School As Church

What happens when gender values collide in a public institution?

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

At the beginning of the pandemic, when my kids’ school shut down, what I craved most from teachers was for them to simply talk to the students over Zoom. I didn’t care about reading, writing, or arithmetic. I cared about emotional engagement. I cared about social connection. And, honestly, I cared that my kids had something to do during the day. I penned an op-ed during this time of upheaval, imploring teachers to focus on social-emotional learning instead of academics, and insisting that the point of school had changed.

I was wrong.

That school has gone from a bastion of academic achievement to a place where belonging, not learning or persevering, is the imperative. Of course, a sense of belonging is wonderful (or so I’ve heard), and I want children to behave well in school, to be kind and empathetic, and for schools to have some role in shaping their character.

The problem is, we don’t all agree on what the school’s role is, or what makes good character. We don’t agree on what children should be learning, and from whom. And we don’t agree on who and what is covered under “belonging.” As founder of public education Horace Mann once said, “Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.” When we focus on inclusion, whose values are included? And what happens to those whose values aren’t?

See, for instance, Seattle public schools, where fourth graders engage in a lesson around I Am Jazz, a children’s book which I’ve written about here. The book introduces the concept of being born in the wrong body, of having a “girl brain,” and the idea of gender identity—a theory that each person has a feeling of being male or female (or both or neither), independent of the body. This theory makes a lot of sense to some people, and to others does not. In this lesson plan, students are encouraged to be accepting—supportive and welcoming of others different than you—and to be allies, people who work for equality. That all sounds lovely, but if you don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a girl brain, or you don’t have a gender identity yourself, can you be compelled to advocate for people who do? Can you, should you, be taught to share a belief system?

I fear that, as church, synagogue, and mosque attendance has fallen to historic lows, some schools, especially those in liberal areas, are now tasked with shaping children’s morals. As a friend said to me recently, it used to be the school educated you academically and your parents educated you morally; now it’s the opposite. Thus, some schools are de factor churches, parochial schools of sorts, with social justice as the religion and teachers as spiritual leaders and saviors. But unlike a religious institution, chosen by parents based on an expectation of shared values and worldviews, a public school is tasked with serving families of divergent values and viewpoints, and that’s what makes some diversity initiatives and social-emotional lessons so tricky.

Recently, I interviewed a teacher who works in a blue state public school, who had all kinds of trenchant insights into how the point of school has changed, and the effects of those changes. As we’ve faced shortages and cutbacks in mental health services, in housing, in monetary support for those struggling financially, the school has become the locus of such services—functioning the way many churches do. “Instead of just being a teacher, I’m a teacher/social worker/motivational speaker/career counselor/crisis intervention specialist and so on. There are so many roles to play,” he said. “In that context, it’s very hard to not bring in gender identity and sexuality.”

Thus, one of those roles has become gender therapist of sorts, sometimes secretly facilitating a child’s psychological gender transition; this is also mandated by the vast majority of public schools’ guidelines. Some schools must also protect children’s rights to change in the locker room or play on the sports team that aligns with their gender identity. Unless they’re in a state which outlaws those things, those guidelines now mandate this version of belonging and inclusivity.

But while those guidelines make sense to some, they are based on beliefs that some people don’t share. How are such rules inclusive of those who don’t believe in the theory of gender identity? How are they inclusive of religious beliefs that divide customs and activities by sex? How do they jive with those who believe in sex-based rights?

When a school embraces one theory of gender, it puts both parents and teachers in a difficult position. Teachers must straddle opposing factions of parents, and sometimes teach things they themselves don’t understand or believe. As the blue state teacher noted, most teachers are “probably not [asking for pronouns] because they’re rubbing their hands in glee and saying oh, man, I’m so excited to see if I can turn some kids trans.” They are doing as they’re told, respecting chosen names and pronouns, trying to teach what they’re supposed to, trying to do something good, trying to get through the day. Most are not trying to be priests of gender, converting unsuspecting students to their religious beliefs. Transgender people exist, and deserve dignity and respect like everyone else. What should kids learn about them, about sexuality, about gender, in the classroom?

I don’t know. I certainly don’t want the people who do subscribe to the theory of gender identity, and kids who transition, to be bullied or harassed, as some are claiming happened, for instance, in Pennsylvania. But I do fear that when we teach children that “misgendering” or “dead-naming” is bullying, we’re teaching them that language is violence, that not subscribing to one’s subjective reality is harassment; after all, another way to understand those terms and actions is that misgendering is correctly identifying one’s biological sex and deadnaming is using one’s birth name. By teaching them to be offended and hurt instead of curious and resilient, we are teaching them to be fragile. As a person who has struggled mightily with emotion regulation, and who tends toward malignant instead of benign interpretations of others’ actions, I know how hard it is to walk through the world feeling fragile. I don’t want kids to receive instruction that contributes to such fragility.

What I want kids to learn about gender is that their body type doesn’t determine what they like to do or how typically masculine or feminine they are or should be, but that males and females are different and that’s okay. I don’t support censorship bills, like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill—while most of the bill pertains to including parents in decisions about children’s mental health care, a small part of it restricts what teachers can say about gender and sexuality, and I want curricular decisions to be made not by legislators but by educators. Yet I also don’t like a lot of the gender theories my kids are learning as facts. And what I really don’t like is how I have to tell my children to be very careful sharing our family’s belief system in school, because some families have had to endure investigations from child protective services when their gender beliefs don’t align. There may be social repercussions for sharing our beliefs, but there also may be legal repercussions.

Meanwhile, plenty of people disagree with me that boys should have access to all the clothes, colors, and toys that girls have. When I argue that pink tutus are as much for girls as boys, I receive nasty emails telling me I’m trying to make kids gay. While few people have taken me up on the suggestion to de-emphasize sex and gender in toys and colors and clothes, how should those people handle it if I someday find a school that teaches that, which they’re enrolled in?

As we reckon with enormous learning loss wrought by the closing of schools during the pandemic, I now wish schools would focus on teaching kids to do reading, writing, and arithmetic, and on respecting viewpoint diversity, rather than to imposing one set of views. I wish that the SEL and DEI they’ve engaged in weren’t so strident, and didn’t seem to come at the expense of academics. I wish, as the teacher suggested, that kids were able to access the services they need, that our society ensured living wages, decent housing, affordable food. I wish my kids’ schools would focus on good study habits, on intellectual curiosity, on trying really hard, on handling failure and conflict, on seeing complex issues from multiple points of view—especially those they think they reject. I wish they would focus on creating kids who were anti-fragile.

That’s the kind of character-building I can embrace, which prepares them to navigate the world, to find their own way in it, to figure out what they believe. If school is now fundamentalist, I want it to become non-denominational, as I believe viewpoint diversity to be. Or, as my treasured volunteer editor wrote to me, “If they are going to teach morals and ethics, let it be the kind of wide-ranging material that will apply as much to a Park Slope atheist progressive as it would to a working class kid from a conservative Muslim background.”

And then I wish that the bulk of social-emotional learning was: “Don’t be an asshole.” But then again, we have different ideas of what makes someone an asshole.

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Questions? Comments? Hit me up on Twitter, which is still crazy but now just in a different direction.