From "Tenafly teacher, principal placed on paid leave after student's controversial Hitler report" NorthJersey.com).
Here's the image — shared by one parent on Facebook — showing the essay with statements like: "My greatest accomplishment was uniting a great mass of German and Austrian people behind me," "I was pretty great, wasn't I?," and "My belif [sic] in antisemitism drove me to kill more than 6 million Jews."
Don't invite children to write from the perspective of an evil historical figure if you don't want them to compose material like this. It was dumb to print "Accomplishments" on the form and hang it on the wall where it would be seen and judged by many people who don't understand what the assignment was. It's good that no one seems to be going after the child here.
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6 comments:
Temujin writes:
"Yeesh. I'm glad I'm my age and went through most of my life, and schooling, when things were more black and white. Even in the 60s and 70s, as weird as those times were, things seemed more clear than they do now. Everything is so grey now. Nebulous, without form or shape. This was a tough assignment. I get what the teacher was trying to do...I think. But that's a bad way of going about it. You're literally asking kids to make the argument from Evil's point of view. Instead of teaching the vast chasm between good and evil, you're muddying up the image, making it hard to differentiate. Which falls precisely into today's thinking that there is no right or wrong, nothing that can be known. This took place in Tenafly- a very upscale city in Bergen County, with some of the supposedly best schools around."
It's a very sophisticated thing for a child to do. At what age did you first think about how an evil person might sincerely believe that what they are doing is good and actually try to put that person's thoughts into words?
And yet, children read books and watch movies that have evil characters, and when those characters speak, they often state their ideas as if their ideas are, to them, good ideas. That's not *always* the case. Many evil characters just keep saying they are evil and they like being evil.
Do I think children should be taught there's a "vast chasm between good and evil"? No. I think they need to learn that you can't always tell where the line is and you can sometimes have it backwards. But, clearly, there should be clarity about the extremes of evil, such as Hitler. Nevertheless, I think a mature child might want to think about what Hitler and his followers thought they were doing and how they justified it to themselves. It's human nature to come up with reasons for why we can or should do things we want to do.
Jay Gilbert writes:
You said, “It's good that no one seems to be going after the child here.”
Oh, just give it ten or fifteen years. Thirty, even.
Narr writes:
Speaking as an historian and sometime history teacher, I've always felt that part of the
job is to speak up for bastards--giving devils their due.
But I wouldn't have tried this with college freshmen, much less elementary school kids.
Finally, I doubt that the teacher has any historical knowledge of the period beyond
TV.
Michael writes:
"Whatever happened to people minding their own business? Was there a magic moment when that became hopelessly passe? Do we moderns simply not have enough business of our own, or has the anonymity of social media just released and magnified inclinations that have always been there? I'm sure the good people of Tenafly could handle this, if it even needs to be handled, without help from all over the planet. Read a book or something, people! (Yes, I'm old.)"
Jonathan writes:
"The value of history is that it teaches you how unearthly hard it is to understand people in the past, how those people thought about their times and themselves. It means getting outside of yourself and into some other self. And that especially means understanding that other person's times and many-sided contexts, and how those contexts shaped them to understand and experience in ways so different from your own. This tasks requires something other than telling a kid to imagine themselves as the other person -- even apart from doing that for a person as weird as Hitler. An assignment like the one described here only keeps the kids mired in themselves as the measure of all, a narcissistic diversion from what history should do -- which is get the kids OUT of their selves. As Fran Lebowitz put it, with reference to reading books, "A book is not a mirror, it's a door.""
But that exercise *could* be a door. A child who tries to imagine how he'd think if he were the person who did those things might realize how much more he needs to go much further into understanding the world and how other people think.
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