Systemic Opposition: Teachers vs Parents

 

I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day about inclusion.

Well, not inclusion exactly. It was actually about exclusion.

I was explaining my position on exclusionary practices that have become normalized in our education system: partial timetables, suspensions, expulsions, and students being sent home for “behaviours.” Practices that disproportionately impact disabled students and those who do not fit neatly into the expectations of school.

The conversation took an unexpected turn when I was accused of being against teachers.

I paused, because nothing could be further from the truth.

My position has never been students versus teachers. It has always been grounded in an ethical responsibility to do the right thing, to uphold children’s rights, and to speak up against oppressive conditions. These conditions harm students, and just as often, they harm the adults working within the system.

That is where the disagreement began.

Every suggestion I raised was framed as impossible. Not in the budget. Against policy. Not allowed under the collective agreement. Not realistic in the current system. Many of these concerns, I explained, were labour or resourcing issues, not human rights issues, and should not be used to justify exclusion. Still, I listened. Teachers do have valid concerns. They are working in underfunded, overstretched systems that ask the impossible while offering little in return.

At one point in the conversation, I shrugged and said something that has stayed with me ever since.

“I fear you have been schooled.”

Standing in front of me was a well-educated person who struggled with critical problem solving, flexibility, and considering the perspective of another person. Someone fluent in naming barriers, yet unable to imagine possibilities beyond what already exists. Surely, I thought, this could not be the outcome of years of education.

And yet, that is exactly what it revealed.

Not education in its fullest sense, but schooling. A system that privileges compliance, efficiency, and rule-following over curiosity, ethical imagination, and the ability to question power. Schooling teaches us how to navigate constraints and assume our place within existing social and institutional hierarchies, rather than ask whether those hierarchies are just.

Education, by contrast, should expand our capacity to hold multiple perspectives, imagine alternatives, and respond to complexity with care. It asks not only what is allowed, but what is right.

This is how schooling fails us all. It produces adults who can describe the limits of the system in detail, yet struggle to envision change, not because they lack intelligence or care, but because they have been trained to adapt to the world as it is, rather than challenge the conditions that shape it.

This is how the system works.

Parents and teachers are positioned in opposition to one another. Parents are framed as unreasonable, demanding, or emotional. Teachers are framed as rigid, resistant, or uncaring. Meanwhile, the system sits quietly in the background, pitting both sides against each other in a carefully constructed lose-lose scenario.

Teachers are told their hands are tied. Parents are told to be patient. Everyone is exhausted. Energy is consumed by conflict rather than change, and nothing fundamentally shifts.

This opposition is not accidental.

When parents and teachers are busy defending themselves against one another, they are not joining forces to question the conditions that make exclusion seem inevitable. They are not challenging funding models built on scarcity. They are not interrogating policies that prioritize compliance over care. They are not asking why children’s rights become negotiable when budgets are tight.

Instead, the fight stays small. Personal. Circular.

And the system watches.

If we are serious about inclusion, we have to stop accepting this manufactured opposition. Parents and teachers are not enemies. They are both navigating structures that limit imagination, punish flexibility, and reward silence.

The real work begins when we refuse to fight each other and start naming the system that benefits from our division.

Because inclusion will never be achieved by choosing sides.
It will only be achieved when we stand on the same one.