Earth Day Activists

6-year-old activists.




Joseph spots his mom and her ubiquitous camera at the side of the road.




The boys and their recycled-cereal-box signs. Even the signs are "green!"




Joseph's sign. The teacher wrote "suggestions" on the board for the kids to copy.




Brigham's sign. He actually wrote something that we had talked about at home. We ought to be preaching responsibility over everything else.



So last Friday I got this in my email, as part of the 1st grade weekly newsletter:

"Earth Day is next Tuesday! In celebration, we have an entire day planned of “Earthy” lessons. Please send an empty cereal box and paper towel roll to school on Monday with your child. They will be using the materials to make a handheld poster.
Then on Tuesday morning, Earth Day, parents and children are invited to meet at Mrs. Dielmann’s house to walk to school as a grade level. She lives very close to the school and the walk is an easy one. The children will carry their handheld poster advertising our concern for loving the planet that they made on Monday in class."

Lovely! More political indoctrination for six year olds!

Not that I have any problem with my children learning respect for the earth, I'm a big fan of that. It's just that I'm not sure the public school 1st grade is the correct forum for environmental activist marches!

I'm sort of kidding, I did send the boys to school yesterday with their cereal box and paper towel roll to make their recycled signs, and they did walk to school with their class this morning. Of course their teachers had talked up this activity a lot, so I could hardly say no.

But I drew the line at my kids wearing green. I love green! Green on St. Patrick's Day is awesome. But until the school encourages the kids to wear red white and blue on President's Day, I will not be sending them to school wearing green on Earth Day. They wore red, white, and blue so they could at least make their own private statement.

We talked quite a bit yesterday and this morning about our responsibility to the earth, and how we need to be respectful of all living things, and take care of the beautiful earth Heavenly Father has given us. But then we talked about how our first responsibility is to human beings. I told them about DDT and how environmentalists have essentially caused the deaths of millions of people. We talked about their responsibility to people always coming before their responsibility to the earth or anything else.

Dennis Prager (talk show host I really like) talks about how whenever he meets with groups of kids, he'll always ask them one question. He poses the following scenario and asks them what their response would be:
Suppose you are at the beach and you notice that your family dog is drowning. As you are running to rescue him, you notice a stranger is also drowning just a little way from your dog. You can only save one of them, and the other will definitely drown. Which would you choose to save?

Dennis Prager says that invariably a majority of children will say they would choose to save their dog. I was skeptical of this until I heard him about a week ago, as he was broadcasting live from somewhere or other. A class of 4th graders had come to watch part of the broadcast, and he asked this question to them live, and broadcast their unrehearsed answers. Sure enough, a majority of the children said they'd save their dog. They had a variety of answers (the dog is like a member of the family, they love their dog, etc.), but the majority did choose their dog. I find that very frightening. I'm going to ask my boys that question today after school and see what they say.

So anyway, here's what the boys' signs said. I asked them and they told me their teachers had written several suggestions on the board and they copied them.

Joseph's sign:
"Be responsible. Walk, don't drive. Turn off lights. Plant trees. Recycle. Earth is our only home. Save our home!"

Brigham's sign:
"Think before you act." Followed by drawings of the earth, recycling symbol, garbage can in a circle with a slash across it, and a heart above a house.

****UPDATE****
So tonight as I was fixing dinner I asked the boys the drowning dog/drowning stranger question. Brigham answered first and he said he would save Mister (our dog). I asked him why, and he said because he loved Mister. Then Joseph said he would save the drowning man. I asked him why and he said "Because people are more important than dogs." I didn't prod them on what I thought the right answer was, and the two of them talked a little bit. Brigham said, "What if the man was a bad guy?" Joseph said, "You don't know if he is a bad guy!" I asked him what he thought Heavenly Father would ask him to do, and he said, "Save the person." So he eventually got to the right answer. I do think this shows how kids must be TAUGHT values. Good values don't come naturally.
We then had an interesting discussion about what if this man really WAS a bad guy (really were?), what should he do then? We talked about Alma the Younger and how sad it would have been if someone had refused to save him as a young man, because he was so bad. He would never have had the chance to repent and to bring so many Lamanites to the gospel. I asked Brigham if he would be more sad if Mister died or if Daddy died. Of course he said he'd be more sad if his Dad died. Then I pointed out that the drowning stranger might have been some other little boy's daddy, and that little boy probably would really hope Brigham would choose to save his Dad. The point was to try to teach empathy, another trait which is completely unnatural to humans, and must be taught (especially to boys, I think). We talked about how life is full of hard choices, and many times the right choice is the hard choice. It would be really hard to let our dog drown, but it still would be the right choice.
So, I wish both my kids would have given the right answer right off the bat, but as it was we had a good talk and I think it was definitely a learning moment.
Pretty telling, though, that at 6 years old after two years in the public school system, my boys can tell you all about the evils of greenhouse gases, and the virtue of recycling and riding bikes, but they couldn't clearly and confidently answer that they should save a human being over a dog. If the schools must teach values, I wish they'd at least teach those that will actually make the students better human beings. Oh well. (That's not to say that recycling isn't a worthy cause. It's just that I don't think it is recycling that makes a good human being. And I worry that when schools get into the business of "character education," there are many parents who assume their kids are being taught correct values at school, and perhaps are not as vigilant about teaching their kids values as they should be. If schools would stick to education, no parent would get the false impression that values teaching is anyone else's responsibility but their own.)
By the way, Dennis Prager asks this question of high school students, and gets the same results. Very scary.