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The devil is in the details
There is an editorial in today’s Mop and Pail regarding a request from conservative Muslim and Christian parents that public schools accommodate their religious faiths by exempting their children from various programs, such as sex education, environmental worship, and values-neutral education. The Mop opines that this is a reasonable request for certain topics, but not for others. What a can of worms that is! For example, who is going to arbitrate which topics are off-limits and which aren’t? The Mop and Pail? Really?
Adding to the confusion is the problem of how the various topics are treated. It has been my observation that the kinds of teachers who are attracted to teaching contentious topics - sex ed, environmentalism, ethics - are not necessarily the sort of people I want broaching such sensitive topics with my kids. For example, while I am very tolerant of various sexual orientations (I mean, really, who gives a damn?), I nevertheless deplored the way this topic was treated at my children’s school - you know, now children, homosexuals are GOOD. I felt such emphasis gave sexual orientation hugely greater importance than it warrants in the overall scheme of things. So I would have much rather the school had minded its own business (that would be the three R’s, in case you hadn’t guessed). And I wasn’t thrilled by the teacher who taught my son how to shoot up (true story) or the teacher who took it upon herself to teach my too-young daughter very graphic sexual details, scaring and horrifying her.
The comments to the editorial tend to be quite hostile to the request from the conservative Muslim and Christian parents. The commenters are obviously assuming that the public schools will treat sensitive topics in a reasonable, responsible manner. And of course, most teachers will. But some teachers are jerks or incompetents, and they seem to disproportionately enjoy teaching sensitive topics. Children are in school for something like 14 or 15 years, meaning the odds are pretty good that every child will encounter at least one of these lemons. Do we really want to give these folks permission to mess with our kids’ minds?