In other news, I got this assignment back last night, and I was so tickled by it that I'm going to type it up for your reading pleasure.

The writing prompt was something like this:

There's a kindergarten teacher who has a poem of the week every week. She reads it with her students several times during the week, which helps them to recognize the words and improves their reading skills. During the month of December, she chooses a poem about a different holiday every week. One week, the poem is about Hanukkah. A parent gets very upset about her choice of poem and says that he doesn't want his child exposed to Hanukkah.

We were supposed to write a response to the prompt. This was during my Introduction to Graduate School Seminar, which wasn't for a grade, so I just wrote whatever I felt like writing. We could also leave as soon as we were done, so this was totally off the cuff. Here it is:

I believe that the teacher should continue to use the Hanukkah poem because it is important to introduce children to the religions and cultures around them. In addition, I believe it would be useful to identify the religions and cultures behind the holiday celebrations. [That is, to explain more about Judaism than just Hanukkah.]

With the separation of church and state, public schools either have to purge themselves of religion or teach all religions (or at least a good sample of them). We cannot simply pander to the Christian majority. I believe that the outrage of the parent in this scenario is an example of the bigotry I would hope to help avoid in future generations through my efforts as a teacher. By exposing young children to a variety of beliefs and practices, we can help to engender acceptance of those beliefs and practices, as well as the people who hold them.

Although teaching the children about Hanukkah is certainly a step in the right direction, the teacher made an error when she decided to leave out the story behind the celebration. Just as the story of Jesus's birth is central to the celebration of Christmas, every holiday celebration has its own unique and vital history. Leaving out the story behind the celebration is a disservice to the children, and also makes it more difficult for parents to explain why they themselves do not practice the holiday. If the teacher had introduced the children to Jewish history and culture along with the Hanukkah celebration, it would be easier [for the parent] to say, "ah, my child, we are not Jewish, so we don't celebrate Hanukkah." Instead, they are left with an ambiguous, disembodied celebration that has been stripped of all cultural context and meaning.

I believe this scenario is an excellent example of how the outraged extremists have cowed our educators into teaching a vacuous, feel-good, politically correct curriculum that does not encourage children to think dynamically about the world around them.