Rant

(Those of you who are still forming opinions of me should probably skip this post)

Over breakfast this morning, my eldest daughter and I were speaking about her recent biography presentation on Beethoven for school. In passing, she said that her teacher had stated unequivocally that Wikipedia was an unacceptable source "because anyone can get on to Wikipedia and just make stuff up."  I talked myself into a knot trying to explain the difference between learning and formal education, and the difference between doing an assignment for school to learn the material, versus pandering to the instructors biases/beliefs for a grade objective.

Never mind the countless studies that prove the increasing viability and equivalency of Wikipedia as a source, or (more often) a source of sources.  The teacher was saying that his opinion was fact, and that Wikipedia should be (wholesale) disregarded as a source. I am not a Wikipedia-lover, nor hater, but the bias-as-fact statement was what I took issue with.

I would have let it go, and just deprogrammed her at breakfast and thought no more of it, but I made the mistake of asking her what site he recommended she use instead of Wikipedia as a source.

It is an individual, faith-based, learning site that also had a small area for biographies of some famous people. The biography was sandwiched in-between all sorts of rhetoric about the religious beliefs of the site author.

For the record, I have no problem with people of faith, or people being proud of their faith in public.  I do take issue with the not-even-remotely-subtle direction of my children to a particular faith-based site by their schoolteacher in a secular setting. My children could be of a different faith, or no faith, and this could confuse them at this early age.

Given the nearly-infinite quantity of primary sources other than Wikipedia, why choose this one above all others?

I am now presented with two choices:

1) Discuss my issues with the teacher, potentially raise their ire and defense mechanisms, and potentially see my child suffer indirectly as a result, or

2) Make sure that my eldest, now that she is learning Algebra, comes in with some equally faith-based sites from the Middle East (the birthplace of Algebra, ancient Babylon) to support her homework.  This will point out by demonstration the bias inherent in their Beethoven-biography reference-site selection.

Or am I overreacting?

Comments

[Michael_keen]

Your reaction would be the same as mine Christian. That was completely unacceptable of the teacher to press his own biases on his students.

I agree with your second choice of what to do. Educate your eldest about the other viewpoints that are out there. She will be a better person for it.

No you are not overreacting.

Cheers mate
Michael

[twitter.com/Entropologist]

There are always other options. The one I would prefer in this case is not fighting at all.

Neither no nor your children are likely to win a fight based on belief instead of fact. Any attempt to fight against it will further entrench the other side and it is likely that they will react negatively. This could cause pain to your children and could teach them poor lessons moving forward.

Personally, I would recommend taking this opportunity to teach your kids how to recognize the bias in others, have a discussion on how these different biases might impact wikipedia, look at some controversial issues on wikipedia revisions and talk sections and start discussing ways to interact with people who might have biases counter to your own. (Hint: fact-based confrontational approaches often feel great but are seldom effective.)

This would be a way to fight the war while avoiding this particular battle.

[B_Wagoner]

Once again embracing my role as outlier, I offer the following—from three different views within my world:

Teacher: Simply put, there are always (at least) two sides to every story. Right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the teacher here deserves to tell his side of this story. Two different people can come out of the exact same set of experiences with very different perceptions. It’s human nature—every experience is shaped by our biases and beliefs. Engage in a dialogue with the teacher—rather than crowd-sourced chastisement. Don’t create a contentious relationship with a teacher. It’s not in anyone’s best interest. I don’t, however, think you have much to worry about in terms of retaliation if you do raise questions. Anyone who’s been in the profession very long is more than used to questions and concerned parents.

Administrator: We’re all best served when we view schools as learning organizations. Every person—custodian to superintendent—is learning each and every day. As you know, I’ve worked with thousands of educators, and I’ve never yet met one who is intentionally doing harm to kids. I’ve certainly seen many instances of unintentional harm, but those can typically be boiled down to issues of “the will” or “the way.” When we know better, we do better. I’d open the discussion with this question: What was the learning goal in this assignment? Was it about gaining knowledge of a famous composer? Was it about developing a research-based writing skill set? This would allow us to engage in a conversation about alignment among learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessments—which is where this conversation needs to go. Every relevant issue here can be illuminated through these.

