Regardless of your opinion on teaching diversity/multiculturalism in school, teaching 5-year-olds in kindergarten about "same-sex couples raising children" raising children doesn't make sense.
It has nothing to do with whether such relationships are "good" or "bad". It's that to a 5-year-old, those relationships don't matter. Young children first begin to recognize how others are related to them (family, friend, teacher...). At kindergarten age they relate to other children as "someone like me" and view the realtionships the other children have in the same way - how the people in that other child's life are related to that child. How those people are related to each other isn't an issue yet. For example, a friend's brother is thought of only as a brother, not as another child of that child's parents. Parents are parents, period. It's not that the child is totally unaware that parents may also be husband and wife or whatever their relationship or lack of relationship is to each other, it's that their primary identification label in his mind is "friend's mom", "friend's dad" (or "friend's other mom"), "friend's grandmother", or "friend's whatever-you-want-to-call-the-person-who-takes-care-of-him". At this age, adults and other household members relationships with each other isn't as important as their relationship with the child or his friends.
For a child who is dependent upon the adults in his life, their relationship with him is what is most important. Funny how some adults seem to have lost sight of this.
I don't believe it's the place of the schools to teach about family relationships. I'll teach my children what they need to know about that when they need to know (when they begin asking questions.) The schools should trust me to do this just as I trust them to teach literature, math, and science (in spite of the fact that one science poster I saw in a classroom said "energy causes light" and another teacher said that touching mercury will burn your skin.)
What some parents teach their children may not be what the educational powers that be think is "right". If the schools spent more time teaching the basics and teaching critical thinking then this wouldn't be a problem. Teach a child to think critically and find the truth for himself and eventually it won't matter if his parents have taught him that anyone different is wrong or to be hated. Life experience and his critical reasoning skills will help him find the truth. Spoonfeed him the ideas that you believe are right and he won't learn anything other than to believe the voices that he hears the loudest.
Posted by marybeth at May 1, 2005 03:46 PM Other Stuff