I remember how it was -- JR
Parents outraged over school picture day ‘retouch’ trend
Jennifer Greene doesn’t want her 12-year-old daughter, Madeline, to feel pressured into looking picture-perfect.
So when the Maryland mum opened the seventh-grader’s school picture package from photography company Lifetouch and saw it urged parents to lay out an extra $12 for portrait “retouching” services — including teeth whitening, skin-tone evening and blemish removal — she freaked. “I was shocked,” Greene, 43, told The Post.
“I completely disagree with (retouching a child’s school picture), because it’s teaching kids that they need to look perfect all the time and that they can change (a perceived flaw) with the click of a mouse.”
Retouching options on school portraits aren’t new — but they’re now being offered to students as young as pre-K and are becoming as ubiquitous as face-altering filters on social media, which have triggered a spike in anxiety and depression in teen girls.
Greene, a travel blogger and social media administrator, was so incensed by the Photoshop proposition that she blasted the company on Twitter.
“I’m going to need someone to explain to me why @Lifetouch offers PHOTO RETOUCH for KIDS school pics?!” she tweeted late last month. “What the hell?!”
She said she never received a response. In a statement to The Post, Lifetouch said, “Our goal is always to authentically capture each child we photograph. Photo retouch is an entirely opt-in service that customers choose to add on to photo packages. Most, if not all, school photography companies offer this service and it’s an expectation as an available option for schools.”
Last November, Tampa, Fla.-based mum Kristin Loerns did a double-take when she received her son Kieran’s school photos. His adorable freckles had vanished.
“I gave permission for ‘basic retouching,’ which would be removing blemishes, and they removed all of his freckles instead,” the 36-year-old blogger (@loefamilyloves) and photographer told The Post.
She complained to Lifetouch, which remedied the situation by resending the pictures with Kieran’s adorable freckles returned.
School picture alterations don’t appear to be limited to the airbrushing of a child’s skin, teeth or blemishes.
Whitney Rose, a mum of two hearing-impaired toddlers, told The Post that she believes a photographer from a different company erased her 3-year-old son’s hearing aids from his school picture. Her outrage over the apparent offence garnered 2.2 million views on TikTok.
“These are my son’s hearing aids. They help him hear, they’re a part of who he is and he likes them,” Rose said on her TikTok account, @TheseDeafKidsRock. “It’s sending a message to him that part of who he is, his hearing loss, is something he should be ashamed of.”
But Manhattan mum Heidi Green — an event and professional portrait photographer who spent 10 years snapping school pictures — said it is often parents who are pushing for perfection.
“The parent feels like they had to get [the flaw] fixed in order to enjoy the school picture, or to make the child look better,” she said.
Green said there’s a fine line between standard photo editing and damaging retouching — particularly if the perceived imperfection is permanent.
One year, a client asked Green to edit out a lifelong scar caused by a birth defect on her daughter’s face. “I felt bad about it,” she said. “I smoothed it out a little bit so that she’d be happy with the picture without changing much.
“Removing a permanent scar to me would be like saying, ‘Can you make my child’s eyes blue?’” Green added. “Because why would you want your kid to look in the picture like they don’t look in real life?”
Still, Green says not all edits are sinister. She has long offered free-of-charge retouches for children whose pictures showed visible scratches, blemishes, messy hair from playing or eyeglass glare. Some changes, like minor teeth whitening, are part of the overall photo-editing process.
That type of minor retouching is something children won’t notice, said Yamalis Diaz, a child psychologist at NYU Langone.
What is concerning is when a child learns that their permanent characteristics have been changed in a photo — and no longer reflect what they see in the mirror. “Could that start to make them feel inadequate? … Can that lead to some anxiety and depressed mood, eating disorders, body dysmorphia? Absolutely,” Diaz said.
Unlike adults, children are in an “evolution” stage of understanding themselves — and something as simple as messing with a school picture can be damaging.
“Instead of accepting your physical characteristics, your disability, your features, your appearance, you’re supposed to be fixing it or hiding it,” Diaz said.
