I totally agree with your comments about not using children as pawns in this political back-and-forth. I don’t personally agree with the war in Iraq but that’s my personal opinion and this isn’t my blog.

However, even not agreeing with it, I certainly wouldn’t send comments like that to a soldier stationed overseas, and neither would my child (if s/he liked sitting down, anyway).

But.

I remember being in Girl Scouts when I was, oh, ten or eleven… we were writing to Mr Gorbachev to ask him to let us have pen pals from Russia, before the Iron Curtain came down. I remember not quite understanding the point of the assignment and throwing in a number of inappropriate comments about nuclear warheads or something of that nature… I don’t remember now exactly what I wrote. BUT my troop leader scanned all the letters for content and made me rewrite mine. In this situation, I blame the teacher for not doing the same thing.

Anyway, my point still stands. Examine why it upsets you and look further to make sure all aspects of the story are being told. Often, something is left out to make it look worse.

I live in Washington State and a local radio commentator was making a fuss one day about how a school had pulled their plans to do a school carnival because they couldn’t get the information about the event printed in both English and Spanish. The commentator ranted on and on about how ridiculous this bi-lingualism has become and now kids have to give up their fun because school admins are so politically correct and blah blah… I admit, it made me a little upset hearing it, but I took that as a cue that I needed to look further into it. I discovered with only a few minutes searching on the Web that the school was located in a heavily Spanish-speaking part of the town so many of the students didn’t speak proficient English. The previous year when the school had done a carnival, it had caused the school massive headaches when they printed the info about the carnival in English only as school admins and faculty spent lots of time trying to explain to Spanish-speaking students and parents the details about the event. They were only pursuing the Spanish printing to save them time and money, not to push some liberal multicultural agenda.

So be careful. If it charges you up, look into it further. Chances are that you’re not getting the whole story. Don’t fall prey to bad journalism.

And frankly it isn’t any more outrageous than other legitimate things I read about happening in public schools, such as kids being arrested and handcuffed for drawing pictures.

You have to remember that when a story makes you emotionally charged, you ought to stop and question its validity. If I had to bet, I’d say this was either an outright lie or has been exaggerated. Regardless of you political stripes, you must realize that Fox and the NYPost are no strangers to sensationalism and yellow journalism of this sort.

If it’s a parent, there isn’t an institutional problem. It’s still disgusting that a parent would use a child as a political tool, but free societies have to allow that sort of behavior. I don’t want the law interfering in what I can teach my children; a consequence of that is that I also don’t want the law interfering in what other people teach their children either. These childhood teachings can be overcome in adulthood — David Horowitz was a red diaper baby and he turned into quite an anti-leftist in the end. Such parents should be morally condemned but the law should leave them alone.

From the school’s standpoint this is something that should have been handled ‘below the radar’. Were I the teacher in question I would have read all the letters, graded them based on content-neutral standards of grammar and spelling, and then just quietly discarded the offensive ones instead of mailing them. Either that or just not mail any of them, positive or negative.

Hello Anne, great blog. I am not as bothered if the parents are doing this. That is one right of being a parent, passing on your PoV. The teacher filling young heads full of mush is a completely different story. In my mind it is a firing offense.