The current controversy around talking about gender in the classroom, just like the debates over Critical Race Theory, abstinence-only sex education, desegregation, and the teaching of evolution, is not about what's best for kids. It’s about politicians fighting for power.
America’s contentiousness over public education is unique among Western countries. Nowhere else in the "developed" world do non-educators and non-parents get so riled up about what happens in the classroom. Nowhere else do education-related bills make the national news.
Is that because Europeans, for example, love their children less?
No.
It's because, for Americans, children are a great rhetorical weapon.
US public schools enroll over 50 million students, and these kids are a more diverse mix than the American population. For all its drawbacks, the neighborhood school does, on average, bring together a whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of backgrounds, both cultural and ideological. You're likely to meet people at a school function that you'd have to go out of your way to meet at work, people who look, act, dress and speak very differently. People who sometimes believe fundamentally different things about the world.
Naturally, differences of opinion about what should happen in the classroom will arise. In the quirky American way which recognizes only two tribes, those differences will be slotted into one of two pigeonholes: Right or Left, progressive or conservative. That's just how we do things in America. And, because this is a civilized democracy, damn it, we like to pass laws to sort out differences rather than taking it outside. Small favors, I suppose.
The US has a long and storied history of fighting culture wars in the guise of curriculum battles.
Tennessee's 1925 Butler Act prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state’s schools. The law was catapulted into the national spotlight during the Scopes Trial, and helped crystallize a chasm between Christian fundamentalists and proponents of a scientific view of the world. In a process that is eerily reminiscent of what is currently happening with Florida’s H.B. 1557 (the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill), the Butler Act inspired a rash of copycat laws before being ruled unconstitutional in 1968.
1974’s Kanawha County textbook controversy is another instructive example. In response to a shift towards “multiculturalism” in West Virginia’s curriculum, a group of conservative Christian parents organized a massive boycott, demanding the ban of a slew of books by such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and Sigmund Freud. 20% of the county’s elementary students stayed home, and the situation turned violent when a school was dynamited and some of the students who continued to attend school had rocks thrown in their windows. (Jon Ronson interviewed Alice Moore, the organizer of the boycott, in a fascinating episode of Things Fell Apart.)
Both the Butler Act and the Kanawha book ban were attempts to legislate the “right” way to teach children. They were doomed to fail from the start, because children’s learning is not subject to legislation.
Children hold a hallowed place in the American imagination. The nuclear family with kids running around is the foundation of the American dream. “Parenting” became a verb in this country. Leaving the world better “for the children” is the highest vocation.
It’s also a great way to score political points.
Ever since the infamous Daisy Girl ad scuttled Barry Goldwater’s presidential prospects in 1964, politicians have found that focusing on emotional triggers is a great way to earn votes. Florida’s H.B. 1557 is no exception. While the bill does probably reflect a genuine concern about the changing landscape of childhood and identity development, it can't possibly do anything to address these concerns. No law can. In a democracy, legislation is downstream of culture, not the other way around.
Kids, especially little kids, live in a world that is infinitely more connected than the one their parents grew up in. While adults can, and should, set boundaries around the content their children consume, they will never be able to silo childhood: “dangerous ideas” are no longer housed as physical tomes in libraries, but they are in everyone’s pockets, literally traveling through the ether. This is new and different, but it does not, as Conservatives fear, spell the end of childhood innocence.
The most frustrating and wonderful thing about children is that they are not receptacles into which adults can pour knowledge. Children learn by actively engaging with the world. As their brains develop and they accumulate experience, kids form ideas which they constantly test, adjust or change. A 1st grade lesson on gender stereotypes is silly, misguided, and an utter waste of time because 7 year-olds do not have the mental capacity to understand what a stereotype is: the ability to abstract only starts developing around puberty. Kids may come away from the lesson able to recite the learning outcomes verbatim, but that does not mean they have internalized “gender identity ideology.” A gender unicorn presentation will not make a little kid trans, gay, or straight.
Nor is, as Chris Rufo shamefully claims, the introduction of gender identity-related curriculum a concerted “grooming” attempt on the part of school teachers: grooming a child for sexual abuse requires secrecy and increasing isolation. How would you groom an entire classroom? Why would you publicize a grooming curriculum? And to what end?
Using legislation to mandate or ban curriculum is like opening a soup can with a jackhammer: expensive, loud, and messy – and it leaves you with no soup. Of course parents should have a say in what happens at school. Of course teachers should be transparent and receptive to their students’ families. For the most part, this is the case throughout American schools, every day. When there are breakdowns, communication goes a long way. (And school choice would go a longer way, still.) But curriculum laws are the wrong tool for the job.
H.B. 1557 is billed as the “Parental Rights in Education Act.” A better title would be, the “Helen Lovejoy Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children Act.” But “love”, and “joy”? Directed at children? By teachers? Sure sounds pretty groomy.
Such wise words, Ileana.
You somehow took my thoughts and articulated them beautifully. ❤