First of all, good on you for going into teaching. I have friends that teach and they find it greatly rewarding. My own mother taught for 20 years and found it to be a hell of deep torment. The friends should be teachers. My mother should not have been.

Second of all, be careful of "other people's children" as we've discussed before. The thing of it is, children are eager little sponges that suck up the moral framework of their parents - if I could say there's one perilous thing I've learned from having a kid, it's that she loves me unreservedly and at her tender age, I can literally do no wrong. She is voraciously incorporating our worldview into hers and applying it with enthusiasm to everything she sees.

So it's not that the kids aren't learning "moral and civil upbringing." It's that they're learning moral and civil upbringing that isn't up to your standards. You're right - this is a problem. We probably should do what we can to make sure children learn the basic values of their society but it needs to be done in such a way that parents aren't observing their parenting being negated every single day.

I had to take that course. It was called "critical issues in modern living" and it was proposed, created, ramrodded through the school board and championed by a friend's mother who - you guessed it - decided everyone else's kids were the problem. And everyone could smell it - "my kid isn't the problem, your kid is the problem!" so they packed it full of get out of jail free cards so that their kids wouldn't have to waste their time. Everyone college bound got to skip it if they took two years of a foreign language. Which, as we all know, is a great substitute for life experience, right? It certainly isn't a way to intensely focus on the kids in danger of dropping out who are taking the minimum courseload. You know, the ones that already have too much life experience.

I graduated a semester early (because I hated that school so much). I started German my junior year (because I was too busy taking a bunch of bullshit honors classes). And since I only had 3 semesters of German, I had to take "critical issues in modern living" with all my burnout wasteoid friends. It was taught by the PE teacher. Its curriculum was assembled by committee. I want you to imagine what eight bored stay-at-home moms decided other people's kids needed to be taught so that they wouldn't become the burnout losers other people's kids' parents most obviously were. That way you can understand how we ended up covering "how to survive a hotel fire" and "how not to catch AIDS" in one 45-minute class.

In order to meet the English requirements (how do you slam 4 years of English in 3 1/2 years?) I also had to take "Humanities", the experimental 2-hour long 1-credit of English course started by my least favorite English teacher. It was basically "we're studying literature, and we're also forcing you to look at art and religion." Great idea in theory. In practice, it was poetry plus slideshows of art. The one cool part was we got to visit a Sikh ashram, and we talked to a Mennonite for an hour, and a Rabbi came in, and then somebody's parents got super upset at all this religious talk and showed up to give two hours of the atheist perspective and then someone else's parents got even more super upset and started a petition to get the class cancelled because it was turning us all into godless heathens.

I took "Humanities" for half of the one year it was offered. I'm told once I bailed it wasn't any fun anyway because most of the course was me poking holes in their instruction ("I think maybe you have that upside down. It makes a lot more sense the other way." "No, I'm sure the artist wants it displayed this way." "How are you sure?" "I'm the artist." "Wait. You're subjecting us to your crappy postmodern scribblings?")

So we come full circle - you might be thinking of the children, but effectively, you're picking a fight with their parents. Nobody thinks their own kids lack ethics or values and they're right - their ethics and values just don't meet your standards. The only way to get there is to start early with the idea that the civil sphere is the source of morality, not the family, and that rarely goes well.

The kids are all right. They really are. They play safe-space trigger-warning bullshit games in college because it works. They generally stop once they get out because it doesn't. Using all the advantage and leverage to you isn't amoral, it's efficient and it's not a failing of the kids, it's a failing of an educational system deeply reliant on clients spending vast sums of money on something abstract that will not recuperate their expenses for a decade or more.