Normalizing the Abnormal
The “Normal” Family
“A family is composed of people living together and functioning as a unit. Many people consider the ideal family to consist of a father, who works away from home; a mother, who stays at home; and two children, a boy and a girl. Well, that does not describe my family. Does it describe yours? If so, you are in a minority. There are as many interesting family situations as there are classmates in your classroom.”
These words introduce a “family history” assignment that our eleventh-grader was given recently in the Composition 11 class that he is taking. He is homeschooled, but enrolled in an independent online school. This is just one small example of many that I could cite showing how ideological biases effect the material being taught even in independent and Christian schools, and the way in which that material is often presented.
Let’s take a moment to examine this introductory paragraph. First of all, “A family is composed of people living together and functioning as a unit.” If you’re looking for the vaguest possible description of a family that you could possibly imagine, you’ve found it. If you’re looking for a definition of nothing, here it is. But if you’re looking for a definition of an actual family, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Secondly, “Many people consider the ideal family to consist of a father, who works away from home; a mother, who stays at home; and two children, a boy and a girl.” This is called a “straw man argument.” Many people indeed do consider the ideal family to be composed of a father (male) and a mother (female) who, within the bounds of a life-long committed relationship, produce and raise children. Many people also believe that the husband should be the provider for the family, and that the mother’s main task is to take care of the family and home. But that does not necessarily require that the father work away from home, and describing the father as someone who “works away from home” while describing the mother as someone who merely “stays home” is a rather weak way of describing the roles of the two parents. As for the “two children, a boy and a girl,” this is not a description of the ideal family; perhaps it is a description of the stereotypical nuclear family, of a sort used by people who want to challenge the “traditional” family, but I for one wouldn’t call it the “ideal.”
The paragraph goes on: “Well, that does not describe my family. Does it describe yours? If so, you are in a minority.” Of course you are in a minority if your family falls under that description! It doesn’t describe the family that I grew up in either. The family that I grew up in was composed of a father, who worked on the farm on which we lived, a mother, who worked at home, and three children, two girls and a boy. My family is composed of a father, who largely works from home, a mother, who works at home, and (currently) two boys who live at home with us, and one who is attending university a long way away.
The paragraph concludes by saying that “there are as many interesting family situations as there are classmates in your classroom.” Reading between the lines, I am led to arrive at this conclusion: “Whatever odd conglomeration of people that live together and function as a unit you might be a part of, you should not imagine that your situation is at all unusual or strange, and we can definitely not say that it is abnormal or wrong.”
It’s a subtle message. But it is there. And it is not there by accident. Perhaps it is meant to be “inclusive,” and to not lead students whose family situations are not “ideal” to think less of themselves, thereby having their self-esteem undermined by the “Family History” course. The end result is to cast doubt in students’ minds as to what is “normal.” We cannot say that a certain family structure is “normal” and “good,” while other family structures (such as the one I addressed in a previous post) are “abnormal” and “destructive,” or arise because of sin (broken homes and single-parent families). And so, by means of a simple, apparently innocuous school lesson, the Overton Window is shifted just a little bit more to the left. A Christian student, living in a normal Christian home, is left thinking that he is the weird one, that his situation is abnormal, and that he needs to think differently about what a family really is.
As parents, we need to have our eyes open to these subtle (and not-so-subtle) challenges to our worldview. If your children attend a school that abides by a government curriculum, even if it is a Christian school, you need to be very aware of the ways in which curriculum developers are working to shape your children’s minds, regardless of the subject that is being taught; I could easily write another post about the propaganda that is being built in to something as seemingly neutral as mathematical word questions. Our responsibility as parents is to train our children to be critical thinkers, and to understand when and how they are being manipulated. That manipulation happens everywhere. We cannot let our guard down.