School, chapel, and MLK

I'm looking forward to the rest of long weekend for Martin Luther King Day. I'm grateful that E's school honors the holiday in a significant way. On Friday, there were presentations by the first, fourth, and fifth graders during which each child spoke individually in front of the whole school. (This is one of the nice things about going to a small school: in under half an hour, you can hear every single kid across three different grades can say something meaningful.) The first graders each presented a wish starting with "I had a dream..."

E said, "I have a dream that people would be kind and make good choices, and that school would be good for everyone." (Tim thinks he must have picked up the "good choices" part from me ;-)  I get all choked up with this stuff; it gets me every time. Other kids had wishes for saving the environment, helping lost pets finding their way home. One boy dreamed of having more math. Gotta love first graders.

Before we decided to send E here, I had concerns about chapel as part of school. Since I'm not religious, I was worried about time spent in someone else's faith, how E would fit in, what he would take home, and how to deal with things like communion (it's kind of nice but doesn't taste very good). Fortunately the school is quite progressive and is able to secularize. One story about miracles translated into a message about optimism and believing in possibility for change; it could have gone so many other ways that I might have found disturbing. But perhaps what I most like about chapel is that it's a gathering place for the whole school, where, over the years, the kids take small steps in becoming confident public speakers.

So back to MLK... I'm thrilled that the whole school gets involved, all the way down to the lower grades. But... E has spent the past few days asking questions about segregation, racism, bombings, and the assassination. He asks how people could be so cruel, how firefighters - the consummate good guys - could spray water into a crowd of black folks. To E, racism is bewildering, unfathomable. He's deeply bothered, as no doubt he should be.

He's six, though. And if had my druthers, I'd much prefer the subject be taught in terms of character, moral courage, and what it means to be a hero. I'm not trying to deny the dire human condition leading up to the civil rights movement, but, at least for my kid right now, it seems like too much info.