Show and tell is under siege

At our preschool, the children in the afternoon program are allowed to participate in show and tell once a month, which is called "sharing", instead of "show and tell", for some obscure reason. During the designated Sharing Week during the month, children may bring one object one time only.

My daughter did not participate in this for months after starting preschool; she avoided occasions calling upon her to talk due to self-consciousness over her severe speech disorder. When she finally did start joining in (not coincidentally she was working hard in speech therapy at the same time), she could not get enough of it. She was always plotting and planning what she would bring in the next time. Once she tried to double dip and bring in a second toy for sharing the last month. (I was a wimp that day. I knew the rules prohibited it, but she cried and cried, so I allowed her to take the toy in to ask her teacher if she could share again, but I laid the groundwork that I believed the teacher would say no. Lola was angry, but she accepted the ruling). Over the summer vacation, she talked about sharing a lot and kept a mental list of which toys she wanted to bring in when school resumed.

This year we haven't celebrated the festival of Sharing Week yet. Our director sent out an email to the membership expressing that some parents feel show and tell is "too materialistic" and that perhaps we should move to having "themes" for show and tell, like "things I made" or "pictures of my family" to move the focus away from commercial products. I was annoyed by this. The children LOVE show and tell. They tend to bring in bedraggled stuffed animals, rather than glossy action toys. I'm in favor of allowing the child freedom of choice and not controlling the decision in this regard.

My child has never asked me to buy her anything based on show and tell, and I wondered if others were truly having an actual problem. I asked in an email to our listserv that if other parents were having issues, please share their experiences, but no one spoke up. I expressed my personal preference for allowing freedom of expression and autonomy (in other words, the Drunken Housewife does NOT want to be bothered to remember the frigging theme of the month and to argue with her child about whether she can bring in her toy rabbit when the theme is Pictures Of People We Love or Things We Found or Global Warming or whatever uplifting theme it might be). I'm the only one saying publicly that show and tell is not broken, why fuck with it (although one parent pulled me aside and confided that she agreed with me completely and had composed a rant on the subject, but she reconsidered before sending it). The other parents are using a lot of lofty, vague-sounding talk about enrichment:

> Lastly, we're always looking at ways to promote
> talking about and understanding our emotions; an idea
> for a theme could be along the lines of
> "something/someone that makes me feel better when I'm
> sad" (gets all those stuffed animals included!) Maybe
> we could find a way to incorporate the multiple
> intelligences that our director spoke about the other week,
> highlighting a different one each month to get
> different kids excited? Just brainstorming.

MY GOD, PEOPLE, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT SHOW AND TELL FOR THREE AND FOUR YEAR-OLDS. Do we have to fucking analyze it to death?