Anti-Education Mama

Mary: My boys don't go to your school no more, and that's gonna be it... I saw what they were bringing home — poetry and shit. A waste of time! They got more important things to worry about.
Lou Anne: Don't you think that finishing high school will be valuable to their future?
Mary: That's not in their future. I ain't raising no doctors and lawyers here, they got bills to pay.

— Dangerous Minds

Some parents want their kids to get an education so that they can hold their own in the real world. Others would rather see them sink than swim.

The reasons for this vary, usually due to their disapproval of education due to their own views, preferring having fun, or doubting their child's potential. At worst, it could be because of abuse and neglect. Another reason why a parent could've ended up as this is because they themselves are a Jaded Washout. A lot of times, this happens because a parent wants their child to inherit and keep running the family business rather than go off to pursue a different career. Other times, if it's a girl, they may have old-fashioned sexist values. Sometimes, it could be for justified reasons, like grievances against the education system as a whole, finding it unfair and at times useless. They might concede letting a child go if they're aiming for an MRS Degree, because they'll come out with a spouse and aren't actually getting a real degree.

Subtrope of Wacky Parent, Serious Child. Also compare Jock Dad, Nerd Son.

The polar opposite of Education Mama.

No Real Life Examples, Please!.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Z: Downplayed with Goku. He doesn't oppose Gohan getting an education but would rather pull him out of school to train with him. In contrast, Chi-chi is a hardcore Education Mama, wanting Gohan to turn out nothing like his idiotic dad.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Junpei's mother Nagi encourages her son to skip school and smoke/drink with her, but he refuses... to smoke/drink. While Nagi still thinks her son can succeed even if he doesn't finish high school, since Junpei was being bullied in school she encourages him to skip school not because she doesn't want him to get an education, but rather because Junpei is utterly miserable when he does go and she wants him to be well.
• Kaze no Shōjo Emily:
  • Emily Byrd Starr has always wanted to be a writer ever since she was a little girl, but Aunt Elizabeth thinks it's a waste of time and cruelly tells her that she won't make it as one, forbids her, and wants her to take up sewing instead so she can become a Proper Lady. When Emily continues to anyway, Elizabeth tears her manuscripts to stop her.
  • Perry is Emily's age but has never been to school because his aunt would rather have him work odd jobs for money. When Emily teaches him how to write, he asks her if he can go to school too, but she forbids him because she looks down on reading and writing.

Films — Live-Action

• Dangerous Minds: Mary pulls her grandsons Cornelius, Damien, and Tyrone out of school after seeing the poetry assignments they were bringing home. She accuses their teacher Lou Anne of having a White Savior complex and tells her her grandsons don't need an education to deal with their problems.
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife: Callie dislikes scientists because her deadbeat father was one, so she has trouble coming to terms with the fact that her teenage daughter Phoebe wants to be a scientist one day.
• Gifted: Downplayed. While Mary's uncle and guardian Frank encourages her intellectual interests, he also insists she goes to a normal school instead of one that would better suit her advanced mathematical abilities. This is later revealed to be because his math genius sister, Mary's mother, killed herself due to their mother's extreme Education Mama tendencies making her isolated and depressed. He became jaded against all his mother stood for, including prestigious schooling, quitting his own philosophy career over this. According to Frank, Mary's mother also would have wanted a more normal life for her daughter and he is fulfilling her wishes. By the end of the film, Frank learns to Take a Third Option - Mary takes advanced math classes but join non-academic extracurriculars to mingle with normal children.
• Legally Blonde: Downplayed with Elle's parents. When she brings up the idea of going to law school (to follow Warner), they are skeptical, thinking, like Warner, that Elle is too pretty to be serious and go to law school. They don't ultimately stand in her way (and in the musical actually agree to pay the tuition if she gets in), but Elle later remarks that she doesn't think her parents take her seriously because of this.
  Sapphire: You were first runner-up in the Miss Hawaiian Tropic contest. Why throw all that away?
  Daniel: Sweetheart, you don't need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. And you, button, are none of those things.
• Stand and Deliver: In this film, it's the father of Ana Delgado who's opposed to his daughter getting an education. He wants her to work in his restaurant. After Mr. Escalante intervenes she comes back to class.

