Pound Pup Legacy

I read an interesting article about the duty and obligation teachers and schools have to the social-learning of it's child-population.  [Religion in the History-Social Science Textbook Adoption]  Of course, each school lesson must make the tax-paying parents happy, because when the parents are happy, the school-board is happy.  I have grown to accept happiness is found in the superficial, especially when it comes to public bureaucracy... (giving new meaning to hypocrisy! <cheeky smile>  )  But the truth is, folks, kids know P.C. teachings when they see and read them.... and sadly, school, for far too many, has become a really bad joke.  The stuff I read about schools and violence these days does NOT make me happy, yet it does not at all surprise me.  (Should it?) I honestly don't think most policy-makers understand how deep "conflict of interest" goes anymore, and as any parent knows, no where does it show more than within our own public school-systems.

I grew-up in a time when religion and culture were very abstract historical lessons in the classroom.  We learned about slaves and concentration camps, and how cruel man's inhumanity towards man can really be.  I grew-up in a time when mixed-race couples were shunned, and a Korean in the classroom meant there was an adopted child in the house.  I was as white-bread as I could come, but not at all like my friends or their families.  I was a minority of the worst kind because I was white, but didn't know who or what my family was.  Could you imagine such a stupid thing to experience in an American classroom?  "You don't know your own MOTHER????"

I was 9 when I got surrounded in the hall outside my classroom by a group of girls and boys.  They gave me my first-lesson on what a bastard is, and from that day on, it became the class-joke.  I remember looking at a friend, hoping I'd get saved, but he stood... watching... like a deer in headlights.  I stood and took what they wanted to give me, and went into the class and said nothing. That joke spread like wild-fire to other classrooms.  I remember kids pointing and whispering, and laughing.  I was the child even my own mother couldn't love, so she sent me to another country to get rid of me.  I learned this from the kids in my class.  Oddly enough, it was "the minorities" who teased me the most.  Maybe they liked the idea of a rich white girl not being wanted by her family... I don't know.  I never told anyone, I just learned how to fight.  HARD.

There's a lot that parents don't know about the adopted-experience, and how it fits in and out of the classroom.  I often think parents today think culture-acceptance and religious tolerance can work well in school, but it's the playground where kids are getting teased, hurt and ignored (both by kids and adults).  I also think many parents don't respect the cultural and historic needs of the child who sits in a classroom and thinks:  I wonder what my parents were, and if they had any customs or traditions I would have really liked?

I wonder when classrooms will cover the history of child-placement as much as they cover slaves and the Jews.  I wonder when maternity homes will be discussed in sex-ed, and how religious fundamentalists can hurt families more than Planned Pregnancy services.  I wonder when lessons like "Buying or selling a child is wrong" and "robbing a child of his family should never be tolerated" will be taught in classrooms that teach ethics, trade or economics.  I wonder when adoption will become part of the teaching-learning tradition, and I wonder just how honest it will one day be!

Until then, I just thank God I'm not an adoptive parent these days, because I would hate to be so clueless in terms of the hard-core realities international adoption brings its most innocent victims.