Right-Minded People

The new school year starts exactly two weeks from today in our little nape of the neck of the sage-brushy woods. I appreciate the district's summertime continuing education program where they challenge our reasoning, logic and spatial skills as well as our emotional poise by continuing to offer inexplicable and indefensibly inconvenient minor changes to the daily schedule, a tradition established (probably coincidentally!) the year they decided to stop paying for the buses that would take the kids to school. Different start times for different schools (middle, high, elementary) separated by more than an hour! Elimination of whole days of instruction! Irregular minimum days! Then regular minimum days! And just this year, new minimum days with the time taken off at the start of the day instead of at the end! The game now, as ever, is to figure out how to get the kids to and from school without having to burn through my accrued vacation hours at work to make it happen. In desperation I've considered hiring a car service, but I'm afraid I'd look too much a fancy-pants like that Mr. Drummond from Diff'rent Strokes. But then I remember nobody under 40 knows who that is, so I would probably be safe doing that. If anything, their lives would resemble a little bit more of the decadence described in early-2000s hip-hop, just minus the Courvoisier.

The oldest boy is starting 11th grade, meaning we're getting to the point where we actually have to start making concrete plans for his future as an independent adult. You know, the kind who does not live here with me and, ideally, also not in a group shelter in a colorful downtown area where he has to defend the Target bag carrying all his worldly possessions with a sharpened spoon handle. Luckily for us he's a smarty, so a lot of the immediate next-phase planning is happening while he takes honors and Advanced Placement classes. He's way more likely than average to get into a competitive school of his choice AND nerdy enough so I don't have to worry as much as I might about derailing his future with by knocking some girl up. I've tried to eliminate that risk completely by reassuring him that I would be TOTALLY OK with him being gay, but the allure of boobs will not be gainsaid once voiced.

There's more challenge with honors and AP classes, sure, but I'm happy so far with the way they skip past the rote recitation of facts and delve into concepts of problem-solving and critical thinking. Well, at least they used to until someone made the mistake of revising educational standards after listening to stupid people.

The AP U.S. History (which he will be taking this year) standards have been rejiggered this year because of conservative objections to the previous year's changes that moved (slightly) away from the Great Man theory of historical narrative or really narrative in general in favor of concepts and learning how to ask the right questions.

The same rigor was not applied to reviewing the AP European History class curriculum he tackled last year, but I guess the assumption is a) mostly atheists and communists over there anyway and b) we can be forgiven for indifference since nothing really counts as history before Ronald Reagan.

They not only brought back explicit mentions (if not emphasis) on American exceptionalism, but one school board in Colorado actually objected on the grounds that "all materials should promote 'patriotism' and 'respect for authority,' and 'should not encourage or condone civil disorder.'"

So ideology over pedagogy is not a red flag for everybody, I get it. I'm also baffled by the emotional fragility of the position that we can't rely on the qualities of our polity, our civics and our ideals to engender love for the United States as a consequence of living here but that we should insist on it through indoctrination, and of a fairly clumsy and ham-handed variety. But these are the same people who cry when they hear that fucking Lee Greenwood song.

The good news is that, at least in my son's case, his dad is an historian by training, educated in high academia by true-pinkish-blue crypto-communists, the really dangerous kinds with tenure and everything. The bookshelves in my house are stuffed almost exclusively with books about American exploitation, degradation, subjugation and rape of lands and populations, cultures and a whole gender in the name of imperial Civilization and Christianity. Not actual Christianity, the American kind which, like American civic morality, works in exactly the opposite way it most often describes itself.