I enjoyed brunch today with a family whose boys have attended the elite Cambridge Friends School (about $23,000 per year). The kids were saying that they did not enjoy a full day event celebrating Gay Pride and did not understand why a teacher was telling her coming-out story to the entire assembled school, including pre-K. I asked the 10-year-old “If I told you that I was gay and was going to marry my boyfriend and move to Greenwich Village, would that raise or lower your opinion of me?” [this is why parents usually don’t let me near their kids] He replied that it would lower his opinion. His mother, shocked at this prejudice despite so much well-intentioned indoctrination at school, said “What about Dan [a gay family friend]?” The kid said “I would like him better if he were straight.”
The older boy said that he had no interest in any teacher’s opinions about politics, sexuality, personal philosophy, tolerance, race relations, etc. “I only listen to them when it is educational,” he said. A good student, he wanted to get skills and facts from adults. But he was not influenced by the teachers’ attempts to mold him into what he called a “politically correct human being.” [He did say that the school overall had lowered his opinion of gays by harping on the subject constantly; he did not think that he’d been prejudiced to begin with, but the 1000th appeal for more tolerance was “annoying”.]
Perhaps a lot of the arguments about what should be taught in school rest on an overestimate of kids’ interest in what adults have to say. They respect us for knowing more math than they do; at least by age 10 they don’t necessarily naturally follow our lead in politics or religion.
The fact is, most kids are smart. Just because they have trouble with fractions does not mean they will believe all your opinions; they see the difference between fact and opinion. Part of the explanation may be in their interactions with each other; they have to make decisions about who to listen to or who to follow every day. Through their experiences they learn to perceive what is the truth for them.
Sounds like bright kids, or certainly brighter than the adults.
How old was the older boy?
And small logic nit: it’s not fair to characterize the boy’s observation as “prejudice”…. you didn’t ask about some unknown person whose only known characteristic is the one under discussion, but instead, you asked about a specific case with lots of other information known to the boy (since he had obviously been chatting with you). It may well be prejudice, but one can’t tell from the facts you presented.
After the first couple years, parents’ influence is almost nil (granted, the first few years are crucial). Kids get influenced far more by their peers than by parents or officialdom. Teen culture has proven extremely resistant to attempts to change it, however well meaning (e.g. public interest messages about drugs and alcohol abuse), let alone more contentious issues.
Jeffrey: I don’t want to give an exact age for the older boy to protect the identity of the kids, but the school only goes through Grade 8.
I think it was prejudice for the 10-year-old to say that he wouldn’t like my new openly gay persona. He does know me, as you point out, but he doesn’t know what I’d be like with a husband and an apartment on Christopher Street.
Listening to teachers talk about sexual issues and ‘coming – out’ is like thinking about your parents having sex – parents and teachers are asexual in the eyes of students. In another forum in different circumstances the responses would be very different. These issues take a long time to tease out and school isn’t always the place to do it.
Interesting. I would say that the kid is actually not that smart (or at least not a quick learner). If he were, he would have realized that the prevailing ideology at his school is tolerance, and made life easier on himself by paying lip service. To be fair, that’s more a sign of bad social skills than low intelligence.
Kids and Children may not follow our words, but are always watching our acts and behaviour. So if we want to lead it has to be by example.
JohnL: The kid was equally un-fond of other social engineering events at the school. It just so happens that the Gay Pride event was the most recent.
James: I don’t know how you can draw the conclusion that the kid lacks social skills. I presented no evidence of what he says when he is at school (and indeed I don’t know whether or not he has objected to what he feels is a waste of his time and parents’ money). He was speaking to a group of adults, none of us teachers, at a Sunday brunch (his presence at a “brunch” already indicates a high level of tolerance for the gay lifestyle!).
You’d be great with a husband and an apartment on Christopher Street!
Thanks, Christopher! I appreciate the vote of confidence. The more that I struggle with maintaining a 4000-square-foot suburban house (built in 1968), the more appealing the Manhattan apartment is (though I would definitely not want to be a taxpayer in New York right now; it is unclear how they are going to pay for their huge public employee pension overhang).
Your post made me think of the work of UMass psych professer Dan Anderson who just about wrote the book on how children interact with television. There was a time when parents were very concerned about the amount of television young children watched and Dan’s research somewhat put them at ease. He demonstrated (repeatedly) that although the children were “watching” the tv they really weren’t paying much attention to it- especially when the speakers were adults. Generally young children are much more interested in the voices of children than the voices of adults. Perhaps this carries over to your young friends. Discourse with adults in school is usually centered on rules or “educational” topics. To grade school students the values and social opinions of their peers are far more interesting than anything an adult might have to say.
I am reminded of my children’s private grade school [here in Massachusetts]: rabidly liberal, punishingly expensive, and they try so hard to ‘be diverse’, ‘do the right thing’, and be surgically-clean politically correct that sometimes it’s just agonizing to be a parent there. They hammer all this liberal diatribe and focus on out-diversity-ing everyone else so hard that it’s no wonder kids end up either cynical or terrified (my 8 year-old came home to recriminate my piggish carbon footprint while accepting the unstoppable impending doom of environmental ruin and mass extinction as known facts)
“If I told you that I was gay and was going to marry my boyfriend and move to Greenwich Village, would that raise or lower your opinion of me?”
If a long-time straight friend suddenly told me that they were going to give up their present life, run off to Greenwich Village to marry their secret boyfriend, that might lower my opinion of them as well. And I’m gay!
It might be the sudden, impetuous switch from straight to gay suggested by your hypothetical that he was responding to.
Forgot to mention the most salient point raised by your hypothetical: if someone hasn’t figured out their sexuality by age 30, in the year 2009 (and in progressive Massachussetts ,no less!), then that would definitely lower my opinion of their intellect.
Minty: Lots of people change their sexuality as they get older. St. Augustine is a well-known example. Or just look around you at all of the married guys with kids. They apparently decided that they wished to become celibate… (except for Tiger Woods).