Do the Children of Bigots Deserve a Righteous Education?

Do you think the children of bigots deserve a righteous education?  If so, how does one go about providing a non-secular learning experience to the children of prejudiced parents?

I have been wondering about that matter of learning for a bit now because I do online teaching and one of the students I planned to teach — purchase order faxed and in hand and invoiced — had my class canceled because that student’s mother didn’t like an article I wrote.

The article in question was one defending Chaz Bono from bigoted hatred — and I was ironically being stung by the same wand of ridiculous condemnation as Chaz — just because I provided public support for Chaz.

I suppose the mother’s thinking was that I would somehow take my “liberal” support for Chaz Bono and attach it to my teaching.  I don’t purposefully bring politics or religion into my classroom — virtual or not — and it was then that I realized my condemner was actually the sort of person she feared.

The parent of the child who cancelled my class thought I would spew some sort of manifesto in the classroom — I don’t do that — but clearly that mother does.  She indoctrinates her offspring into a singular way of thinking, and any outside exposure to anything even remotely foreign is seen as a danger and a threat to be attacked.

That mother has a couple of unwitting, looming, tasks ahead of her.  The first is for her to stop her paranoid thinking that others are as small minded as she is, and the second is that she needs to trust her child to open her own heart and mind to different ways of thinking so she can make up her own mind on what’s right and what’s wrong.

I really don’t care about the mother and her bigotry — but I do mourn for the child entangled in her apron strings and I yearn for the loss of free thinking she may never experience in the free world — and yet there is no real way to touch the indoctrinated mind with any sense of a sensible and sensitive moral compass, especially when the mother cuts of all ordinary and compassionate access.