Parent says NO! to Kindergarten Thanksgiving Costumes because it's "demeaning"
 

Seriously????? WTF don't parents have anything better to do?

I do understand the framing of the jews breaking bread with nazis.... but the Pilgrims and Indians?

How we teach kids? What about by EXAMPLE? We teach kids the wrong examples all the time, and we think that the children don't know or aren't paying attention.

This is one of the many reasons, I'm not having kids, too many fucking other morons out here telling me how to live and raise my kids.

The situation doesn't really bother me either way. Have the event, don't have the event. None of the people quoted on either side seem like morons to me.

Seems reasonable.

This quote seemed odd:
"A vein of suspicion"! "Agendra-driven elitists"! Aargh!! Lock your doors!

I always thought the cardboard headband and feather did look silly and I always felt goofy when I had to wear it, but that's just me.

well, see, she's right.
whether being right about this extends to a rationale for trying to stop this silly dress-up day is another matter.
but at the core of things, raheja is right.

i'd be cool with a political storm over this that functioned to shift how this ritual was framed for the students--that there is something really quite bizarre about this tradition, about the narrative. basically the problem is straightforward: the europeans were directly and indirectly responsible for the eradication of the native-american population. for example, between about 1617 and 1621, european diseases had killed somewhere between 70-90% of the native american population in new england, varying by region. for the pilgrims, this havoc could have been understood as an aspect of Providence, the kind of thing god does when he likes a population of chosen-types. for the native americans, i would expect that the story was....um......not quite the same.

this is one of those ugly historical realities that does not disappear between charades involving little kids.

you could say "WHADDYA TALKING ABOUT THIS IS THANKSGIVING FOR FUCKS SAKE LEAVE IT ALONE" but that just raises the same problem in spades. this is the history that this holiday pantomimes, that it sanitizes...but the event being commemorated was also that which was understood by william bradford (whose account of plymouth is its source)...but bradford's is a strange strange paranoid little book---i suppose the kiddies could read bradford and start getting a sense of just how fucking bizarre these people were, how self-consumed they were, how paranoid, particularly about the native americans, who quickly became sex-devils in the pilgrim collective imaginary.

i dunno---i don't personally see any situation in which being oblivious is something to protect, in which wholesale revision of the past is something to be proud of, in which avoidance of the centrality of massacre to the making of this america which is defined in part by it's wholesale inability to even start to face the realities, such as we know them, that are effaced behind such happy-face rituals as thanksgiving.

but the holiday is also about having survived in a fucked up and unexpected context for a year, about the unexpected kindness of others, about the power of banding together...

it's both. face it.
there's no amount of snippiness that changes any of it.
that said----again---- i don't care if the kids dress up as idiotic stereotypes today or tomorrow. i just think they should know what they're doing.

There are valid points to both sides from where I stand.


For the kids it's a harmless dress-up occasion where they can have a little fun;

On the other hand, if you put the clichés and stereotypes into these children early enough, they become ingrained and hard to get rid off in their own PoV later on.
Not saying this one is the worst possible stereotype there is, but the principle is the same.


Personally I wouldn't have a problem with it, but I can see where they're coming from.



I don't see how they're telling other people how to raise their kids though Cynthetiq.
It's taking an active role in raising your own kids at least.
And if they didn't, somebody would say "where the fuck are the parents? Why does the school have to decide this for them? Get involved in your own kids' lives!"

I like the idea of teaching children about perseverance and cooperation between groups. However, I do think that the standard representation of Thanksgiving portrayed to children is a bit disconnected from reality.
Seems reasonable to me.

Children dressing up as pilgrims and Native Americans, and re-enacting their historical coming together peacefully and sharing a feast? What's wrong with that? How does that convey any kind of wrong message to the children involved? Now, children dressing up as 19th Century U.S. Calvary and Native Americans, and re-encacting the Massacre at Wounded Knee or the Battle of Little Bighorn – that I can see people having a problem with.

On a seriousness scale of 1-5, with one being top priority, I'd give this a 7.

These kids are in kindergarten. How deep do they think these kids should get into the true history of the holiday? If this was a high school production they were rallying about, I might see their point but this is kindergarten fer crying out loud. Let the kids have some fun learning about the holiday. They still have many years of education ahead of them to learn the correct history.

Don't you mean, the full history? I mean, it is historical fact that the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony (who, BTW, weren't Puritans, and they weren't really even pilgrims, per se) cooperated with the Native Americans there, and that those two peoples came together diplomatically and shared a feast for 2-3 days. And that is what these children were dressing up as and re-enacting.

this is like a movie, then. you can include or exclude whatever you like to reinforce your ready-made position. like the dress-up? leave out everything that makes it a problem. find it suspect? include things that make it a problem. the "historical facts" include context, though. if you leave out context, you're trafficking in fantasy. so let's not pretend that isolating the dinner as recounted by bradford in "of plymouth plantation" is a "matter of historical fact" on it's own. that'd be like saying your winter hat says everything about you, no need to see or do or think about anything else because we have the winter hat.

