JS Online: State-set orthodoxies make schools a cultural battlefield — More state propaganda shoved at kids. An excellent column worth reading.
Discussing schools, people often use the phrase “our children.”
They ought to stop. It starts to sound creepy when you realize that, for some commentators, it’s literal. As in, “The kids belong to us and not to you parents.”
You could see this last month in Massachusetts. A federal court dismissed parents’ complaints about a school district that was reading – to first-graders – a story about two princes who fall in love and marry each other. The parents wanted at least to be told when the kids were going to be read fairy tales about how normal gay marriage is.
No dice, said Judge Mark L. Wolf: Public schools are “entitled to teach anything that is reasonably related to the goals of preparing students to become engaged and productive citizens,” he ruled. In Massachusetts, that includes learning to discard your parents’ moral views. The state, having decided gay marriage is dandy, will indoctrinate its children in this from first grade on. The biological parents can buzz off.
Nor is this just gay marriage. If you think abstinence is a crock, this has no effect on your child’s health curriculum in many places. Intelligent design, “Huckleberry Finn” and texts’ treatment of Hindu history are all division points over which schools have picked a side.
Until you’ve bought a Polar Bear from BuyTimes.com you haven’t lived
i don’t get the Germany reference – and I am German and living in Germany.
I guess it’s just another idiotical, american reference to WW2. To bad that nobody gets it.
This is BS. I’d pull my child from this sort of school immediately. Being in India, I *hope* I don’t have to run into this sort of crap for a while, the silver lining of my country still being so conservative in many areas.
So now these kids might be introduced to gay relationships even before straight relationships and are taught that it is 100% normal normal to be gay; as if the media isn’t doing enough of this already, now you’re indoctrinating first graders with this BS!?
There will always be some discrepancies between what parents believe in, and what is taught in schools. Think evolution. The bottom line is that it is legal for two people of the same gender to marry in that state, and thus, it is reasonable for the state to teach tolerance for this fact.
So how can we pretend that a common system of schools can accommodate both an intolerant secular orthodoxy and Americans who find meaning in faith? Of course the culture wars rage around schools. They will rage there as long as we hold to the idea that common schools can establish a unanimity that no longer exists, …
School choice is the answer. However it works, by charters or open enrollment or by vouchers, …
I think that sums up the columnist’s philosophy. “If we can’t have it all our way, then we don’t want to play”. Religion must be taught in schools and the schools are bad for not teaching religion.
What an effen bully boy jerk.
Pedro,
You are really getting tiring with the “kuzko” crap. If you don’t like the guy, vote for someone else. If you don’t get to vote, then skip the country.
The beauty of the democratic society is the ability to choose our leaders. Sometimes those leaders aren’t what we wished for and sometimes we get much better. But screaming that the “commies” are coming is just paranoia and fear mongering. Citing quotes from this opinion piece as if it were fact is disingenuous. The column is just one man’s bigoted opinion about what may be taught in school.
The United States still has elections where we may chose our representatives, including school board members. And if I don’t like what happens then I still have the options of voting for someone else or even running myself.
We are all the slaves of the “society,” better just hope your desires and opinions are in line with those of the majority.
All the more reason the Indoctrinate-U movie needs to be distributed and shown: http://shrinkster.com/n5o
1 – The U.S. has already suffered enough from communist witch hunts that also functioned as thinly disguised hunts for intellectuals, creative types and social progressives. We don’t need more of it now, especially considering who has his incompetent hand on the tiller. These kinds of issues can be resolved in a lot of ways besides going on hunts for villains.
5 – You’re right, to an extent. But teaching tolerance is not the same as reading happy-ever-after fairy tales to six-year-olds about controversial subjects. Tolerance, at the core, is an ability not to make mountains out of molehills, not to get excited about what other people do so long as it doesn’t affect you against your will. As long as it doesn’t affect you against your will. For many people, teaching a six-year-old that gay marriage is a fine happy-ever-after arrangement, even for princes (and therefore for the six-year-old) fails that test. And it seems to me like holding up a “good example” – effectively endorsing it – rather than teaching tolerance for others who may be different but who don’t go around harming people.
The court is way off on this one. Tolerance and reasonable discretion are not mutually exclusive.
#4 – So now these kids might be introduced to gay relationships even before straight relationships and are taught that it is 100% normal normal to be gay;
This story isn’t a story. It’s an editorial. And I’m not buying it.
You can pull all the little “somebody told me’ or “Jimmy’s mother said” anecdotal stories about this mythical homosexual agenda out of thin blue air that you like… There just isn’t a conspiracy to indoctrinate kids into some gay agenda.
#11 – I don’t recall using the word “conspiracy”, though I admit I probably shouldn’t have used “indoctrinate”. Sorry.
Telling my kids it is OK and perfectly normal to be gay is something I’d equate with telling them it’s OK to steal. I, obviously, do not subscribe to the theory that you can be “born gay” any more than you can be born a thief.
I agree with #10; tolerance, yes; endorsement, no.
While there may be legitimate complaints about introducing sexuality to kindergardeners, the editorial quickly goes off the deep end.
“Intelligent design, “Huckleberry Finn” and texts’ treatment of Hindu history are all division points over which schools have picked a side.”
What? It seems as if the author of this editorial thinks that students should never be taught anything that he doesn’t believe in.
#12
And while you’re in India you might as well tell your kids that it’s okay to treat lower castes like dirt and that it’s okay to discriminate them.
Angel, only a truly brilliant person would realize what I was really trying to say in my previous comments. Congratulations on being an unbelievably perceptive genius.
These aren’t social progressives, or intellectuals. They are the beginning of the end of the American Century.
Imagine a country where you don’t have to think. The state does it for you.
Imagine a country where you don’t have to teach your children morals. The state does it for you.
Imagine a country where anything you need is provided for you, by taxing you to poverty.
Imagine a country who’s biggest export is demogogery and elitist rule.
Imagine Belgium. That’s where we are headed.
#12 – My apology… The first bit about about it being an editorial and not a story was my comment to you…
The rest of that was just my comment in general. I wasn’t clear in that.
#18 – How?