Toni
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2011
- Messages
- 19,818
- Basic Beliefs
- Peace on Earth, goodwill towards all
But do you think those magazines that you snuck WERE inappropriate for you at that age? I confess that I read virtually anything I could get my hands on when I was a kid, including my father's Louis L'Amour paperbacks which were not necessarily OK for me to read. For that matter, neither was Gone With The Wind or To Kill A Mockingbird, which I read for the first time when I was maybe 10 years old, dictionary in hand. I had no idea what a whore lady was and when I looked it up (amazingly whore was in the dictionary), it led me to look up procurement and some other words whose definitions I did not quite believe were possible.In the early 1960s, when I was a boy of 8-10, my father was reading a series of articles about the Nazi death camps, genocide and human experimentation. I wanted to read those articles. I already knew Nazis were bad, and about the death camps and genocide, and my father went over them again with me, but forbad me to read the actual articles he was reading because their content was too horrific for a small boy.When I first really started to understand what Hitler did, it was because I read The Diary of Anne Frank and identified with her because she was a girl just a little older than I was when I read her diary. It made the horror of antisemitism real to me, and the even more horrific concentration camps. I felt horrible because I saw what human beings did to other human beings. When I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I was horrified and more, because once again, I found it horrific what people could do to other people. When I learned about slavery--and mind, you, this was a very mild, watered down 'knowledge-' I felt nauseated, horrified, much more than words can explain to think that some people did this to other people. And worse, in all of these cases because other people cheered it on or merely stood and watched it happen. Around this same time frame, I read the very lurid account of the torture death of a young girl a few years older than myself, who was tortured over a period of some months in a city near where I lived, by the woman who was given her care while the girl's parents had to travel for work. Again, this evil woman recruited others to help her torture this girl and other kids in the neighborhood knew what was going on and no one came to her rescue. Neighbors wondered but did nothing until the girl died.People should feel uncomfortable about what happened. They just shouldn't be forced to feel guilty for the acts by others, and almost no teacher in the country has done that. Slavery, Trail of Tears, nuclear experiments on humans, our country has done some shady stuff, and we need to learn from that. The South (and Southern wannabes) just have this issue with truth, especially when it isn't convenient for them.Yes it does. It explicitly does, by saying anything that is deemed offensive or shameful is out of bounds. They don't create limits, they created a dubious and undefined standard that isn't black and white and can be easily used to take a school to court... something schools don't have money to do... to determine if whatever was taught was out of bounds. It is a form of legalized judicial harassment.
Yup, this is the real issue. It's about going just far enough that it can be used to create trouble for those who aren't actually doing wrong.
What happens when someone feels uncomfortable about being told what white people did even though the teacher doesn't tell them they should be uncomfortable about it?
Though part of me wonders how much this has to even do with what is taught in school and rather how much this is about wedging people against each other.
The problem is simply teaching the truth can cause students to be uncomfortable because "my people" did that. I see this as being used to prohibit teaching the uncomfortable bits of history.
How reading about these events made me feel is beyond my ability to describe. It still gives me chills to think about any of these. When I was a small child and I heard my grandfather disrespect a black man with a young son for no reason other than he could, it made me feel ashamed, disgusted, sick to my stomach.
I've been proud all my life that my family, as far as I've been able to trace, has never lived below the Mason-Dixon line and so is unlikely to have engaged in slavery. Some fought for the North in the Civil War. Given the level of casual bigotry that surrounded me while I was growing up, it's small enough comfort. Even then, I know that I could be wrong--maybe there were those in my family tree who enslaved other people. If they didn't it was not because they were so enlightened.
I felt and feel all of these things because I am a human being capable of empathy and not too cowardly to face these facts: People do terrible things to other people for profit and for convenience and for political power--and sometimes for very sick entertainment that defies explanation to me.
I am an extremely average human being. I understand parents wanting to protect their own kids from horrific knowledge. But mostly, I think it is the parents who feel uncomfortable, who don't know how to answer difficult questions or how to resolve the fact that Grandpa or Uncle Joe might have been funny, and smart, and hardworking and loved to tell good stories and were great hunters/farmers/mechanics/whatever---but they also were pretty racist.
That's the hard part; Not understanding or accepting that people are sometimes really awful human beings, terrible beyond most people's ken. But that these terrible truths can and do coexist with admirable characteristics: People with intelligence, a sense of duty and caring, talents, ambitions, love for family and friends--also could have some horrible faults and sometimes could also commit terrible atrocities, and more often, failed to stand up for what they knew in their hearts was wrong, or excused horrors as things of the past or justified by some need, as though it was justified to steal someone's life if you needed their labor or their land. Or if it happened long ago.
In order to convince oneself that it was acceptable to slaughter innocents, to rape, steal, murder, kidnap and more, one had to convince oneself that these were justified because you weren't really doing it to real human beings equal to yourself. No, you had to convince yourself that somehow, they were less than human.
Trouble is, it's really hard to eradicate that belief system once it's baked into the laws and customs of the land. How can you justify that Great Grandpa took part in the massacre at Sand Creek and still live with the fact that's how your family came by its homestead? And so on.
It makes people uncomfortable to consider these things. That's why we must consider these things.
Being an inveterate reader, curious, and (mostly) without t v to pass the time, I of course snuck the magazines with that series of articles, read them and was thoroughly horrified and felt almost humiliated to be a human being if humans could so deliberately debase themselves so low. I had been raised in a Pelgian Heresy branch of fundamentalist Christianity and so I had a very positive view of basic human nature, though individual experiences with a few cruel adults had suggested to my fledging mind that adults were capable of being very corrupted from their original goodness.
I'm not sure I needed to know details of the camps at that point in my development, but certainly the basic facts, which my parents made sure I did know, were essential knowledge then and now.
In any case, for books simply in school libraries and not being taught in the classroom, it is the parents' responsibility to advise their children that certain titles are inappropriate for them at this point in their maturation.
I know very well that I was a pretty sheltered child, as sheltered as my parents could keep me. But I still saw and heard some ugly racism first hand, some of it from the mouth of a beloved grandparent. My parents never knew that I was sexually assaulted by someone I thought of as family years before I was considered old enough to date.
Of course this is not ideal and of course, some of the very ugly things I read or experienced were beyond my capacity to understand. I still have difficulty understanding some of it. I know what happened during the Holocaust, during the campaign to exterminate Indians, to a teenage girl who was tortured to death, including sexually by the person who was entrusted with her care and some neighborhood kids. I know these things happened and yes, it made me sick to even think about, with the limited ability to actually understand what happened that I had at the time. I'm no less sickened now than I was then.
But: If I had encountered these books and news articles under the guidance of a sensitive and supportive teacher, I might have been able to process them better than I was. If I had been raised a little less sheltered, I might have stood up for myself sooner and more firmly. I might have even told adults what was happening but I never did.
I think providing information and context is the best way to protect children. I think providing a supportive and understanding environment goes much further than keeping things hidden behind the librarian's desk. Sadly, children often experience a lot of horrible things that no adult wants their child to have to deal with. Pretending things are like Leave It To Beaver is not helpful.