If it's just a child who wants to play dress-up with your winter hat, and maybe re-enact the historic event of your wearing that hat while treking through the snow, one day, to go meet your sweetheart; why should we spoil that's child's fun by teaching them the finer if not more gritty details of that event, such as the reason you braved and endured a trek through the snow, that day, was so that you could go have a sexual tryst with your lover?

This is how I feel about it. The "true story" of Thanksgiving is glossed over via these events. I don't care if they play dress-up, but they should know what really happened, versus what our national mythos tells us what happened.

I just wish they'd teach the real history of Thanksgiving, namely that the pilgrims' socialism is primarily to blame for their need to rely on Indians for their food.

No. Not really.

I don't care either way. Seems like whatever this community decides to do is up to them.

Cynthetiq, I thought that you didn't want kids because you hate kids.

*has Adam's Family Values flashback*

I'd be a lot happier if our children weren't taught the Disney version of history. There are plenty of things in American history to be proud of, just not the Native American genocide. That gets put in the "devastating embarrassment and regret" pile.

If kids want to get dressed up on Thanksgiving, let it be in celebration of the wonderful things that we have. Let them express thankfulness for liberty (who doesn't want to dress up as Honest Abe or Thomas "Red" Jefferson?). Let them express thankfulness for an economy strong enough that they can have a feast (we can all dress up as turkeys).

Just make sure this doesn't stop me from having my four-day weekend.

First the porn teacher aide, now thanksgiving. I HATE parents.

Really. What the fuck is wrong with american people? Every year its like someone is upset or offended with another holiday. Its like these people as kids had a miserable holiday cause daddy was drunk and mommy was fighting and uncle bill touched them in the bathroom and now they hate the holiday and want to be offended by it and stop it or something.
I'm gonna start claiming i'm canadian.

One more thing to sacrifice on the altar of political correctness. Where does it stop?

fine points, gentlemen.

raheja, a native american person who teaches native american literature and who is also a parent, should stop being such a drag---suck it up, accept the white fantasy origin-myth of what ended up a genocide, and move on.

nothing to see here folks.

i mean, it's a public holiday for christ's sake and none of them has anything to do with history--the fourth of july--nothing to do with history; memorial day--nothing to do with history. it's a holiday---you know, a moment that enables us all to gather together and thank the kind of god that obviously endorsed genocide, since so much of it was carried out in his name, for the fact that on the bones of these folk a different country grew up, one that didn't loose a war and so can pretend to itself that genocide never happened.
but most of all, we can give thanks that we weren't native american.

who could have a problem with that?
only a party-pooper.

sheesh, this stuff continues and people might get the sense that what they've been taught is a little fucked up.
wouldn't want that would we.

Ironically (or maybe not-so-much), I think that that those opposed to the happy re-enactment of the Thanksgiving celebration would be all for a brutal, bloody realistic re-enactment of Wounded Knee by five year olds. Because what is most important is that pre-school plays be historically accurate and remind us all how evil the "white man" is.

I'm more worried about the parents who send the kids to dress up days dressed as a teenage mutant ninja turtle or wags the dog. Don't these people realise how stupid their children look? Somebody think of the children!!!!

Hopefully never. I want my children to question every assumption.

Is there any way we can sacrifice contrived self-righteous indignation?

It always strikes me that the people who express moral outrage at the PC-ification of America have a great deal in common with the forces who seek to PC-ify America.

In any case if "tradition" is the only justification you can cough up for a particular activity, it probably isn't all the valuable an activity any way.

*sniff sniff* i think i smell sarcasm.

i grew up with the "traditional' thanksgiving where i learned the pilgrims and their big hats and belt buckle shoes were taught by the indians that planting a fish with your corn makes the corn grow, and they all loved each other and had pumpkin pie. of course that isnt reality. but the fake happy tahnksging rammed down my kinderarten gullet didn't keep me from realizing the truth as i got older. so let the kids have fun. there is plenty of time for the kids to learn that humans treat other humans like shit. why ruin it for them when they are young? i bet the israeli kids and palestinan kids wouldnt grow up to hate each other if they had some disneyland fantasy taught to them.

Good grief, people, they're FIVE YEARS OLD!
How many kids start out reading Tolstoy? None. See Spot. See Spot be PC.
In the 13 years of public education they'll be receiving, they'll get the "true history".
In the meantime, give them a little fun time, some dress up and food and find something a bit more meaningful to debate.
I would agree that the woman making all the fuss is being elitist. They're not college kids putting on a insulting play....they're freaking 5 year old babies.

Actually, the comparative analysis of high school history books done by James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong shows that most American high school history books don't touch on the negative aspects of American settlement and the colony at Plymouth. It's rare that "true" history gets taught in American public schools unless a student is fortunate enough to have a teacher that is well-educated themselves and has read works by other historians (recently, versus being forced to read such works in college). By and large, however, many instructors of social studies at the secondary level are far too dependent on their teacher's edition to tell them what to teach. It isn't as if the high school classrooms across the United States are full of teachers introducing their students to Howard Zinn.

