Halt to San Jose kindergartners’ Santa visit angers parents

[Igel]

89. The distinction between culture and religion is a non-existent one.

Remove all religious celebrations and references from a culture where most people belong to the same faith tradition and you've bowdlerized the literature, the culture, and behavior.

"I'm sorry, most kids will be home for Xmas. This may be inconvenient, but that's when we've scheduled the standardized test required for advancing to the next grade." It's intolerant and unconscionable.

When I started grad school in Slavic lit, my cohort was told to read the Bible, at least the NT, several times--a couple of times in English, and at least once in Russian. Why? Because all the writers and readers for the literatures involved attended church fairly regularly, in their youth if not as adults, and it provided a common frame of reference, a common cultural language.

If you were Jewish or Confucian or Muslim, it didn't matter. You needed to know what was going on, and that required understanding the dominant culture. If there is no dominant culture, then society is quickly balkanized. Older traditions and canons are inaccessible; the common cultural framework, how to interact with each other, falls to pieces. Older generations feel the ground shifting, and younger generations assume that anything goes. Social trust erodes and instead of a society you have multiple competing, mutually exclusive societies. And we wonder why a societal safety net isn't manageable, while advocating for multiple societies, but ensuring that some societies give more than they receive. It doesn't work, or doesn't stay a liberal democracy.

Note that not all field trips satisfy learning standards. Some are just for fun. Not every lab in high school is spot-on for a learning standard. Not every activity needs to be tested on or be according to some normed and standards-related rubric. Our chemistry teachers were irate when some parent complained that her little snowflake got a failing grade on something that was irrelevant--making a mole for Mole Day.

(I'd note that the standards that had to be implemented instead of Mole Day had been revised. The previous ones included stoichiometry but assumed that even brain-damaged admins would realize that if you need to teach solutions and stoich you'd need to use moles. The standards, however, left that unstated, so the teachers were told not to waste time teaching what a mole is. In high school physics there's the same problem. Teach motion, forces, etc., in two dimensions. But teaching trig or i-j notation isn't stated, takes times, and we get headwind if we try to teach it. So everything's at 0, 90, or 180 degrees and students have to memorize 1, 0, or -1 as appropriate instead of learning what a cosine is.)

If I'm teaching cultural literacy abroad, I'd teach Santa. Too many pop and historical references to it. You may not "feel" the salience, but you should at least know they're there. And the more salient, the more personal the reference the better.