What the kids bring home from school

My four-year-old son came home from his (public) kindergarten the other day with two things: one, a piece of paper on which he (with his parents’ help) was supposed to describe how his family celebrates Christmas; the other, the experience of having watched the Nativity story performed by classmates.

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Last year, our son’s day-care, in what was a sincere attempt to be inclusive, posted a big sign in one of the classrooms/play-areas that read, “People around the world celebrate Christmas in different ways. What are some of the ways that Christmas is celebrated?” Again, my seasonally-incorrect response is to snarl that most of those people around the world aren’t Christian, and so might celebrate Christmas by… ignoring it. (The CIA Factbook tells me that only 33.03% of the world’s people are Christian.)

I should emphasize that the teachers and caregivers who spurred this grumble are well-meaning. But, as you might guess, I’m not a Christian; I’m not religious. Like Freud, “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.”¹ But whether I can or cannot is really not the point, though it adds a certain edge to my response. Religion, even the banalized, feel-good version promulgated around Christmas, does not belong in public education except as an object of historical or literary study. Four-year-olds are not equipped to deal with systems of religious belief–particularly systems of belief that conflict with the one they get at home.

“Oh, hey, what’s the harm in knowing about Christmas?” It’s not knowing about Christmas; the problem is that the celebration of Christmas in school catapults that holiday and that system of religious belief into a privileged place. I do, eventually, want my children to know why people celebrate Christmas. I do not want the schools telling them, either explicitly or by more subtle means, that they should take part in a religious celebration.

1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, James Strachey, trans. and ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 11. ↩︎