“And that is a dangerous message to send.”
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Sussex university professor Kathleen Stock resigns after transgender rights row
A philosophy professor who became embroiled in a row over transgender rights has stepped down from her role at the University of Sussex.
Kathleen Stock, who has an OBE for her contribution to higher education, had faced calls to be sacked over her stance on gender identity.
The controversy centres on her view that a person’s self-declared gender does not trump their biological sex, “particularly when it comes to law and policy”.
Prof Stock believes that female-only spaces such as changing rooms should not be open to self-identifying trans women.
As a result, the academic was accused of transphobia, with an anonymous group, allegedly led by students, campaigning for her to be fired.
Posters to this effect were reportedly put up near the university campus, while an image of a protester holding a banner reading “Stock Out” appeared online.
Announcing her decision to leave the university, Prof Stock explained how the last few years had been “very difficult” and “an absolutely horrible time” for her and her family. “I’m putting it behind me now. On to brighter things soon, I hope,” she said.
Professor Adam Tickell, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, said in a statement that the institution was sorry to see her go. “Her departure is a loss to us all,” he wrote.
He added that harassment and bullying had no place at the university. “Rigorous academic challenge is welcome. However, we have seen an intolerance of her as a member of our community because of her work,” Prof Tickell said.
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What Role Do Parents Play in Education?
Dear parents: Thank you for sending your child to school. Now stay out of their education. It’s none of your business.
This sums up the attitude of many school boards these days. They don’t want any disagreement about the radical agenda they’re pushing on students across America.
This isn’t a new problem. Leftists have used education to burrow into the center of our culture and rot it from within for many decades. But now they’re openly admitting what they’re doing and telling the rest of us to stay out of the discussion.
As former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe boldly proclaimed during a recent gubernatorial debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
And he’s not alone.
Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire write in The Washington Post that parents don’t have any right to influence the school curriculum and that the uproar over parental rights is radical and unprecedented. They claim “common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.”
And that’s the problem. The education kids receive today is not teaching them to think for themselves. In fact, the right to an alternative opinion is condemned by school boards, administrators, and educators at all levels.
No one is suggesting that parents make every decision about a school district’s curriculum. Parents don’t want to write the curriculum, but they have a right to an alternative opinion when teaching becomes indoctrination.
Expressing different opinions has led some parents to be deemed “domestic terrorists” by the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
And now, Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the FBI to investigate “alleged harassment and threats to school boards, teachers, staff and administrators.” (Even after being challenged in Congress, and even after the NSBA apologized for its letter requesting Justice Department action, Garland refused to back down.)
The only people being harassed are the parents who want their children learning how to read and write instead of being force-fed Critical Race Theory (CRT) or gender fluidity. They want their children to be taught to love their country despite its flaws rather than being told their only hope is to dismantle the institutions, values, and traditions of our founding.
Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and her comrades “would prefer that parental contact with their children be limited by an increasingly powerful state at an ever-earlier age,” writes political analyst Stephen Kruiser. “That’s why they’re pushing for universal pre-K.” Democrats will fund universal pre-K as part of the “Build Back Better” scheme.
To highlight just how far the Left is willing to go to silence the rest of us, one Ohio private school even expelled three students in retaliation for their parents criticizing the school’s teaching of CRT. A surgeon in Minnesota was fired for daring to say that parents should decide whether their children wear masks in school.
Parents are finally taking a stand, but the best approach may be school choice rather than trying to save a school system already lost to the culture wars.
The productive way for parents to fight the culture wars is to “choose different schools,” writes former free speech litigator David French. “Kids who lack resources should be provided ‘backpack funding’ — educational dollars that follow students to the school their families choose.” This approach “uses the liberty the Constitution preserves to protect the authority of parents in the American family.” The Left, on the other hand, “uses the powers the Constitution does not restrict to magnify the role of the state in the life of the child.”
Those who seek to use education to undermine our civilization have dug in their heels. Now those of us who want our children educated instead of indoctrinated need to do the same.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/83807-what-role-do-parents-play-in-education-2021-10-29
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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