I’m sorry if I treat the kids I teach like they are capable of learning and discerning. You learned your religion when it was my way or the highway. That doesn’t work anymore. there are too many outside influences that have a stronger hold than I do. If they know why they believe they are more likely to keep believing. You don’t know the age I teach. Children are not stupid .
Rather simplistic and dismissive of people, I believe. I wonder why so many people of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation (who were emphatically not stupid, and whose general curricula for high school puts today’s to shame) were able to ‘keep believing’ (and who, like my grandfather, not only read the Bible but read it in the original Latin and Greek, knew Hebrew as well, and had a vast library with books on every imaginable subject), were able to learn and to keep the faith. Why do you think that ‘former’ ways didn’t treat the children as if they were capable? How did YOU learn, anyway, if it was all so terrible?
For that matter, how come Tostig the thane, and Swithin the serf, Philomela the peasant girl, etc.,even if illiterate, poor, and laboring from sun up to sundown every day of the year, were able to ‘keep the faith’?
Were people just stupid all those centuries? Then how come some of the best thinkers lived then? How come so many of the ‘poor’ became aware of those thinkers through ‘oral’ lectures?
All those years when nobody was catering to the ‘needs’ of the young. IF they were lucky enough to be able to learn at all! Because education wasn’t a right. It wasn’t guaranteed. You had to work for it! Nobody was worried about how it might be too ‘much’ for them to learn, or that they needed to have a ‘voice’ in what, how, when, and why they would condescend to actually ‘learn’ (or at least, sit, lounge, or stroll in and out of some room and perhaps (between listening to the I-pod or texting one’s friends) checking out on-line articles and ‘learning’ about something. . .
I don’t want people to be ‘bullied’ but mercy me, many (not all) of today’s students are coddled beyond belief and lazy beyond belief. Millions of poor people (not all children) would have literally given their last coin or drop of blood to have the OPPORTUNITY to open a book, to sit in a room and be taught, without fear of being sold, or having a war break out, or simply being knocked on the head and killed by wandering thugs. . .and so many youth today whine about how ‘boring’ school is or how they don’t see the ‘point’ to learning some ‘dumb stuff’ and it all has to be made ‘exciting’ for them.
You might think I’m just a harsh old biddy. . .but this harsh old biddy’s daughter graduated college as valedictorian. Especially when it came to English, she learned from what I taught her at home more than the ‘fluff’ honors courses at her high school! (Senior English honors involved discussing the works of three prominent black women writers --and there is nothing wrong with black women writers, but these children had never heard of Milton, Pope, Addison, or even Thoreau, Emerson, or Hawthorne! Chaucer was a FOOTNOTE, It was pitiful.)
You’re right, children aren’t stupid. . .now OR then. We weren’t stupid brainwashed morons when we learned that thinking didn’t mean answering every question with another ‘but why’ as if there were never a definitive ‘because.’ And that it was as much critical thinking to ACCEPT, on reasoned reflection, a teaching as it would be to REJECT it.
