New York Elementary School Made Fifth Graders Rehearse Being Shot by Police

You sent your fifth grader to school on June 11 for Multicultural Day, and you knew roughly what to expect. A song you did not recognize. A flag from somewhere far away. Your kid scanning the rows of folding chairs for your face, and beaming when he found it. That is the day most parents at P.S. 75 Emily Dickinson thought they were attending.

Instead, some of them watched their ten-year-old fall to the floor of the auditorium and lie still, as if a police officer had just shot him dead.

Let me say the good thing first, because there is one, and it matters. Honoring where a child comes from is a genuine kindness. A school that helps a little girl feel proud of her grandmother's language, or teaches a boy a dance his family left a country to keep, is doing something tender and right. The fourth graders that very afternoon stood up and recited Native American poetry. That is what Multicultural Day is supposed to be, and if that were all of this, I would be the first to say amen.

And make no mistake, this school had real cultures to honor. P.S. 75 is genuinely multicultural: of its 467 children, fifty-six percent are Hispanic, fourteen percent Black, four percent Asian, and twenty-two percent White. More than two thirds of them, sixty-eight percent, qualify for free or reduced lunch, well above the district's fifty-four. These are not, by and large, the children of the comfortable. They are a roomful of real heritages, and any one of them would have been worth a day.

So hold that beside what the fifth grade actually staged. Plural, particular cultures were sitting right there in that building, and the grown-ups swapped them out for one ideology. That is the difference, and it is the whole story.

The word they used was "performance." Ask what that means.#

The coverage has fixed on a real and reasonable complaint: parents were given no warning. I will come back to that, because it matters less than you would think. The deeper question is not whether you were told. It is what your child was made to practice.

A heart is not formed by lectures. It is formed by rehearsal. We become tender or hard, brave or fearful, by the small things we are asked to do over and over until they feel like ourselves.

This is not a hunch. Psychologists call it embodied cognition, and the research on children finds that a young mind builds its understanding through what the body does, not through words alone. Tell a child what to believe and it goes in one ear. Have him act it out, with his own body, in front of the people he loves, and it sinks past his ears and into the place where a self is being assembled.

So look honestly at what these particular children were drilled to feel. To the song "Glory" by John Legend and Common, whose lyrics carry the audience through Ferguson with their hands up, the ten and eleven year olds mimed the gestures of police, then dropped to the stage as bodies, then rose to one knee in the posture Colin Kaepernick made famous. They did not learn a fact about injustice. They rehearsed a despair.

A child should get to practice hope before he practices grief.#

Before he has had much chance to build hope, a ten-year-old has now practiced, on cue and to a beat, the feeling of being killed by the very people who are supposed to keep him safe. What the body practices, the body keeps. You do not get to make a child perform his own death as a dance and trust that none of it stays behind.

And the death-mime was not the end of it. Students held up signs reading "Respect LGBTQIA+," "Terrorism has no religion," "No place for antisemitism," and "ICE Out," and some wore little homemade badges of identity, one of them, on a child, reading "I'm bisexual."

Read that list again. It is four separate arguments: policing, immigration enforcement, the Middle East, and a ten-year-old's own sexuality. These are four of the hardest questions an adult can wrestle with, and a fifth grader has not had the years it takes to reason through even one.

That is the thread that ties the gunshots to the badges. In every case, a grown-up's conclusion was pinned to a child's chest, and the child was sent on stage to wear it as if he had arrived there himself. He had not. The positions were the adults', borrowed and strapped onto a body too young to have earned them.

I want to be fair to the teacher, because I think the intention was sincere. Shahreen Karim, who organized it, very likely believed she was raising compassionate, justice-minded kids. But you cannot hand a child compassion the way you hand him a placard. Real compassion is slow, grown at home in a thousand unglamorous moments, in a child gently taught to see the real person in front of him rather than a child handed a slogan and told where to stand.

What Jesus actually said about getting between a child and his childhood.#

There is a moment in the Gospels that the people who run our schools should sit with. The disciples were shooing children away from Jesus, thinking they were a distraction from the serious business of adults. He was not pleased. "Let the children come to me," he told them, "do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14).

Notice what he protects. Not the child's politics, which a child does not have. He protects the child's childhood. The disciples wanted to put grown-up agendas between the children and the simple goodness that was theirs to enjoy, and Jesus told them, plainly, to get out of the way. A ten-year-old on a stage rehearsing his own death is a child being hindered, and you do not need a degree in theology to feel it.

This is where the contrast with the fourth grade does its work. The fourth graders honored a culture. The fifth grade staged a politics. One let children be children inside something beautiful. The other used children as the delivery vehicle for something they were too small to consent to.

The costume was the same. What it dressed up was not Multicultural Day. It was catechism.

Now, about the notice.#

Yes, the school should have told you, and the failure runs deeper than one assembly. Parents say they were also not warned about a May 5 visit from transgender author Kyle Lukoff, who read "When Aiden Became a Brother" to seven-year-olds. The Department of Education's entire answer, so far, is that it is working with the school to make sure families get advance notice next time.

But hear me, because notice is not the cure most people think it is. Being told in advance would only have bought you the chance to say no to a thing that should never have been built in the first place. A permission slip to watch your son rehearse being shot is just a more polite version of the same idea.

The wound was never that you did not get the form. The wound is what they were teaching your child to feel while you were not in the room.