Literature

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: When the poor drunkard Pap Finn returns and learns his son Huck has started going to school and learning to read in his absence, he accuses Huck of trying to be uppity.
  "Now looky here’ you stop that putting on frills. I won’t have it. I’ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son."
• Harry Potter: Voldemort's mother and uncle, Merope and Morfin Gaunt, were terrible at magic, with it being all but stated that they never attended Hogwarts. It is heavily implied that their father Marvolo did not allow them to go there, as they would have been learning magic alongside Muggle-borns, whom he hated due to his belief in blood purity.
• The Inheritance Cycle: Garrows never taught his son Roran and his nephew Eragon how to read, even though he himself knew how to read.
• Matilda: The titular Matilda's parents are heavily neglectful and like sitting in front of the TV all day. Matilda, on the other hand, favours books. When she asks her mother one day if she can take her dinner to her room so she can read while she eats, her father loses his temper and asks her if she thinks the TV isn't good enough.
• The Queen Of Water: Virginia's parents are poor indigena field workers who don't see the value in education. When she is five, she starts attending the local school against her mother's wishes. The mestiza teacher only wants her to speak and write Spanish, but Virginia's native language is Quichua, so the teacher thinks she's stupid and frequently pinches her ear with her sharp fingernails. When she decides to stop going, her mother's only comment is, "Fine. Now you can make yourself useful and pasture the animals."
• Skippyjon Jones: In "Class Action", Skippy expresses the desire to go to school, but his mother Mama Junebug insists that only dogs go to school and that cats are above this. Skippy gets around this by going on a make-believe adventure to school with Los Chimichangos.

Live-Action TV

• A.P. Bio: Humorously in "Freakin' Enamored" its revealed that Sarika Sarkar's mother is one. In contrast to her studious and grade-obsessed daughter, she's in fact a laid-back party girl who doesn't understand her daughter's obsession with academics and admits she would much rather be relaxing by the pool drinking cocktails than attending the parent-teacher conference.
• The Beauty Queen Of Jerusalem: Mercada and to a lesser extent Rosa have a very Stay in the Kitchen attitude towards Rosa's daughters getting an education (one of the few things Rosa and her mother-in-law agree on), saying that the girls should only care about finding a husband, not getting a job or an education. It's implied that part of Rosa's motivation is envy over the fact that she never learned to read. On the other hand, Gabriel supports Rachelika when she wants to go to university.
• Bridgerton: Lady Portia Featherington is utterly hostile to any of her daughters putting any investment into them directly attracting suitors, and thus deliberately goes out of her way to discourage them from pursuing education, believing that it will make them less attractive prospects. This puts her in conflict several times with her youngest daughter, the bookish and intelligent Penelope. This is partially down to Deliberate Values Dissonance, as with its Regency setting, attracting a good marriage is a young lady's only hope at financial security made all the worse by the fact the Featherington's are secretly broke due to Baron Featherington's gambling addiction, she just takes it a bit to far.
• The Brittas Empire: According to "Mums and Dads", when he was 15, Jim Brittas wanted to become an astronomer. However, his father laughed off his desire to stay at school and pass an exam for this dream, believing that there were better ways (such as becoming a night watchman) to allow him to see the stars.
• Parks and Recreation: Whilst espousing the virtues of a college education, Ron admits that his father was actually against him going to college believing it was a waste of time, to the point that despite Ron being accepted when it came time to go, his father instead dropped him off at the metal factory and drove off leaving him there. Ron was forced to hitchhike his way to college.