While I agree about the fun time, there are plenty of other fun activities to be done around Thanksgiving that don't focus on incorrect history. The kids could make hand turkeys or make a piece of art focused around the idea of gratitude. That's what we did in the nursery where I work.

I found my public education to be rather devoid of the "true history" of a lot of things. Not the Native American genocide, black civil rights, the suffragist movement, the chicano civil rights movement, the LGBT movement, Vietnam, WWII... Hell, I hadn't even heard about some of those until I started my college education.

I'm all for parents speaking out against the bullshit and propaganda that's used to indoctrinate their children.

Education shouldn't be just fun and games. It should also be...well...educating.

Five-year-olds aren't just dress-up dolls. They remember things.

Now that is insulting. These kids should be taught the proper way to draw a turkey. By allowing them to do that, they are perpetuating the myth that turkeys have palm shaped bodies and only 4 tail feathers. If they are allowed to continue with this, next they will be drawing people as stick figures.
While we are at it, lets just tell them the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny.

I agree with Snowy... nobody is saying take away "the fun". What is being said here is why perpetuate a false stereotype? There are many fun things that can come out of Thanksgiving that don't involve falsification of history (nobody at Plymouth wore those freakin' hats and buckles by the way... it was used by the painter who came up with the traditional image because he thought it looked old-fashioned).

The idea behind Thanksgiving is a powerful one.

I find that really really hard to believe. MLK day has been around your entire life, and you expect us to believe that not one teacher in 12+ years mentioned why there was a holiday.

Of course, maybe I assume too much. You didn't say that none of those things had been taught, just that you hadn't heard them.

I don't expect you to believe anything other than what I've typed.

While some of it wasn't taught at all, much of what was taught was either glossed over or complete bullshit.

MLK day was first observed as a federal holiday my senior year of high school

So wait - teaching kids a historical fallacy where people get together and not fight is bad. (Pictures some beauty pageant contestant wishing for world peace). Yet violence in not the answer? What would you have them do in lieu of cooperating and not fighting? I can see the script now for a 5 year old dressed up as a native scalping his cowboy garbed classmate... Wait wasn't this like an episode of south park?

Besides, the whole thing turned into a fantastic marketing arm for any company that sells Turkey...

Oh, cry me a river. Every human nation or country has been built upon the bones of native peoples, i.e. upon the unmarked graves of those people who were there before, and who lost the war for possession of that land. Why should Native Americans be so special? Furthermore, the proponents of every belief system – be it Christians, Jews, Muslims, pantheists or atheists – have engaged in genocide, throughout human history. So, why bring up religion, into the discussion?

i'm not going to waste my time outlining rudimentary history and worrying the question of what is and is not genocide in a thread about a bunch of 5 year olds dressing up like pilgrims.

Probably because certain folks would rather pretend that the primary significance of Thanksgiving is that it's a great opportunity to dress their children up in silly clothes.

Here's a thought: Kids don't care. At 5 years old, kids will do whatever you tell them for whatever fucking reason you give. You could dress them up as zombies and humans and tell them that they're celebrating the truce that ended the Great Zombie War and it would have the same effect on them. It might probably be just about as accurate a reflection of reality.

I think its interesting how quick folks are to overreact to something like this, especially since their main complaint is that the something is an overreaction.

"I just hate it when people make such a fuss about insignificant things so badly that I will make a big fuss every time somebody makes a fuss about something I consider insignificant."

That's not really true, but even if it were would that make it okay?
Because we screwed them over.
I'm sure my history teacher in high school went into great detail about the pantheistic crusades, but maybe you could remind me.

It is true. But who said anything about it being okay?

We? For sure, I didn't screw them over. Neither did my father. Neither did my grandfather. And neither did my great grandfather. Now, maybe – maybe! – my great, great grandfather was somehow involved in screwing them over. But even if so, me and my offspring will not be held responsible, nor will we even feel guilty, for any misdeeds of my great, great grandfather and his generation.

What, you think followers of Odin and Thor, or Ares and Dionysus, or Shiva and Kali, or Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, et. all, never went to war and killed people in the name of their gods? Or do you think only the followers of Christ, Yahweh, or Allah have ever done that?

If it were my child's school, I would save my chips for a bigger battle.

But at the same time, I find it a bit narrow-minded when some can only respond with shouts of "here they go again with forcing their political correctness on us!" when they are confronted with something that bucks the status quo.

IMO, sincere attempts by some parents to end what they consider to be the perpetuation of fables as history, including false and often degrading stereotypes, are not PC.

What is so bad about suggesting that schools teach (not just with books and lesson plans, but with such tools as skits, costumes, and other interactive means) in a manner that is HC (historically correct)?

Maybe you'd be willing to cite evidence?
"Oh cry me a river" was fairly clear.
We, the United States. There's no need to feign ignorance, it's dishonest.
Nothing you just named is an example of pantheism. I think you're confusing pantheism with what's colloquially called paganism.
Pantheism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)