I have run into one of those. I had no response as I was dumbfounded. Evangelist spook me quite often.
Some of us consider this a feature, not a bug.
I refuse to believe that, and I am deeply offended that people think 2 + 2 = 4. It hurt my child’s feelings when he was given a bad grade because he shares my beliefs about arithmetic. IT’S THE SCHOOL’S FAULT.
Besides, we all know 42 is the answer to everything.
I really think by the time kids go to school, parents should be working on distinguishing fantasy from reality for their children. Like even though old cartoons have cat’s tails being pulled, not to do it to the real cat living in our house; besides, if the parents don’t teach reality, chances are the cat will, real quick. Cartoon characters fly, but you can’t and feel free not to jump out the upstairs window, even if you’re wearing the same costume.
My parents taught us from day one that Santa Claus didn’t exist: that it’s a cool idea, but it is not real. How is that a problem, really? We could understand he didn’t exist but it was fun to think about him once a year. Reality: it’s not just for breakfast any more.
But now school teachers, already badly underpaid and overworked and doing a lot of the job of raising children that a lot of parents can’t be bothered with, now also have to tiptoe through a minefield of guessing and respecting the feelings of and defending fantasies for parents of children who maybe never show up for parent-teacher conferences. Sorry, parents, but teacher’s jobs are to teach. It’s YOUR job to immerse them in reality, if you can put your phones down long enough.
My parents felt educating their children was their job, on equal footing with the teacher. They taught all five kids in my family to read, write, and do simple arithmetic before we ever got to kindergarten. Not everyone can do this, but how few even try?
I believe that is basically the position of many people who home school.
Exactly. The teacher should be teaching the curriculum and not worrying about what fantasies the children may or may not harbor at the knees of their parents. No tiptoeing is necessary if you stick to the lesson plan.
Walked in on my Biology teacher being scolded by a red-faced man for teaching the man’s daughter evolution. In college.
But that was a class which necessarily covered human evolution. I doubt very much the grade-schoolers were taking Debunking Childhood Myths 101.
There aren’t enough accurate details about the circumstances to know whether this might be a bit draconian or entirely appropriate – and you can bet that the media got parts of the story wrong or incomplete – but from what we’ve been told at this point, for the reasons already stated, I’m glad this Grinch is gone. 
“What your parents are telling you about the age of the planet is wrong; it’s way older than a few thousand years.”
“What your parents are telling you about evolution being fake is wrong.”
Also, what sanctions would you propose for a random passerby who utters the truth within your child’s hearing? Or for a classmate who does the deed? :dubious:
What if what the parents are telling them IS demonstrably wrong? “2 + 2 = 22, no matter what your teacher says”.
There was in the Dear Prudence column in SLATE last year, a mother whose son was going on a trip with other kids. I believe the kid was a third or fourth grader and the mother asked the trip leader not to disabuse the child of his belief in… The Easter Bunny. Seriously, every adult and other child has to submit to coddling stupid fantasies of a single deluded child? Dear Prudence: I refused to pretend the Easter Bunny is real.
If parents want their children to enjoy a preposterous fantasy life as long as possible, 1) never let them around other children and 2) teach them never to ask questions they might not like the answer to. If I had been in that first grade class, I’d have popped up and said the teacher was right; there is no Santa Claus. Should the teacher have punished me for, you know, being right and telling the truth?
Besides, did Superman lease the land for the Fortress of Solitude from Santa at the North Pole? Oh wait, Superman is a fictional character, unlike Santa.
Funny old thing life, isn’t it. For so many situations there isn’t a hard firm line that tells us what to do.
However, collectively, in this country, a teacher telling 1st graders that Santa doesn’t exist is pretty fucking clueless at best or being an asshole.
I think its incredibly wrong to teach kids to believe things that aren’t true. It’s the gateway to magical thinking, which as far as I can tell, never goes away. I see that same kind of thinking all around me in adults. You need to teach your kids how to think critically, to ask questions, to NEVER stop asking questions that asking questions is good and healthy, and they should learn that some people are not going to tell the truth. I’m speaking as someone who has been lied to by their parents, and what I learned was that I couldn’t always trust them.
