This article about 4th grade textbooks in Saudi Arabia struck a chord with me. I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss this article that talks about how the revised Saudi textbooks teach Muslim children that to be true believers they must not only believe, but also hate the nonbelievers, specifically Christians and Jews.
But, the article opened my innocent and naive eyes a little. It reminded me about when I was in college and thought about becoming a teacher. I wrote a cheesy essay about how The Catcher in the Rye inspired me to want to work with children, to in a sense "save" them and preserve that innocence and good.
I ended up working with kids, not as a "traditional" teacher, but as a camp and afterschool counselor. One summer I had this sweet African American little boy. We were playing on the playground and I noticed a group of all African American boys in a circle having a discussion. I stepped in a little closer to listen. The sweet boy who was probably in second grade said, "Jessica, isn't that right? Most boys don't know their dads." Wow, those words were the most genuinely innocent and naive words I think I had ever heard. No, I was the naive one. I knew these children's backgrounds, but didn't truly understand that this was all these kids knew. I answered with something like, "Well, I know my dad and I see him a lot." I tried to explain how there are different families and some kids know their dads and some don't. I learned more from that child, and some others in my experience, than I ever learned from any college class or textbook. We are what we know and often assume everyone else is just like we are.
That makes the article so sad and scary. How do you really change a belief, something as strong as hate, that's been ingrained in you since childhood? I no longer have as much interaction with children directly, but plan the afterschool activities for over 4000 Texas kids. Hopefully, in some tiny way I'm helping to expose kids (and our staff) to things they may not otherwise ever be exposed to.
1 comment:
This interchange in "Ride with the Devil" comes to mind (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134154/quotes):
Mr. Evans: I'm not speakin' of numbers, nor even abolitionist trouble makin'. It was the schoolhouse. Before they built their church, even, they built that schoolhouse. And they let in every tailor's son... and every farmer's daughter in that country.
Jack Bull Chiles: Spellin' won't help you hold a plow any firmer. Or a gun either.
Mr. Evans: No, it won't Mr. Chiles. But my point is merely that they rounded every pup up into that schoolhouse because they fancied that everyone should think and talk the same free-thinkin' way they do with no regard to station, custom, propriety. And that is why they will win. Because they believe everyone should live and think just like them. And we shall lose because we don't care one way or another how they live. We just worry about ourselves.
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