Redefining Famlies
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 10:43AM My son discovered an interesting subtlety this week while working on his homework. He's a bright 6 year old public kindergarten student. His assignment was fairly straight forward consisting of 3 questions.
Question #1 How many people are in your family (you can include grandparents and pets if you want)?
Question #2 What different ways can you group those family members?
Question #3 Draw pictures of your family members.
On the bottom they showed examples in pictures of a family broken out into groups.
Picture #1 shows a mom by herself then a little girl, a little boy, a cat and a dog.
Picture #2 shows a mom, the little girl and the little boy then the cat and dog separated out.
Picture #3 show the mom and little girl and the boy with the cat and dog separated out.
See the problem? Should be easy to spot, after all a 6 year old picked right up on it. Here's a hint, who is in a typical family.
Answer: The dad is missing. They show a mom with kids but no dad in any of the pictures. Now you may shrug this off but it is subtleties like this that slowly redefine what people view as a family. And it is bias such as this that groups like the Fatherhood Collation continue to fight. We should be encouraging families to stay together and be encouraging fathers to take responsibility for their children. Instead our public schools put out subtle examples that feed the idea to young minds that fathers are not needed. This teaches young men that they can father all the kids they want and don't need to stay with the women. And teaches women that its ok to have children without getting married and without having a dad in their lives to serve as a role model growing up. Is that what we want? Is that the type of example we want to set for our kids? I think we can and should do better.
Reader Comments (3)
Are you going to let it go Richard or are you going to go to the school and give them hell? You know the dangers of allowing our children to become acclimated to this material, you just wrote about them.
Suzanne, until the masses wake up and seek change the individual voices will continue to be simply tossed aside.
I'm not sure if you are aware of the program "everyday math"? Schools across the nation are slowly starting to wake up that it isn't working only after using our kids as test subjects for years. Many NH schools however still use this method of teaching math despite now solid data supporting that it doesn't work. A number of parents in Merrimack where I live have gone to the school and the school board members about this and continue to hear that it is their kid not the program with the problem.
Until there are enough people demanding school choice and for opening the education market to competition giving parents more ability to have a say in what's best for their own kids what power do we have? My best weapon right now is to write this blog bringing things like this out in the open to allow more people to maybe wake up and notice things they otherwise wouldn't have thought twice about.
Imagine how many parents either don't know what's going on or are uninformed and/or too intimidated to speak out. They've got the conviction but lack information to convey a succinct message.
Your ire has been sparked and you're telling me that you're going to wait around until there are "enough" people aware to help solve the problem and write on an obscure blog site, in the mean time your child is subjected to this kind of deprivation?
I think you greatly underestimate a singular lone voice of truth and conviction.
Those same parents who complain to the school board evidently continue to elect the same crappy board members over an over again. Why? If we want change, we have the mechanisms to enact it. It's called vote the jackasses the hell out of office.