What does it mean to be American?

Prompt: "Many People say one important  purpose of Public Schooling in this country is to enculturate children into what if means to be American.  What does it mean to be American?"

I want to start my blog by referring to two very diverse concepts of what it means to be American through two musical selections:

"America" West Side Story music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enqhiEzfZz4

God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY

These are two sides of the American image:  The land of opportunity, and the Land of the free and home of the brave concepts. So how does one determine what it means to be American? By personal experiences, family belief systems? By what Gee calls Cultural models (114) What if these are changing radically? I don't think I have ever been less sure what it means to be American than I am this decade.  As a teen  I might have listed things such as:

• Freedom
• patriotism
• equal opportunities
• English speaking nation
• Democracy
• World power
• Strong military
• Religious freedom

Then words like these have emerged:

• tolerance/intolerance
• diversity
• terrorist
• code red
• Tea party
• bipartisan

With the emergence of social media and everyone posting, commenting, or tweeting their every thought, I am growing more and more concerned about our nation's identity.  This is the only country where the people are expected to change to adapt to new cultures coming in.  No other country does that.  On the other hand we are the only country which does not border many other countries with different languages such as Europe. Yes, Canada rests on our northern border, whose people speak English and French; as well as our Spanish speaking neighbors in South and Central America. We have been a large, proud nation who expected immigrants to learn assimilate to our mainstream culture. But our mainstream culture has changed.  The face of America is no longer that of a middle aged white christian male.

Educators are expected to teach every content area, plus health and safety which include sex educations, drug education, social skills and tolerance. I hate that word...tolerance.

tol·er·ate

ˈtäləˌrāt/

verb

1. 1.

   allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.

   "a regime unwilling to tolerate dissent"

   synonyms:

   allow, permit, condone, accept,swallow, countenance;

To tolerate...to "put up with?"   We teach children to TOLERATE each other, to tolerate people with different ideas, beliefs, cultures.
That's the problem.  When you tolerate something or someone it is assuming that your way is the superior way and you have to put up with someone that doesn't meet your standard somehow.  I like acceptance.  But how much can one accept?

ac·cept  (k-spt)

v. ac·cept·ed, ac·cept·ing, ac·cepts

v.tr.

a. To regard as proper, usual, or right: Such customs are widely accepted.

b. To regard as true; believe in: Scientists have accepted the new theory.

c. To understand as having a specific meaning.

      d. To endure resignedly or patiently: accept one's fate.

Well, "accept" then takes us to another realm. If I accept other people's beliefs, cultures, ideas, what happens to my own? Then again "Accept" definition d. takes us back to "enduring"=tolerating.

I bet each of us has our own understanding of "American." So then how do we teach this to children. Is indoctrination part of our responsibilities as educators? Well whether we know it or not we are indoctrinating our students, for better or worse, depending on each teacher's own schema, biases and perceptions.

When my children were younger I taught CCD one year.  I hated it. CCD taught children how to be Catholic, not christian, not God centered.  I taught about saints and sins and servitude, doctrine.  I wanted to teach about forgiveness, acceptance, scripture.  I didn't return.  Is our curriculum indoctrinating children to Americanism? American propaganda?  All countries do that, we are not alone in this.

I will refer again to Chimanda Adichi's video on TED TALKS: "Consequence of a single story." I believe people of other countries have a single story of America, with each holding a different single story.  How many single story view points are coming together in one classroom? In Pre-K we teach social skills such as sharing, helping, being independent, cleaning up after yourself.  We had a young boy one year who would not participate in clean up time.  He would walk away and ignore all efforts of the teacher to get him to pick up any toys he played with or help his peers clean.  When his Mom arrived to pick him up the teacher told her he was not helping with clean up.  The next morning the father came to school to talk with the teacher.  Again, the teacher explained that the boy would not "clean up."  The father said he would handle the situation. That day two women came to the classroom to clean for the boy. You see in his culture, men did not clean, women cleaned.  In his culture men spoke for the family, not the women. Is it our job to change this child?  To make him clean up because "that's the way we do it here?"  In my earlier blog I spoke of the boy from Africa who was insistent that girls did not play basketball.  I did share with him that in America girls do, because, he was going to encounter that pretty quickly in school, and it would cause him distress if he didn't understand.

We have a dual language school that works under the assumption that students will have more success if they are taught to read and write in their native language first, with English being taught in increasing percentages of their coursework over time.  In pre-k it is 90% /10%  English to Spanish or Spanish to English depending on their home language. There isn't enough research yet to tell if this model works better than traditional models, especially since many children do not remain in the school from Pre-K - 8th grade. There are people who are very vocal that this is not a good model.  That these children live in America and should be taught English. They argue that every other culture that ever immigrated to America, learned English.  Why now are we becoming a dual language nation? Many immigrants feel Americans should learn to speak Spanish, especially in hospitals, police stations etc... Each of us - teachers, students, critics - have a "cultural model."  Gee says "There is no knowing a language without knowing the cultural model ...they allow us to function in the world with ease, but at the price of stereotypes and routinized thought and perception." (115)  Like the two songs I opened this blog with..