Rachel Brougham: Who’s really raising our kids these days?
Across the country, young students are getting ready for their spring concerts.
Melissa Tempel’s first grade class in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, had spent weeks preparing for such a show. But school leaders had other plans.
Tempel and her students were working on songs that addressed a theme of world unity for the upcoming concert. They selected "It’s a Small World," which they’d sing in Spanish, "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles, and the Miley Cyrus-Dolly Parton duet of "Rainbowland." The last song talks about being true to who you are.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to live in paradise, where we’re free to be exactly who we are,” Cyrus and her godmother, Parton, sing. “Living in a Rainbowland, where you and I go hand in hand. Oh, I’d be lying if I said this was fine, all the hurt and the hate going on here.”
But school administration said not so fast. They told Tempel to remove the song from their setlist, saying its lyrics “could be deemed controversial.”
In 2017, after the song was originally released, Parton said of the lyrics, "It’s really about if we could love one another a little better or be a little kinder, be a little sweeter, we could live in rainbow land.”
That’s controversial?
In Florida, a school principal was recently forced to resign after a photo of the famous Michelangelo sculpture was shown in class. Parents got upset, despite a notice going out in advance informing them of the upcoming lesson.
In school districts around the country, there’s a movement to ban books. Whether led by local school boards or state legislatures, the movement has popular titles disappearing from library shelves.
Whether it’s banning books, avoiding discussion of a famous statue or calling the concept of unity a “controversial subject,” it seems as if the cultural war movement in this country is a bit too real.
Are we so fearful of our own parenting skills that we are limiting what our children learn in the classroom? Are we protecting them from being exposed to diversity so much that they won’t know how to deal with differences when they become adults?
I can’t imagine these cultural wars are an actual issue that resonates with the majority of Americans. During the 2022 midterms, I heard over and over politicians pushing issues such as inflation and the economy, crime and immigration. Yet here we are worried that a song about being true to who you are with the word “Rainbow” in the title might hurt our children.
It’s interesting to me that the same party who always seems to shout about free speech is now the party working to ban books, art and school lesson plans.
Who’s really raising our kids these days: Parents or politicians?
— Rachel Brougham is the former assistant editor of the Petoskey News-Review. You can email her at racheldbrougham@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Rachel Brougham: Who’s really raising our kids these days?
