Grrrrr!

The New York Times published an op-ed last year by a kindergarten teacher who congratulates herself for being a brilliant multiculturalist in the classroom. The crux of the op-ed is this anecdote:

I was moving around the classroom checking students’ writing when a question popped up out of nowhere. One of my American students, David, called out, “Ms. Shunnarah, can an elephant be a god?”

…I remembered from my studies of Hinduism in college that there is a religious entity known as Ganesh, who takes the form of an elephant….

This information about Ganesh came to me quickly and I am glad that it did, because I could have carelessly dismissed David’s comment as silly. Instead, I told him yes, and described Ganesh and his place in the Hindu religion. After I said this, I noticed that one of my students from India, Abhra, pulled out his own drawings of Ganesh from his backpack. He had been discussing his beliefs with David, when David had called out the question. This small bit of knowledge I had retained turned out to be important. After my response, Abhra smiled; his religious beliefs and identity were acknowledged. …

Later Abhra’s mother came to me and said that I had made her son happy because I knew about Ganesh….What if I had responded from my own personal biases and religious perspective? What would have been the outcome for my student Abhra? Would he have been ashamed? Would he have kept his pictures hidden, damaging his sense of self?

Needless to say, most of the comments lavish praise on the teacher for being so sensitive.

I was so incensed that I took the rare step of actually submitting a comment of my own. Since I doubt it will ever see the light of day (NYTimes comments are moderated), I’ll post it here:

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Why were you so cruel to your student? You congratulate yourself for improving the self-esteem of the Hindu student, but when you told the “American” (presumably Christian) student that elephants could be gods, did it ever even occur to you that you were destroying HIS self-esteem, and turning HIS world upside-down? No, apparently this did not occur to you, because attending to the feelings of and supporting the worldview of the non-Western students is paramount in your philosophy. It’s more important to crush the beliefs of the Americans than it is to be even-handed. For all you know, you just ruined that little Christian boy’s life: now he doubts his parents, because he no longer can trust what they say is true. If they lied about God, then they can lie about anything.

It would have been equally valid, and equally one-sided, to tell the Hindu boy that No, elephants cannot be Gods. But you didn’t do that. Yet you did the mirror image, which is just as bad. And by taking sides, you gave your imprimatur to Hinduism, while rejecting monotheism. In your quest to be multicultural, you ended up taking sides anyway. It sickens me to see your overwhelming concern for the feelings of one of your students (the Hindu), and a complete unconscious lack of concern for the other student, who is just roadkill on your superhighway to a multicultural utopia.

As one of the other commenters here noted, saying to a Muslim that there are other gods besides Allah would rank as a capital offense in some countries; and informing the monotheist children — Christian, Muslim, Jewish — that it is a FACT that elephants can be gods, is likely to be extremely upsetting to them. Despite your fantasies, there is no middle ground on this issue, and you blundered spectacularly by supporting one religious viewpoint over the others. Stop patting yourself on the back for one moment to see the damage you’ve done, and probably do every single day of the year when you force all of your students through the multicultural sieve.