Miscellany

Off limits

I’ve been thinking about this article I read yesterday. It’s about the multicultural holiday season in the public schools. The basic gist is that public education no longer operates under the benighted view that Christmas is about Christmas. Now, it’s about “instruction that teaches students about the variety of cultural celebrations this time of year.”

At one point, a principal mentions that some parents want to see more emphasis on Christmas:

But for the most part, he said, parents understand and accept the way the season is marked.

A national expert thinks “Christmas wars,” while an explosive issue for schools in the past, have lost much of their fury.

“There are always some fights around the edges, but over the last decade public schools understand how to get religion right. You don’t impose religion, but you don’t ignore it either. You get beyond those two failed models,” said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar with the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va.

Wow. “Schools understand how to get religion right.” “Parents understand and accept the way the season is marked.”

I’ve encountered this feeling of parental helplessness more than once lately. Parents are so afraid of getting the parenting thing wrong that they don’t even try. The implication of the article is that they’ve turned their kids over to “the experts.” Even in matters of religious training, which is what the public school holiday celebrations, as described in this article, are.

They aren’t excising religion from the schools. On the contrary, there is more religion than ever — a veritable buffet of religions. But they are all secularized, taught not as religion, not as possible answers to the deepest human questions and yearnings, not as competing truth claims, but as “cultural traditions.” Just nice things people do together around the beginning of winter.

What stands out to me is the sense we get from the article that parents have lost the battle for their children, and they’re being good sports. In their own homes, they celebrate Christmas however they want. But the vast majority of their children’s waking hours are spent under the tutelage of “the experts” — or more precisely, teachers, some very good and compassionate ones, whose activities are dictated by the experts. It’s territory that seems, judging from this article, off limits to parents.

Where does this leave the children? I don’t advocate “Christmas wars,” but if the parents of children being educated have no voice, how can the “public” be said to be represented in public education? Whose interests are represented?