

The Indiana Congress members will vote on three new bills as part of the “Education Matters” plan: Senate Bill 167, House Bill 1040, and House Bill 1134. While each bill is a little bit different they are all part of a greater plan, censoring what students learn. 

While these bills have some good intentions, passing them will drastically change our education. 

Divisive Concepts

Many topics in these bills deal with teaching divisive concepts including; gender, race, ethnicity, religion, color, nationality or political affiliations. This basically limits the entirety of history, government, and social studies classes. 

Teachers can’t teach how terrible the Holocaust or slavery was because it is considered “divisive”. Students won’t be able to learn about any of the very important Civil Rights leaders or the movement at all. 

This is all to prevent students from feeling uncomfortable, but I think most people know it is the parents that are uncomfortable.

Not wanting a child to learn the true history of the world because the “divisive concepts” don’t align with one’s view of the world is selfish. This could create generations of kids who don’t know the actual history of the world. 

Also, everyone doesn’t always have to feel comfortable. Some topics are uncomfortable to talk about, like racism, however they’re very real and have to be discussed. Censoring these topics would make them seem even more taboo and not help the issue. 

We need to teach the mistakes made in our country in order to prevent them from happening again, otherwise everyone will be naive and the cycle could continue to repeat. 

Advance Lesson Plans

The new bills also put a lot of stress on teachers because they have to post all of their curriculum and lesson plans for the year on June 30. 

This would put massive amounts of stress on teachers to make all their lesson plans before June 30. It would also create more stress during the school year when they can’t modify them.

Let’s say a teacher’s class fails a test and they want to take a day to reteach something that they didn’t previously plan on reteaching, that won’t be allowed. 

This also doesn’t leave room to teach about current events that might happen throughout the school year. Take Covid-19 for example. When the pandemic hit it was important for many teachers, especially in younger grades, to teach about how to prevent the spread of Covid-19 by washing your hands properly. 

Parents will also have to review these lesson plans to make sure they are “appropriate” for students. This is completely up to parental discretion meaning they could deem learning about the American Revolution inappropriate. 

If a parent thinks the lesson plans are not appropriate for their child they can opt their child out of it meaning teachers would be under more stress having to make additional alternative. 

Teachers Interacting With Students

Under this new bill students also aren’t allowed to talk to teachers about anything besides homework, academics, or lesson plans without parental consent. 

Let’s say a child is upset because their parents are going through a divorce and they don’t feel like they can talk to their parents about it. So they go to a trusted teacher at school, if the child’s parent doesn’t consent to the conversation happening teachers can face disciplinary actions. 

This could be very detrimental to a student’s mental health. Some kids don’t have adults they trust at home so they rely on teachers, but now they won’t be allowed to do this. This could lead to kids keeping all these emotions inside without seeking help. 

It can also prevent cases of abuse and neglect from being noticed. A parent who is abusing or neglecting their child obviously wouldn’t consent to their child talking to their teachers about it. This means not only would the student not be able to reach out for help, the teacher wouldn’t be allowed to ask if everything is okay if they notice something wrong. This has the potential to be very dangerous. 

What Should Happen

Instead of Indiana Congress members wasting time creating and voting on these bills that do way more hurt than help. They should spend their time trying to resolve actual problems including; student loan debt, racial inequities, misogyny, body autonomy and more. Teachers are trained to do their job, they don’t need legislators micromanaging them.