Kids need a healthy bit of skepticism, because inevitably, there will be times when their parents aren’t around. But even when they are around, they need to trust what their parents say, so their parents need to be trustworthy.
This. That teacher had no business interfering in this sort of thing, why on Earth would you tall that to a kid and take some of the fun out of Christmas?
“That’s something to talk with your parents about.” Works for:
-Is Jesus real?
-Is Santa Claus real?
-Is Trump racist?
-What happens to us after we die?
and pretty much any other question that I, as a teacher, don’t think I should be discussing with kids. There’s no tiptoeing; a single answer suffices for them all.
Oh, boy. No, that’s not how school works. There’s plenty of tiptoeing in other areas that needs to happen, because kids have rich and complicated and sometimes very traumatic lives. When I read a book in which a parent dies, how do I make it non-awful for the kids in my class who have had a parent die, for example? That’s not in the lesson plan.
Did you do research on that subject, or just, ironically, assume it’s true?
Because my own assumption would be that the process kids go through in figuring out for themselves that Santa doesn’t exist would be a useful process they can apply for the rest of their lives to other subjects. My aunt-in-law, for example, is an atheist to this day, because once she figured out Santa wasn’t real as a kid, she promptly applied similar reasoning to God.
I’m torn on the whole thing.
I was one of those kids who believed in Santa but was creeped out by the whole thing. I wanted to believe he didn’t exist. A man prancing around the house in red pajamas didn’t evoke happy feelings in me. Just lots of fear and unease. Once my sister decided to go downstairs and wait for him, and I spent the whole night trembling in fear on her behalf. What if she caught a glimpse of him–this individual with God-like powers–and died?
So I think six-year-old me would have appreciated an authority figure assuring me that Santa belonged in the same category as monsters, vampires, and ghosts.
But lots of parents treat the whole Santa myth like a pseudo-religion. If you can’t tell kids that God isn’t real without expecting to catch flak, you shouldn’t expect any different for Santa. I think this is strange and kinda messed-up, but out of all the things to get worked up about, this is real far down the list.
Well said, and I am not a teacher. My comment was overly simplistic. I don’t know the context in which this teacher made her statements–whether she just took it upon herself to make what she felt was a needed correction, or whether the students started a discussion about it. But when I made that comment I assumed she had brought it up, which there was no reason to do, hence my suggestion to stick with the lesson plan. The situation may have been more complex and nuanced, requiring her to give some kind of response, in which case your advice would have been much needed.
There have been a lot of Santa-Claus-as-mass-murderer stories, and there’s always Krampus, but I’ve never seen a story of Santa-Claus-as-Eldritch-God-Who-Strikes-Dead-All-Who-View-Him story. Cookies and milk put out as fearful sacrifice; coal in stockings is harbinger of death in the coming year; the presents reveal one’s deepest desires, whether you want them revealed or not.
I would read that story.
Now that you mention it, the Grinch story could have taken a much darker turn at the encounter between Santa-Grinch and Cindy-Lou Who.
Like one of your parents?
If one of my kids had been frightened of Santa, I’d sure have told her he wasn’t real. And we never tried to convince the one who never believed that Santa was real either.
I don’t think my parents knew I was afraid because I didn’t tell anyone about it. I knew I was supposed to be rah-rah about Santa, so I put on a rah-rah act. (After all, I knew he was watching me with his omniscient powers). But I think if I had told them I was afraid, they would have laughed and told me I was taking things way too seriously.
I was also afraid of the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and Jesus.
As a kid, I was always conflating stories. Some Sunday School teacher had taught me that you would die if you ever saw the face of God (which is why God had revealed himself to Moses via a burning bush). Santa knew who was naughty or nice and had supernatural powers, so I figured if he wasn’t God himself, he must be like a god. And thus, he might kill you if you looked at him (especially if you were supposed to be in bed like all the other good little boys and girls).
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