How Do You Teach About MLK in Kindergarten?

On this Martin Luther King Day I had planned to write a laudatory article about the man himself. He is a personal hero of mine. I can think of no one since Lincoln that has done more to further our freedom and fundamental rights. He was all at once a man of great faith, a skilled leader, and a formidable intellectual. MLK led great change by invoking God and the self-professed values of a nation, reflecting back on that nation its own shortcomings, and challenging us all to more fully fulfill the promise of the founding generation. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail should be required reading for all Americans. It is appropriate then, that we celebrate the man, his achievements, and his dream every year on his birthday.

Unfortunately I felt compelled to change the subject matter of this article when my 5 year old son came home from kindergarten on Friday afternoon. My son is a really sweet kid, and his mother and I are trying to raise him to become a good man while preserving his childhood innocence as long as possible. Until Friday, my son was not even aware of race. Just this past week we had been watching a cartoon together in which one of the characters was a black child named Truman. I took an interest in the name and asked my son, “Which one is Truman?” My son replied, “The one with the blue sweater.” It hadn’t even occurred to him to describe the character by the color of his skin.

So I was disappointed by the response I got when I asked my child over dinner on Friday night what he learned in kindergarten that day. He got down from his chair and ran to his backpack, bringing back a picture of Martin Luther King that he had colored. “Oh you learned about Martin Luther King?” I asked. “Dad,” he replied, “people with white skin are mean to people with black skin.” “Is that what you learned in school today?” I asked. My son responded, “Yes.” Discouraged by my son’s use of absolute language I tried to correct him. “Son, some people with white skin were mean to people with black skin, and Martin Luther King tried to stop the mean people. But the color of your skin doesn’t make someone mean or not.” My son was insistent. “Yes!” I searched for an analogy, “Son, see how mom has brown eyes and I have blue eyes? That doesn’t make mom good and dad bad right?” That was true, my son agreed, but the objections continued. “But dad it was in the book we read. And dad, one person with white skin wouldn’t let a woman with black skin sit on the bus.” I was discouraged by the generalizations my son was deriving from the lesson in class. Apparently the message he took away from his class was “black skin = victim, white skin = bad.”

It got worse from there. Eventually the conversation turned to what the children played at recess. My son said, “Well Billy (not his real name) was in charge because we were pretending he had black skin, because we have a person with black skin in charge of us now.” This seems like an obvious reference to President Obama, and what a disservice to the President’s considerable achievements that my son was left with the belief that he owes that success to the color of his skin.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think my son’s teacher is an amazing teacher and a really nice person and it never would have been her intention for this to have been the takeaway from her lessons on Friday. It’s easy to imagine how a well-intentioned lesson could go awry to a kindergarten audience. I suspect the intended message was that this Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King, who worked to help people with black skin who were being hurt by some people with white skin, and because of him we have progressed so much that a person with black skin can be President. It’s a wonderful lesson and one that should be taught, but to kindergarten ears and minds more used to absolutes than nuance, it’s a difficult one to explain.