Web Videos

• One Dhar Mann episode puts a racial spin on this trope.
  (Scene: Elliot sees his son Jerome doing his homework at the dinner table).
  Elliot: You listenin' to white people's business again?
  Jerome: I'm just trying to learn, is all.
  Elliot: Learning is going to get you strung up in a tree.
  Elliot's wife: Elliot! Please, now.
  Elliot: Do you know what's going on in Mississippi right now? Same thing can happen here!
  Elliot: Son, you're a smart boy, but you're the wrong colour.
  Jerome: A black man can't be a banker?
  Elliot: A black man can't even be a man right now! It's just the way it is with our kind.

Western Animation

• In BoJack Horseman, Princess Caroline's mother fought her attempts to go to college and make something of herself, both because she feared they could not afford tuition and because she resented the implication that being a housecleaner wasn't good enough for her daughter. She finally relented after a plan to push Princess Caroline into a loveless marriage to the son of the rich family she worked for fell through.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, Gabriel Agreste is an interesting case. On the one hand, he has scheduled his son Adrien for tutoring in a wide variety of subjects ranging from Russian to fencing. On the other hand, none of these lessons are geared towards the usual aim of education - creating a functional, independent adult - but rather are just a way to keep Adrien occupied and isolated and occasionally imparting bits of information that he might need in his modeling career. Meanwhile, Gabriel — being the Control Freak that he is — is ardently against Adrien going to a regular school, only letting him attend junior high because the threat of pulling him out and further isolating him is one of the few levers he has with which to control his son.
• The Owl House: Luz wants to go to Hexside in order to learn how to do magic, but Eda (who takes care of Luz during her stay in the Boiling Isles) doesn't want Luz to do so at first — this is because Eda quit school, and strongly favors Wild Magic over the school system's method of teaching students how to do "proper" magic. However, Eda eventually allows Luz to make the decision to go to Hexside. Then again, Eda's reasons against the education system are far deeper — education at Hexside is essentially indoctrination into the Coven System, enforced by Emperor Belos in the 50 years he has reigned, which Eda refuses to be a part of. And rightfully so, as it turns out: the Emperor is actually a human Witch Hunter who sees witches and every magical being on the Isles as abominations. The Coven System was a means to mark every being for the Day of Unity, which would wipe out every witch with a Coven Sigil from the Isles at once.
• Rick and Morty: Rick Sanchez (especially at the start of the series) is an interesting example. He doesn't believe in traditional education, thinking that public schools diminish one's academic potential rather than improving it, and thus thinks it's fine to pull Morty out of school at random moments. That said, he recognizes that Morty is smarter than most people believe, and his adventures with Rick actually do teach him skills that a traditional school couldn't... although most of those skills (i.e. disarming a bomb) are ones he gained due to Rick's drunken hijinks.
• In the South Park episode "The Jeffersons", Mr. Jefferson, who is totally not Michael Jackson with a fake mustache, wants to keep his young son Blanket locked up in his mansion at all times, and resents when the boys suggest that maybe Blanket should learn some basic skills for living in rural Colorado, like how to chop wood. In this case, Mr. Jackson's intentions are not malicious, but he does not understand that life can't always be fun and games.
• Super Mario World (1991): "A Little Learning" provides a male example with King Koopa. His twin sons, Hip and Hop, are interested in going to school upon seeing pranks that Yoshi and Oogtar have pulled on Princess Toadstool, and they want to be able to prank them. Koopa does not approve of the idea of Hip and Hop going to school, as he doesn't want them to learn good citizenship and prefers for them to grow up to be sneaky, two-faced cheating illiterates like him.
• Transformers: Animated: A variant; Professor Sumdac is a genius in numerous fields and understands the importance of his daughter having a full education. But instead of sending her to a traditional school, he built her a tutor-bot programmed with a full K-12 learning plan. It's later revealed that this was done because Sari wasn't fully human, but a Cybertronian with a human form who'd come to Earth. He wanted to keep her origin a secret from everyone (including her), hence his isolating her.

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