Education

A tour of my school yielded the following number of pictures of:

George Bush (without something derogatory underneath): 0
Winston Churchill: 0
George Washington: 0
Ronald Reagan: 0
Dwight D. Eisenhower: 0
Jose Marti: 0
Bill Clinton: 0
Anybody associated with religion: 0
Audie Murphy: 0
Army Reserve anniversary: 1 (my class)

OK, number of pictures of anti-American murderer, nation impovrisher, psychopath, deadbeat dad, would be world-enslaver, Che Guevara: 1 (below)

I had previously confused "The Prince" with the fairy tale "King and King" about a king and his...ummm...king. I wonder if there's a gay Rapunzel in the works.

The above book display in my school's high school library prompted this post. My friend Chris pointed out some errors, however, so I fixed them up and here it is again:

In California schools, there's a push to mainstream homosexuality.

Democrats in the California legislature continue to pass laws requiring schools to teach students about homosexuality and have homosexual representation in history books (not that there's anything wrong with that).

A recent law prohibits gender bias.

All schools, even in supposedly "macho" communities like Huntington Park have gay-strait alliance clubs.

This isn't really a criticism or an opinion. I'm just reporting on the situation. Knowledge, awareness, accuracy, and all that good stuff.

King & King by Stern Nijland

I'll even make the following neutral, objective arguments: Gay people are citizens too and deserve recognition. And, since they probably don't utilize the school system as much as the non-gay population while paying the same amount in taxes, they're a net-gain for schools.

Other arguments include reducing prejudice against 3-5% of our population and, according to the argument in the Guardian article referenced, the accurate reflection of reality.

As for the clubs, if that's how children want to organize themselves, OK.

Rainbow High by Alex Sanchez

I can argue for the books' exclusion as well: As I mentioned one sentence ago, people want to include gay books because they reflect reality. But, is children's literature meant to reflect reality or to inspire proper behavior and form societal values? Unless explicitly condemned (and I'm not saying that homosexuality should be in a public school), anything talked about becomes condoned de facto and lots of things exist that we don't want to necessarily condone. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples. Some who hold heterosexual marriage as the ideal only wish for their children to consider such a relationship.

Anyways, again, these things are complicated and neither point of view, in my opinion, can be dismissed.

This is an article about California grammar school literature in 2010. Excerpt:

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