How do we talk about this?

One mother, Jewish, asked that we not teach her son about the Holocaust — she wanted to do it herself. I get it. (Image by Ron Porter)

One afternoon in December of 2012, I was leading my middle school students through a discussion of an article in the New York Times. I had the image from my laptop projected onto the wall of the classroom.

I don’t remember what the article was, but the themes were age-appropriate and we were slowly working through it to get a handle on the language and structure.

As we finished up, I refreshed the home page of the Times. And that’s when I learned, along with a roomful of adolescents, that a large number of children had been killed in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

In working with children, there’s a balance between expanding their understanding of the world and protecting them from understanding too much. As they grow, it is appropriate for them to learn more and see more. But who is ready for six-year-olds being murdered en masse? Absolutely no one. Certainly, there was no way to protect the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School from the reality of what depraved humans can do to each other. The adults tasked with helping the students heal must have had to work from a completely different framework than the one they were used to.

I want to teach my students respect for law enforcement, respect for elected officials, and a level of trust in the government and its systems. It’s hard to do this when alleged petty criminals are murdered on the street by law enforcement officers in broad daylight, elected officials tweet misinformation, and a mob can violently breach the seat of government and disrupt official proceedings. Not only are these events upsetting and destabilizing for people of all ages, they are politically fraught, making them difficult to talk about with people who are not my own children.

I’ve been called out for not ensuring that my students participated in what was supposed to be a student-led walkout to protest school shootings. I’ve also been challenged on the idea that one aim of government is to keep people safe, by a parent who wanted to make sure her twelve-year-old remained ever wary of the aims of leaders. In short, there will always be parents who are dissatisfied with how we handle any issue that has multiple perspectives.

There should be space in the classroom to respect the views of others. The political spectrum, at least theoretically, at least in the United States, can be explained to students as a continuum in which personal liberty and private enterprise is at one end and heavy involvement of government for the collective good is at the other. People don’t necessarily disagree about whether we should have roads and bridges, health care and public safety; they disagree about who should be responsible or who should pay for it. We might say that though people may differ in their political and religious beliefs, we all want what is best for our families and communities. We disagree about the specifics: How do we get what we want? What (or who) should be prioritized?

Obviously, this is oversimplified, but it’s been a helpful construct for sharing big ideas with students without casting judgment. But in an era when casting judgment is the dominant mode of discourse, my explanation of politics is hopelessly quaint. And in the United States, when viewed through the lens of consistent efforts from many people and institutions over the last couple of centuries to prevent Black people from voting or holding public office, it’s all but irrelevant.

I’m not saying that I give up, but it’s hard. Leaving politics aside, even the basics are hard. How do you talk about a president who, on Twitter, says the kinds of mean things to and about other people that we are trying every day to prevent our students from saying to and about each other? It goes both ways: Lots of kids have learned, through watching adults, that it’s okay to mock the president’s physical appearance and make personal attacks. It’s not. If we want decency, we have to model decency — all of us, no matter who we are, how old we are, or what power we wield. But that’s a tough case to make when the world outside the home or classroom is broadcasting the opposite message.

Some will read this and see my views as too liberal; others will think that I’m too conservative. I’m not advocating for or against any candidate or platform, though — I’m advocating for a world in which we can see political differences not as truth vs. untruth, sane vs. unhinged, or humane vs. tyrannical, but as two different opinions stemming from a shared reality. Without that, it’s pretty impossible to teach children about the world. You’ll find yourself indoctrinating them into the only “correct” belief or trying to parse a bunch of confusing or even scary rhetoric.

Navigating the current landscape does require dismissing certain ideas as dangerous or wrong, such as the current anti-vaccine fervor. However, this presents an opportunity, at least, to practice empathy. As Seth Godin puts it: “What do they believe that you don’t believe? What do they see that you don’t see? What do they want that you don’t want?” There’s a whole context we’re not seeing. These people have reasons for their beliefs. These beliefs are rational to them. If we just dismiss them as wrong or stupid, we aren’t going to get anywhere. Nothing will change.

When we first heard about the coronavirus in late January, I led my students in a discussion to soothe their fears and share what I knew, trying to break through the sensationalism to the facts. I was right in my assertion that the coronavirus was unlikely to kill them, but totally wrong in the implication that it was not likely to cause them harm — that it certainly has. But at least we talked about it. At least they had someone who cared about them to help them process the news they were hearing.

We adults won’t always get it right, but at least we can have those discussions. We can read articles together and make sense of them, just as I was doing on that December day years ago. We can talk about the opinions involved and try to understand their context. We can try to see things from a historical or global perspective. The conversation may lead to uncomfortable places and may even generate challenging feedback from parents, but that can be an opportunity for thoughtful discussion as well — and growth for all of us.

A parent wrote to me after his son came home talking about the Sandy Hook shooting. He wasn’t angry that his eleven-year-old had been exposed to such an upsetting piece of news. Instead, he expressed gratitude that I was willing to share my genuine, human reaction with my students. “You made quite an impact on my son. He told me, in awe, that ‘Ms. Casey started crying when she saw the news on the computer.’ Thank you.”

If we can’t protect kids, at least we can show them how to deal with difficult things, day by day — while we’re figuring it out ourselves.