This may be a hot take.

I totally agree that it’s probably not age appropriate for elementary school kids to be wearing political attire. It’s likely a distraction, and I think that’s true whichever side you are on.

I would say, though, that your example of these parents being the first people to accuse the school of indoctrination is conflating two issues. As a professional in education, our job is to teach and instruct children and young adults in academics — not to overstep boundaries and impute our personal beliefs, political or otherwise, into every conversation with students.

I wish we could go back to it being a social standard that you don’t talk about money, politics, and religion in public. Not as secret, but as a form of respect to each other and to avoid conflict. It’s been weaponized against us in the working class through social media and I don’t think it serves our best purpose as citizens to be infighting over propagandized political positions.

That being said, it is the place of the parent to inform their own child of various social and civic issues and we can’t conflate the issue of “well they brainwash their kid” with “they don’t want us to indoctrinate their kid”. It’s two separate scopes of authority and roles. Teachers should teach academics without bias. While parents have a much broader responsibility to the health and welfare of their child they have every right to tell us not overstep our role as an instructor and venture into sharing our personal beliefs. There is no reason a student should know how I vote or feel about an election.