A 10 year-old girl in my class asked me last week if she could publish an anti-war comment. I said, Sure. Just realize that everyone might not agree with you. We live in a town with an Army post, and a lot of people from here have been deployed. She went ahead and wrote her heart:
I have a question for all you people in the United States. When will George Bush stop sending people to war? And why doesn’t he go to war himself?
I’m thinking in the future when people are going to be tired of fighting and being in war! I think people should decide on whether they would like to fight or whether they wouldn’t want to fight. I think when we are in the future people are gonna want to give up instead of fight.
People are going to remember when their fathers had died in war and when their father’s father had died, and this will go on and on they’ll remember that, and they know who they will blame.
My grandpa was in the Army but he chose to do that because he knew it was best for his country and the people he loved.
George Bush shouldn’t decide for us even if it’s his job. We the people of the United States should decide by ourselves, and I believe this!
Yesterday, after I reviewed some of the recent class work with the whole group she asked me, Do you think that George Bush is going to read my story? I don’t want to insult him. I told her that I don’t think he’ll be insulted.
Her classmate wrote a comment for her, observing that words can change the world. Freire said much the same thing, using the word, conscientization, meaning emergent consciousness which has the power to transform reality.
It seems they’ve learned that their voices have power, a good thing to know in a democracy.
5 Comments
What a perfect chance to explain to this little girl that there are evil men in the world who would kill her simply because she isn’t Muslim, and the brave men who volunteer for the armed services are all that stand between the evil men and her family.
Of course I am assuming you missed your chance to use this explanation. I could be wrong. Feel free to use it if the topic is raised again.
Thank God my kids go to private Christian school. What kind of crap are you teaching??
Well, Doug! Voices have power indeed – and sometimes it’s the power to bring out the insular voices of bigotry. Your first correspondent could equally have written: ‘…trying to kill her because she IS Muslim…’, but I guess that’s something that, in our Australian vernacular, goes straight through to the wicketkeeper for him. In yours, an equivalent might be that it’s simply not on the radar; or the same planet actually.
I’m old enough to remember one of Bob Dylan’s early efforts. It’s called ‘With God on Our Side’.
When I read what your latest post brought up, the song resonates today just as it did about 40 years ago when I first heard it.
There is an extreme dissonance between the ‘Love it or leave it’ mentality and the spirit of open inquiry and civilised discourse.
If our blogs are to be true to life, however, then they will ever reflect that and I for one wouldn’t have it any other way.
But the lack of charity in an anonymous allegedly professed Christian is a speed bump that even I have difficulty getting over.
‘…the greatest of these is charity (love in the new versions of scripture) … and if I am without charity I am as a sounding brass…’
And, hey, you’ll probably find the identical words in the Koran.
Oh, and did I say some of my best friends are commie faggots who like polluting the minds of our youth?
If I didn’t, someone is sure to.
Hi,
What an interesting and insightful set of views.
Being older I recall a war when, eventually, people began to go though the process of sharing their differences of opinion, and how teachers in my then, WV world were about this. The deep ambivilence and the roles. You might think in my days that anything went or that the teacher took positions, but in my particular set days they didn’t. Often we stopped history after WWII so as not to leak into the material. But it had a way of finding itself in the room. When you did write about it, it was suppressed. I remember that. I wrote something over a loss and it was supressed. Nothing was said. I’m not sure that worked too well.
(In some places one can be shot for skin,clothes, signs but we don’t need to talk about my experiences teaching in American inner city.)
A position, argument, development. Good writing, Provoking, stirring, connecting, better writing. Courageous, uncomfortable, sincere, questioning, better and better writing. Life long writing to know, understand, express… tools for discourses, dialogs communication, debate, writing for life. Possibly the art of teaching. Definitely teachable moments. (Perhaps best so in the silence of a teacher judging content.) I find that excellent.
Possibly what allowed the masterful foundational works of our country to be produced.
Good teaching.
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