School ain't so simple

While doing a little research on the article I mentioned in the previous entry (about which I'll have more to say later), I ran across an article by Tom Weber for Minnesota Public Radio. Here's a comment from one mother opposed to any mention of sexual orientation in school:

"We send our kids to school to help them learn to read, write, do math, science, not to have lessons on homosexuality woven into the classroom curricula."

It's an awfully tempting vision: a school in which only the most basic, uncontroversial subjects are taught.

It's also completely unrealistic.

Come on, lady: kids aren't robots. They don't just sit quietly and absorb knowledge in the classroom. They are living, breathing, thinking, still-developing people. They talk with one another. They have encounters, good and bad, with people they've never met. Things happen that make them happy or sad. You want them to ignore all that and focus on what matters. I daresay you wouldn't be able to live up to your standard of education. You're not facing reality.

The best that a school can do is to try to keep the extraneous stuff from overwhelming students. Neither teachers nor administrators can stop that stuff from happening.

By the way, the reason your school district is having to have a discussion at all on the subject is, your school board laid down a rule that had the chilling effect of barring faculty and staff from even counseling kids suffering from homophobic bullying. Why was that rule instituted? It was at the behest of misinformed, religiously motivated parents who feared (and still fear) that any discussion of sexual orientation opens the door to the dreaded "gay recruitment" whereby innocent kids are turned to the Dark Side as part of Teh Gays' sinister strategy. In short, your school board bowed to pressure from deeply fearful and woefully ignorant religious zealots.

The trouble is, that rule didn't stop the kids from saying whatever they pleased. And somehow, most of what was said on the subject of sexual orientation and same-sex attraction was ... vile. Hateful. Ignorant. Reprehensible. (I don't doubt the kids saying these things learned them from their parents, by the way.)

That shouldn't be part of the school day either. Yet it is.

And as long as it is, we can't afford the fantasy that our kids are only supposed to "learn to read, write, do math, science" in school. We have to deal with what they're actually hearing, and saying, and doing.

If you're clinging to the notion that school is a sterile environment in which knowledge should be poured into kids' brains, divorced from all relationship with real life, then you helped to create the mess in which that school district finds itself.

And if you have that simplistic a mindset, your kids just might be the ones making school hellish for others. Ever consider that?