It turns out that Klara’s 65-year-old Christian school teacher is telling the kids utterly ahistorical things about women’s oppression. I knew something was off when I said, “I don’t lift heavy things. Daddy will do it” and Klara responded with a fiery speech about how wrong it is to be lazy. Then she told me that “in olden times women weren’t allowed to work or to vote.” To which I responded pedantically that for most of human history nobody voted and that there’s zero chance there was a single woman in our bloodline who avoided having to work.
Then I heard a story that a classmate of Klara’s responded to this indoctrination by doubting the wisdom of the female suffrage and was sent to the principal.
I will never understand why any of this is necessary in a 4th-grade classroom and why it’s so impossible to find a teacher who simply teaches instead of cultivating resentments.
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