Kids say the Darndest Things

A good friend of mine e-mailed me the following yesterday. With his permission, I re-print it, with my comments to follow...

Well, the campaign rhetoric has reached my 8 year old...

Last night as my wife and I talked politics in the kitchen, my eight year old daughter apparently could tell how I plan to vote and looked up from her homework. Wide-eyed, she said "No, Dad. You have to vote against President Bush." Imagine my utter shock at this. First of all, she was paying attention to what I said. As any parent can attest, this is a rarity. It must have been because I wasn't actually talking to her and my wife's and my conversation was marginally more interesting than multiplication tables. Had I been speaking to her (such as "pick up your dirty clothes" or "no treats before dinner") she surely would not have listened, but I digress.

Admittedly, sometimes I speak too soon, too much, or too bluntly. This was no exception. I laughed, and in what I thought was a very cheerful voice I said "Of course I'm going to vote for the President." Crocodile tears. Children's tear ducts (like their heads) must be abnormally large in proportion to the rest of their bodies, but again I digress.

With a voice of concern and these huge tears streaming down her face, she looked up at me and said "But Dad, President Bush wants everyone to work an hour longer and I won't get to see you before I go to bed." Okay ... there's so much buried in this statement. I feel pangs of guilt each night as I get home late and see my children just long enough to put them to bed (on those occasions when I make it home before bedtime). Apparently, I spend so little time with them that someone, somewhere is practicing liberal indoctrination. Did I address her apparent fear of abandonment? No, I needed to know how she got such a seemingly absurd notion in her head. Where did she get this idea? From a political discussion in her third grade class. The issue, as seen through the eyes of an eight year old, is that President Bush wants everyone to spend more time working, without getting paid for it.

Now it's bedtime and instead of Dr. Seuss or Mother Goose, I have to explain the Department of Labor's new FairPay system. November 2 can't come soon enough.

What's truly sad about this is that a discussion of political issues and civics in general is something that is generally in poor shape in U.S. education today. But the idea of third graders debating Department of Labor standards strikes me as patently absurd. It's a tough issue for adults to understand and debate -- an eight year-old's limited perspective, no matter how brilliant the child, makes it almost impossible to achieve any true understanding of such an issue.

On the issue of liberal indoctrination... look, I have enough reasons why I want to send my kids to private school based simply on the quality of public schooling (of which I am a product). Frankly, I don't even know if my friend's child is in public school or not (call it a reasonable assumption at this point) or if the teacher was the one who provided the impetus for the child's belief that President Bush would make her daddy work longer hours.

But I know plenty of conservatives who wonder whether certain opinions on issues of public importance are being presented as "facts" by people in positions of authority in public schools today. Yesterday's Best of the Web contained an interesting assertion on this point...

Reader John Vecchione raises another interesting point: "Why are so many 'pro-choicers' antichoice on schools? One good reason is that only by taking the education of their children out of the hands of conservative parents and delivering it to liberal, unionized teachers can liberals hope to maintain parity. It is the conversion of these right-leaning children that the nulliparous liberals require for any continuation in power. Thus the natural intellectual alignment of pro-choice on abortion/pro-choice on schools is rarely seen."

Personally, I think the teachers argue against choice in schools out of self-interest as defined by their union, but that's a seperate issue entirely. I also wonder who uses the word "nulliparous" in an e-m,ail. But the question is more to the point of how children are taught in public schools, and whether too much of the curriculum focuses on delivering one perspective rather than another. And no, I'm not talking about creationism vs. evolution at this point. There are facts out there (such as "JFK was elected President in 1960") and then there are opinions ("JFK won because of massive voter fraud in Illinois and Texas.") Clearly, we want our kids to learn the former, and hopefully be able to debate the latter after reviewing the associated facts. But what happens when an issue is very complex, and a person in authority presents only one side (their side, as it turns out)?

I am talking about issues such as global warming, or more funding for education, or abortion. What's the point of view that's presented to the kiddies while discussing the issue? And are you required to provide your child with the opposing point of view?

I don't have an answer. But it's something anyone with kids (Johnny Goblin and Kansas, here's to you) will need to consider.