Innocence in History?
Reading “The History Teacher” really made me think about the past history teachers I’ve had. Up until now, I didn’t realize that the history I have learned in the past all came from someone else, who could’ve made the information up. The students in the poem didn’t seem to realize they were being taught false information, and just like the students, I could’ve been taught the wrong information in all my years of learning history. How do I know what I’ve been taught is true? In my opinion, history is a subject that cannot be confirmed a hundred percent because the record of the past is all written by the people who lived then, and the information they recorded down could’ve be exaggerated or we interpreted their recordings wrong.
The poem also made me realize that innocence can be protected by very little means. No matter how innocent the teacher made the stories, Billy Collins explained how his students would still “leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart.” To the degree of straight up lying to his students, the teacher still didn’t achieve his goal of keeping the children innocent. This made me think that as a child grows, innocence slowly fades away as social media, friends, etc. slowly corrupts the child. There is no stopping a child from being exposed to the outside world, and having a child be lied to about history is definitely not going to stop the process of maturing.
Good stuff! I agree with you how the history teacher is lying to the students at an unbelievable extent. However, I think that history is factual, there isn't any innocence or morality to it. History is history, it's something that happened in the past and no one can change it. No one can present history in a innocence way because it would be hiding information. It is like news how they all present facts but they can choose what to present and what to not to sway people's thinking.
ReplyDeleteI really resonated with your point about the validity of a teachers educating. It is hard to know if we are being educated at a level that we expect to be. Also, your point about the innocence of children being hard to protect is an important point. Children are exposed to so many things from the media that it becomes less and less important to protect the innocece of a child, and instead focus on educating the correct information to the children. Great work!
ReplyDeleteThat's really interesting that you started to question your past teachers and about the content that they teach because I remember as a kid I would think that the teacher was always right. However, being older now, I realize that teachers do not have the answers to everything. I agree with you about your statement regarding a child's innocence-- shattering that shell of innocence for a child is definitely inevitable and it could even be that trying to protect them from the ugly truth is actually hurting them more.
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