Several years ago I remarked on the idiocy of drag queens and story hours for young children.
I didn’t say how I knew, or why I knew it was a bad mix, but isn’t it amazing how the Spidey-sense works? Even as tiny humans we have a built-in alert system that blares like a car alarm when something is awry.
This is not condemnation; we aren’t assigning permanent places in Hell over one prickly, hair-raising Spidey-sense.
No, it is purely judgment, a matter of using our senses to discriminate between what is good and bad, right and wrong. Scientists might call it a mechanism or trait acquired by evolution.
Camouflage, razor sharp teeth, poison stingers, squirting ink, the powerful spray of a skunk—it doesn’t matter to me how you think these defenses came about—the fact is, even the most basic creatures have a red flag warning system built in.
A child is naturally afraid of weird, unfamiliar things unless they have been abused or mistreated from infancy and cannot, through their broken alert system, access a proper defense.
Recently my local news reported a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration day where “queens” walked catwalk-style and performed at an “inclusive” breakfast. They were invited by the city mayor. Also invited? Local middle school students.
Nevermind what the good preacher King would say (on first thought I’d say he’d be horrified, but he was more pro-eugenics than many people would like to admit, so it’s a toss up)—what do you think parents said when their twelve year olds came home and relayed the events of the day?
Car alarms were blaring.
In education, there is a lot of talk about scaffolding.
Scaffolding is the idea that students use previous knowledge and experience as the foundation for higher thinking.
Take an example of scaffolding from one of my current classes: In kindergarten I began the year singing repeat-after-me songs with my guitar. This led to talking about and touching the guitar. We discussed instruments in the string family, and over a period of several months, the kids were exposed to other instruments in the same music family: mandolin, banjo, violin, dobro, bass, cello. We talked about how strings make vibrations that are amplified, and each instrument has its own special sound.
As the year progresses, we listen to a variety of music. Kindergarten is learning to recognize the sound of each instrument. We read stories, act out folk songs, dance to rhythms, tap out beats. We cut, glue, color. We pull out scarves and dance to classical music.
This week I made a google slides on Wolfgang Mozart, introducing the composer whose music they already recognize.
On Monday, we skimmed over pictures and shared basic facts. Born on the other side of the world (Europe), lived in a time before electricity and indoor plumbing, died at the young age of 35.
“What instrument is this?” I asked, pointing to an old portrait of Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s dad.
“A violin!” They yelled.
Tuesday we listened to the first piece Mozart composed (as a five year old—“hey, I’m five, too!”) discussed the word prodigy and went over the pictures again.
On day three I pulled up the third slide of the Mozart presentation.
“And what instrument is this?” I ask, pointing to the picture of 5 year old Mozart perched next to an intricate keyboard.
“A clavier!” A little girl shouts out.
I beam.
Since then we’ve discussed how Mozart was contemporaries with George Washington. We’ve talked about wigs and leeches and hygiene and Ben Franklin and his glass harmonica. We’ve watched the Papageno clip from The Magic Flute. Next week we’ll break out boomwhackers and coloring sheets and play Rondo Alla Turca. During my lunch duty as I squirt ketchup onto pink trays and poke straws into juice bags the kids beg to talk more about Mozart next class.
This is scaffolding. This is a method for acquiring knowledge.
This is how lifelong learners are born. One must build knowledge block by block.
Now I will repeat what made my local news: the city mayor invited a group of drag queens to parade their scant bodies and garish makeup in front of eleven and twelve year olds—all in the name of inclusion.
Doesn’t it land a bit odd with you? Say what you will about inclusion, but every child deserves some basic scaffolding.
This is what makes inclusion a rotten apple—it places children in the center of confusion and offers no explanation other than to accept it, no questions asked.
At the heart of inclusion is bitterness that refuses the idea of higher thinking.
You might think that, by exposing your young child, you will lay a stable, inclusive bedrock for her future encounters with diverse people in the world. But the truth is you are refusing to give her the scaffolding she needs to reason her way through life. You might even be ruining her natural alert system to where she cannot access a proper defense should the need arise.
In my classroom, the children have lots of questions. They want the knowledge that sparks their curiosity. They are looking with hungry eyes, devouring the answers I give them. I am, after all, their construction supervisor, erecting scaffolding and watching as they add another tier, one story at a time.
Have you done this favor for the children in your life?
Scaffolding is training up a child, little by little; small bites. They don’t need to know the ins and outs of sexuality. They don’t need to see or comprehend behavior that toys with perversion or slinks about in the margins of society. Plenty of lessons are adult-themed, properly handled with decades of scaffolding and without sacrificing the tiny voice inside that says “I’m too scared to learn about this right now.”
It’s worth thinking about.
