Teaching Thanksgiving from a different perspective
Teaching Thanksgiving from a different perspective - CNN.com
LONG BEACH, California (AP) — Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them.
The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Good for him. I can’t even begin to explain just how damaging learning the romanticized version of Thanksgiving is to some of our kids. I am sure it doesn’t damage all of them but I can say from my own personal experience after getting out of school and learning the REAL history it became hard to be sure anything I was taught in school was real. Looking back on it -0 years later that was probably a good thing since from that moment forward, unless I found reliable outside sources, I wouldn’t believe a word I was taught or read and it helped me to become the person I am. But I’m a scrapper, I wanted knowledge, not everyone does. The schools should never be party to teaching lies. Ignore the subject matter if they are too young. You can’t say there is educational value in propetuating a myth.
Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.
“I think that is very sad,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. “He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving.”
This is silly. I learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school and I don’t remember any of us hating our country because of it. We weren’t taught a romantic myth about dropping the bomb on Japan, in fact we were taught at the same time that the United States rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them into interment camps. The United States has gone through some horrible times and we haven’t always come out of it smelling like a rose, to pretend that we have always done the right thing is just silly. It’s our history, take it as it is. There is plenty of good that goes along with the bad but rewriting our history so that it is pretty teaches us nothing and you lose your credibility when you teach lies.
Filed under: Bill Morgan, History, Janice Shaw Crouse, Thanksgiving, Uncategorized
I’m definitely not for the romanticized version but I do think there is something valuable to be taught and remembered. At that moment in time, two different cultures sat down together to celebrate and I don’t think the Pilgrims did it with hidden intent to wipe the Indians out first chance they got. Things definitely went downhill for the Indians afterwards but maybe there is something worthwhile to ponder about the event and our subsequent history.
Good intentions alone are not enough. How many of us think only of the neediest in society on Thanksgiving and Christmas? It’s one thing to acknowledge a culture’s contribution to society with tokens of appreciation, it is another to live and interact with another culture on a day to day basis.
For me, Thanksgiving is about what was, what might have been, and what could yet be. It’s not simply an event but rather a reminder of what we need to learn from and hopefully do better next time we have a chance.