Air-Breathing, Water-Drinking Earthlings

Last night Ethan’s third grade class put on an Earth Day celebration, a “Prairie Home Companion” styled radio show, that was packed full of epic recorder songs and appeals to their parents to recycle and consume water and electricity in more responsible ways. Even though it was relatively standard in the school recital sense, what piqued my interest were the really slick rhetorical appeals, the kinds of environmental appeals about the health of the planet and its inhabitants that probably had all the Republican climate-change-naysayer parents in the audience squirming. For one, the aesthetic of the show was classically hippie. Between the twee recorders, marimbas and bongo drums, and the “We *Heart* Earth” posters with a heart-shaped Planet Earth in the middle, the musical and visual stylings of the show definitely borrowed the optimism from the early days of the environmental, one earth movement.

But what I thought was really slick and cool was the appeal for all of us to value and respect the rights of all “air-breathing, water-drinking earthlings,” an appeal repeated through the whole of the radio show, that was remarkably inclusive without being schlocky. The language of the show included all peoples, animals, and plants, all life on earth, as beings with inherent value and rights that should be protected. Talking with E after the show, it appeared that not only had their teachers put all the work into this complicated, rhythmic performance, but that the kids also had numerous lessons about the importance of maintaining ecological balance as a moral issue and reducing our footprint on the planet and its resources. But the language of inclusiveness — to me, that was so subtle and so amazing.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of subtlety employed in Ethan’s classrooms — he learns more and more about the U.S. civil rights movement every February, not only about Martin Luther King but Malcolm X, and they’ve begun to discuss the conflicts in the Thanksgiving narratives every November. I wonder, though, if part of it is that although he’s in a public school he’s in a very ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse public school, a rich school, with parents involved and vocal enough to devote time and energy to making sure their histories aren’t erased from the curriculum. I mean, I have friends and coworkers who were in school in the 70s and 80s who fondly remember their white teachers showing up at school in blackface to teach black American history. This year, when E’s teachers invited the kids to dress up as black leaders on Martin Luther King Day, I held my breath. I had a headache about it for two days, imagining the possibilities, the conversations I was going to have to have, but I cut out a little mustache, goatee, and bow tie from construction paper so E could dress like W.E.B. DuBois and teach his classmates about The Souls of Black Folk, a book I’d studied in college for a whole semester. I was ready to storm the school if a parent sent in a kid in blackface, but nobody did.

Ethan’s age in the mid-80s, I was among the first generations of children to get a solid, science-based, state-mandated lesson on the environment in the public school (at the time I remember being part of the first group of kids to organize a somewhat controversial recycling effort in my elementary school) and twenty years later it’s perfectly acceptable and not at all controversial for this kind of aesthetic to be part of the curriculum. Or perhaps a better example: In high school, when my best friend’s brother came out and began one of the first support organizations for queer kids in school and was supported by (some of) the administration, our support for him as kids came not only from our love for him, but also from this aesthetic we’d been taught as children, that we could challenge bigotry, root for the “underdog,” and advocate for others’ rights because to not do so was unkind (also a first lesson in privilege). You know, there are kids who use “gay” as an insult and there are the kids who challenge them. As an adult, social justice is more complicated than unkindness or unfairness or underdogs, but to a child, when all the complexities of Whose History and Whose Perspective and language and representation have yet to be teased out, it’s important to know that you have the support of parents and other adults who challenge these tropes with you. As a child, you know what isn’t right even though you may not have the resources to explain why just yet.

Ethan’s school experience gives me hope. I’m trained in education and my professors pushed a solid social justice platform through the course of my college experience. My experience leads me to believe that this, this, is educational neglect. The teacher who is comfortable with turning a blind eye to certain students is not a person who should teach.

I suppose the takeaway lesson as a parent, and as someone who does believe in the value of all air-breathing, water-drinking earthlings, is how vital it is to teach these lessons to our kids, to expose them to the widest ranges of experiences and people and possibilities, so that the idea of loving the planet and all the things on it, the values of gender and racial justice, the aesthetic of kindness and mindfulness, prevails, becomes inherent in them. Positive social pressure. So that racist, homophobic, ableist, sexist bullying, the kind of bullying that lasts for bully and bullied long past the playground, is socially isolated and squashed by authorities and peers alike.

In twenty years’ time? I’ve got to think our lessons, official and unofficial, will be learned. It’s a bright spot of stupid optimism in my usual cynicism, but hey.