My niece had a cupcake cake made of white cake. I made a comment about being surprised it wasn't chocolate which has always been her favorite. She said she decided not to like chocolate. I didn't know you could decide something like that 
After the party I took her to her Powder Puff practice and she told me some stuff about her school. Since she went to Honduras on her mission trip she said she thinks school is a priviledge. After seeing how most of the people she met had only a 3rd grade education, if that, she realizes that their lack of education keeps them poor and she's lucky to have the opportunity to learn. It's a very good thing that she is thinking that way.
However, I wonder about some of the stuff she tells me she is learning. She says they learned how aliens helped build the pyramids. She also doesn't believe that man made it to the moon - that is was a hoax. Next thing I know she will tell me the holocaust didn't happen.
I think there is a pattern in our culture anymore that puts down man's achievments. We are portrayed as greedy, war-mongoring, environment destroying, and brutal as a species. We are rarely given credit for the amazing accomplishments mankind has made over the centuries. For example with the pyramids, the story of aliens helping build them is put out there because man couldn't have possibly done something so amazing by himself, he had to have had help. Like back in the 1800's when explorers found fantastic ruins in Africa, they never gave local people credit for building them, it always had to be some lost white tribe who must have done these marvelous things.
When they teach about the founding founders they seem to emphasize their personal flaws rather than emphasizing the truly revolutionary things they accomplished. They created an entirely new country with a system to make men free to grow, to be rich, to worship and to be free from government abuses. Most of the countries in the world still don't have these privileges. In America we have the right and opportunity to develop from having nothing to being multi-millionaires just through our own efforts. The founders gave us the system for doing that. Yet we are told they were slave owners and philanderers etc. They were, but this wasn't immoral by the standard of their times. And I think the things they accomplished should be emphasized more than the other parts.
We don't seem to want to give credit to man for being great. We always try to find the flaw in a person, and everyone has flaws, and emphasize that to demphasize the great things people do. For example, my sister loved Rock Hudson movies, until she found out he was gay, then she hated them. The movies didn't change, the acting didn't change, just her perception of the actor. What a stupid reason to decide not to like something. But we seem to do it all the time with great historical figures.
Christopher Columbus was a hero when I was growing up. Now he's portrayed as a genocidal conqueror. What he did was heroic. He set out across an ocean in flimsy boats to find a new path to China. He didn't set out to bring disease to a group of people, he didn't set out to conquer a land, he set out to discover something new. That was very brave considering the conditions of the time. But we can't give him credit for that, because of the results.
I don't mind the kids learning both sides, but put the emphasize on the achievements, on the ideas, on the mores of the time in which the people lived. Judging someone from hundreds of years ago based on modern values is wrong. And dismissing their accomplishments based on modern values of their personalities is also wrong.
We should celebrate the greatest of human beings instead of constantly looking to tear them down. I don't know what schools expect to achieve by demphasizing man's greatness.
I finished reading the library book Silent Truth by Sherrilyn Kenyon and Diana Love. Mystery/Romance - pretty good. Not as good as her Dark Hunter series.
aliens built the pyramids?
September 12th, 2010 at 07:44 pm
September 12th, 2010 at 08:52 pm 1284324727
September 13th, 2010 at 12:37 am 1284338244
September 13th, 2010 at 12:55 am 1284339307
September 13th, 2010 at 01:44 am 1284342298
All through my [long-ago] grade school years, if you asked my classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up and why they wanted to do that, you'd hear an answer like, "Doctor!...because I want to help people." "Teacher!... because I want to help kids!" "President!...because I want to help the United States." "Lawyer! because I want to help people." Yeah, the goals and the reasons tended to be stereotypical, but I think we kids were earnest in our ideals.
I think ideals, altruism, and hearing about admirable people were underpinnings to becoming confident adults who expected to be an individual but not to live as an island. I'm not talking about brainwashing here, but I really do think that young human beings need to feel that, even if all is not well with the world, there are people who are working on fixing it, there have always been people working on it, and _they_, too, can do some of that fixing when they are grown. Let them imagine themselves to be such marvelous people and it will add to their motivation to do good things (such as learning the multiplication tables or apologizing to their sister whom they have treated badly) in the present.
September 13th, 2010 at 03:23 am 1284348213
September 13th, 2010 at 04:17 am 1284351428
September 13th, 2010 at 04:49 am 1284353374
As for the other stuff...it's really really hard to draw the line, I think. I'm glad I learned about all the good parts of history and our forefathers first, because I do think patriotism is important to moral development, as well as having role models. But still, when I started finding out more about the flaws of our ancestors, and some of the crazy stuff they didn't tell us about at first (Japanese-Americans imprisoned during WWII was a particular shocker for me), it was a huge comedown and made me very cynical about authority figures (and our history) for a number of years. I think I've come to a good middle ground as an adult, but I can't help but feel that a more-balanced education would have made it less disillusioning to find out about the bad stuff after believing wholeheartedly that we were a nearly perfect country for so many years.
September 13th, 2010 at 12:27 pm 1284380838