I wrote a little bit here about trying to vet potential American History "living book" read-alouds for cultural bias. I didn't do the difficulty much justice. It is hard to find anything that doesn't have objectionable content of one kind or another. And what are the criteria anyway? Is the most important thing to counter stereotypes, or to put them in context? Ought we to omit books' errors from our read-alouds, or explain them? Is the very most important thing to keep the discussion age-appropriate? Or does that risk leaving out complexities entirely? Should we stick to "the facts?" Or should we discuss the rightness and wrongness of how people treated each other?
Yesterday, Hannah and I -- who approached the difficulty in very different and to us, unsatisfying, ways to begin with -- came up with some ideas. The conversation started when I tossed a couple of books at her -- here, do you think these are salvageable? -- while she was nursing Hazel. We continued it in bits and pieces over four hours between schooling the kids, solving fights and making dinner (try that in a two-hour playdate!) We debated, argued, picked up books and quoted passages to each other, theorized, offered suggestions, tried them out, and junked them.
Here's what we came up with:
(1) This is the "grammar stage." Avoid a level of discussion that's proper to the dialectic or the rhetoric. In other words, the emphasis is on objective facts: What was life like back then? What happened first, this or that? What did this person do to that person, and what was the result?
(2) That doesn't mean that our discussion is devoid of morality. Morality is impossible to avoid in interculture contact! It does require sticking to a grammar-stage treatment of right and wrong. That is, an objective, black-and-white sort of treatment. In my house, that means we use language of right and wrong, virtue and sin. When I read, for example, the following passage from Story of the World (II):
...Cortes heard rumors that over on the mainland of Central America, a fantastically wealthy king ruled over a city with streets made of gold and walls made of jewels. So Cortes collected a band of soldiers to go with him, loaded Spanish warhorses onto a ship, and sailed to the coast of Central America.
... I can follow it up with "What was Cortes planning to do with those soldiers?," elicit the response "Take the king's gold by force," and then ask, "Is it wrong to force people to give up their stuff to you? What do we call that?"
(3) Avoid higher-level discussions appropriate to the later stages of dialectic and rhetoric. In the grammar stage, it's important (because interesting and true) to learn about people's different belief systems, but it's not appropriate to analyze how different belief systems might mitigate the rights and wrongs they do each other. This is high-school age and college-age thinking. We will get around to this eventually, but not yet. So, for example, we're not going to suggest that Cortes's cultural background or the Aztecs' brutality excuses him for thinking he had a right to the (imaginary) king's gold. And we're not going to say "In the cultural context of Aztec spirituality, it was good to sacrifice people." Taking other people's stuff is wrong. Human sacrifice is wrong too. Third graders can understand this. Sometimes we can say, "They didn't know any better." But that's about as far as we can go to mitigate it.
(4) Pre-read the material with a pencil in hand. Use it to mark spots where you'll plan to pause and ask leading questions. Also, as you're reading aloud, you will want to make word substitutions or skip sentences or phrases. What to skip? Read on...
(5) First, cross out all the outright falsehoods. Then, cross out everything that's not about actions, accurate descriptions, or information levels. All else is probably speculation. A little interior thought or reaction is okay to keep the story going, but it has to be plausibly, fully human. If what's left makes a coherent narrative, congratulations! You can read it. Otherwise, toss the book and find another one.
For example, continuing the passage from SOTW, my comments in brackets...
When his ship anchored, the tribes who lived near the water came out to see who these new visitors were. [Plausible.] But when Cortes and his men unloaded their horses from their ships and rode them ashore, the
Indianspeople scattered in terror. They had never seen horses before. [Plausible and understandable; my kids were scared the first time they saw a horse too.]They thought each rider was a huge monster with six feet, two arms and two heads.[Implausible. Makes the natives sound like imbeciles. And it's not as if there aren't any four-legged pack animals native to Central America.]
These Indians spread the word all through the mainland: "Monsters are coming! Perhaps they are the gods!"[Implausible. Natives who had actually seen a bunch of scurvy-ridden Spaniards would probably not think this. More in the next graf.] And Cortes and his men plunged into the Central American jungles, searching for the city of gold......"The visitors are approaching!" they warned. And they described Cortes, his men, and their armor. The king of the Aztecs, Montezuma, listened to these descriptions carefully. He wondered: Could this be the god Quetzalcoatl, on his way back to Tenochtitlan? Ancient Aztec prophecies said that the god Quetzalcoatl would return...the time was almost up. Also, the description of Cortes sounded like the carved pictures of Quetzalcoatl on the temple walls. (By chance, the helmet Cortes wore was shaped like Quetzalcoatl's hat!) When Montezuma dreamed one night that Quetzalcoatl was approaching... his mind was made up: The god was on his way. [Much more plausible and non-derogatory than the earlier "they're gods" thing, since (a) Montezuma has not seen the Spaniards, he's only heard a second- or third-hand description and (b) the text provides fully human, fleshed-out discussion of his reasoning.] So when Cortes and his men arrived, Montezuma threw open the city gates and welcomed him in.
(6) Don't read bad books to fill time. If you have to treat a subject briefly in order to keep it true, so be it. If you don't have a good book, what's the point of reading?
(7) Don't forget to read about people who exemplified the virtues of their cultures during interculture contact as well as about people who exemplified the vices. European values produced gold-hungry Cortes; they also helped produce St. Martin de Porres. If anything, this throws the cultural bad guys into a worse light, since it proves that "he didn't know better because of his cultural context" isn't much of an excuse. (Not that you'll discuss this at the grammar stage.)
Other thoughts?
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