Yesterday, one of my neighbors showed me her son’s kindergarten assignment: he was asked to draw a picture of his family, and to write the names under each picture.
I wondered about the purpose of this little exercise. Is the point of it to “out” children with same-sex parents? To solidify latent bigotry against the children of single mothers? To see if tell-tale names like “Shaun” and “Moira” entitle kids with ethnically neutral last names some special privilege? Or the reverse, to see if there’s a “Moishe” attached somewhere to a “Brown”?
Lest one wonder why I reacted in this way to a seemingly innocuous, embarassingly trivial little school assignment: I don’t trust the public schools enough to share ANY extraneous information with them, and I felt this was an invasion of my neighbor’s privacy.
What made me especially suspicious of this little exercise is that my neighbor told me that her son’s teacher has been keeping something called a “behavior journal” about her child since January.
The result of this sadistic journal-keeping is that at the tender age of 6, her child no longer wants to go to school because “the teacher keeps writing bad things about me.”
I’m not the most informed about educational standards for young children, but you don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar to recognize that this kind of uncontrolled written gossip by an adult about a little kid is a particularly sick form of passive-aggression.
During my brief, unhappy tenure as a manager of adults, I got called on the carpet – and very rightly so – for showing one of my employees a performance review that my boss not been previously vetted.
Writing a gossipy “journal” not subject to management review (not that the school principal is any great shakes) about one particular child smacks of scapegoatism, and to follow this up with an assignment about a child’s family members smells like someone using someone else’s kid as a research subject, minor Mengele-style.
I wish there were an institutional way for parents like my friend to be able to tell the schools “None of your f*k*g business”.
In an objective, civilized, milquetoast way, of course, with homage to the “crawl on your belly like a reptile” kind of submission that makes you a “good” parent in the eyes of the public schools.
Because in the warped world of public schooling, “parental involvement” means raising funds and baking cookies, but not activism in support of your child(ren).