Kersten’s School Daze

One of the few effective and newsworthy themes Katherine Kersten consistently digs out in her Strib column is the use of the public schools to advance various cultural and religious agendas, notably ones with which she disagrees.

For those of us on the left or center who are skeptical of the idea that colleges are hotbeds of intolerant one-way thought and that the public schools are laboratories of dysfunction and social engineering, the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, as described by Kersten, is further evidence that urban public schools have passed the point of nuance and are into blatant social advocacy. I can’t vouch for Kersten’s accuracy, but in broad strokes, as a public school parent, it rings true.

Welcoming Schools is a curriculum developed by a DC-based GLBT advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign. MPS is testing the curriculum in three schools as an “anti-bullying” effort.

Now I have no problem with the values Welcoming Schools pushes, namely that families headed by gay and transgender parents are normal and acceptable. We can debate whether they are optimal, but if you believe as I do that homosexuality isn’t a choice and that there are many kids out there in need of good homes, same-sex households with children are helping society, not hurting it.

But I have real qualms about using public school classrooms with kids as young as six years old to so blatantly engage in efforts to shape values that many in our society don’t accept. Not because I want to validate homophobes or endorse parents’ right to be intolerant but because it puts the schools on a slippery slope and ties them to a social movement that on its fringes goes beyond tolerance and understanding to forms of advocacy that even some liberals don’t agree with.

Such advocacy also feeds perceptions on the right that schools have become an instrument of the left, making community, state, or national consensus harder to achieve about funding levels, teacher qualifications, and ongoing evaluation of school effectiveness.

A small digression: My kid is winding down fourth grade at an MPS school. Based on my anecdotal feedback, he has had more classroom instruction about Martin Luther King, Jr. than any other historical figure. MLK was and is important, but his disproportionate salience to the public schools is part of its agenda to empower African-American kids. If the effort is having any success, more power to them I guess, but if it isn't, then my kid’s education has been put secondary to an ineffectual social agenda that is irrelevant to his needs.

My point here is that the right wing’s perception that the public schools are being used to indoctrinate kids in values steeped in multiculturalism and social engineering seems more accurate than not. Multiculturalism has taken on the dogma and emphasis of a religion in academia—it doesn’t take a lot of digging to discern that.

I want my kids to be educated. I hope they learn values in the home by watching us, in religious school by listening to the rabbis and teachers, and in regular school by the enforcement of respect and tolerance.

The problem is many parents have lost confidence in the public schools’ basic efficacy. The Welcoming Schools effort causes me to question whether the schools believe that they now must function as parent and church as well—my guess as to why this curriculum is being tested. (The alternative, pure ideological indoctrination, is frightening, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.)

And if the schools must now be parent and church, whose values rule? What then of the kids who don’t need or whose parents don’t want an edgy values curriculum? And what are our kids missing in all that classroom time spent validating?

Pawlenty’s Problem

Being the guy who said let’s not get too overheated about Eliot Spitzer, I must reinforce the same point about Gov. Pawlenty’s sex quip the other night on Mike Max’s (a perfect porn name, isn’t it?) WCCO love-in.

In case you missed it, Governor No was lauding First Lady Mary Pawlenty’s enthusiasm for fishing and general outdoorsyness when he noted, “now if only I could get her to have sex with me.” Maybe this was just a bit of regrettable boys-will-be-boys quippery from our Christian soldier, but perhaps it was a look behind the veil, “scenes from a marriage,” if you will.

And if the First Lady is withholding, let me suggest that when you are Governor No, there might be no other way for a right (left?)-thinking First Lady to get her objections across than with a cinching up of the chastity belt. No Central Corridor LRT? No seat belt primary offense bill? No dangerous plastics ban?

Then no love.

Now I’m sure one or another of the local TV stations are going to chime in with a segment on husbands who want more sex than their wives and how healthy communication blah, blah, blah—they’re missing the point. Mary Pawlenty is a DFL plant in the gubernatorial bed, and she might have found the way to turn Governor No into Governor Yes.

Governor, get that LRT bill done, and get things right with the first lady, and mspmag.com will contribute a $10 gift certificate from Victoria’s Secret to celebrate your being back in the public and marital good graces!

Hunting the Turkey

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.