Parent: When you’re an administrator at your kids’ school (like I am), you actually lose your parent voice at school. You can say you’re at conferences or a class party as a parent, but that’s just never the case. In every interaction, you are “the boss.” As I came to this realization, I also came to embrace this forced laissez-faire reality. Granted, I’m a laid-back kind of parent. I’ve seen so kids from so many different backgrounds, that I’ve come to understand that very few things really matter. I want my kids to be empathic. I want them to persevere through difficult situations. I want them to understand themselves and the world in a way that allows them to be discerning and act accordingly. My family has certainly quietly navigated difficult school situations through open dialogue at home. I believe it’s made my kids more open-minded, more confident, and more resilient. My years as a high school teacher tell me that your parenting dilemmas will only get more complex and more emotionally-charged. Don’t tilt at windmills now. You’ll be worn out before you get to the big stuff.

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

Is this a private or public school?

My kids are in New York City public schools, which means I have to constantly deprogram that at breakfast *and* dinner from all the socialism that imbues every single lesson on every single subject. They started out in Catholic school, where they had the faith of their forefathers (which I view as a gift, not some sort of constraint on my "Personal Learning Environment"), and none of the usual lefty public school tripe, so they were well prepared -- but eevn so, it takes its toll. Catholic schools are widely damned for poor math skills, and that may well be the case in later years, but when my son had to transfer to public from Catholic school in fifth grade, he was soon teaching kids how to do math so they could understand it, since they were under the thrall of the "fuzzy math" TERC religion that forced them to "not worry about the answer" etc. blah blah.

I've been absolutely appalled at my children's history and social studies books. Once, my son brought home a page from a website that wasn't just one facet of a lesson, not just one lesson, not just one module, but the hallmark of the whole course. The page was from www.marxist.com

So yeah, Christian, people want to pass on their values to their kids and they are aghast at those with different values. You're aghast at some faith page that shows musicians, but you want to uncritically celebrate the lefty tilted Wikipedia. See, people do differ on what the core values should be, and Geek Religion should not be what has to pass for the public commons:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/06/the-geek-religi.html

Now, I think we can agree that public schools should not have religion in them -- not prayer, not faith teachings (except as some kind of comparative history lesson), not rituals. Of course, new-age faithiness invades the public schools -- my son and I were *appalled* that in his fifth grade class, he had to sit in a circle at the end of the day and "share" about what he might have done to harm someone -- a kind of self-criticism circle. Look, if I want my kid to go to Confession, I send him to Catholic school. And if his father, who fled the Soviet Union, wanted his son to grow up in communist self-criticism circles, he wouldn't have left his homeland. So seriously, we have a problem. There should be no such circles. Such circles should be run by communities in other fashions.

Using Wikipedia as a source above all promotes laziness. Much of the time a Wikipedia entry is merely copied from some other source, often paraphrased with footnotes or even carried over verbatim without credit. So it's good to get children looking critically at a multiple set of sources and learning to contrast and compare and not accept the Wikipedia frame as somehow the only lens for reality.

Inherently, Wikipedia is evil:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/the-evils-of-wikipedia-and-the-hope-of-second-life.html

That's because it's run non-transparently, on an arcane set of rules, by a tiny cabal of people with very skewed views. It is not the open, democratic, liberal font of wisdom people imagine. If it *were* that, I'd be for it. But it's not. Unlike hordes of other social media sites, you cannot EASILY contribute and cannot VOTE or LIKE. Wikipedia is very old-fashioned. Put a like or a vote on those pages, boy, that would sure force some accountability from the Nerd Supremacy in a heartbeat.

So we're not going to agree on this. Show me the page, and I will see if I'd agree that the religious packaging was a problem. For me, it would be fine if there was Wikipedia, the religious page, and some other page, maybe from a museum or something. The point is to have PLURALISM of views and building a critical mind. Insistence that Wikipedia is good and that religious is bad is not the way to pluralism.

[Timothy Johnson]

I'm going to go past the either-or mindset.

As a college professor at Drake, I discourage my students from citing wikipedia as a source for the reason your daughter's teacher mentioned. On any given day, somebody could hack into it and literally change history, and - well - who wants to find out that Beethoven was a Nazi cross-dresser who abused puppies in his spare time?

Now, do I encourage use of Wikipedia to help with initial research to help create an outline and find viable sources? Certainly. I don't agree that Wikipedia is unilaterally evil. But as a credible academic source, it is questionable. But that makes it no less viable as a resource.

I also encourage my students to look for answers in unorthodox places which give my "more academic" colleagues heartburn.

Here's where your role as a parent educator comes in, Christian, in explaining the difference between these two uses of Wikipedia.

(And when in doubt on matters of emotion, do what I do: defer to your wife. Wives generally have a knack for telling us when we're overreacting.)