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Should Schools Censor Embarrassing Personal Histories. (Genealogy)

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Carnea Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 11:56 AM
Original message
Should Schools Censor Embarrassing Personal Histories. (Genealogy)
(I originally posted this in another area but in retrospect it may be more lounge style material.)

We do ourselves little favor by simplifying things and making them suitable for today’s sheltered folks. Oh I know you can see tits on the internet with a few clicks but in many ways our society is much more innocent. (And don’t you think people saw more when they lived 12 to a cabin with two beds?)

I bring this up because of a problem I came across. One of the local schools was having a genealogy class where kids traced their roots. Well it turns out that a lot of great grandmothers in the south got married and had their first kid at 13 or 14 years of age. School officials banned the reading of genealogies altogether so as to not warp minds with the apparent child rape of the 20’s 30’s 40’s and 50’s.


This brought a smile to my face because I had such an assignment in middle school and needless to say innocently let loose some skeletons out of my family closet.

Back in the 1850’s my great (x4?) grandfather had a stroke of luck. He bought a farm and married his bride in South Carolina. Per records his farm had a decent acreage and he had two domestic slaves and 6 field slaves. He also had his wife’s family that was still technically owned by his wife and himself. He was a mulatto recently freed only a few years before and had received a sizable sum in his white fathers will.

Now you could judge a black man who bought and owned slaves but it wasn’t that uncommon at that time in that part of South Carolina and it is what he knew.

He was away during the Civil War and his wife and her family were killed. History books don’t write which side slaughtered them. But it is know the Union troops came through and burned the house and farm.

He went New Orleans after the war where he married a light skinned black woman and they settled down to a life of commerce. Skip two generations and my great grandfather found himself in the middle of Mississippi. World War 1 had broken out and he was drafted as a colored cook. My stepfather was yellow black but in Mississippi everyone figured a Negro was a Negro.

He found himself in France after the war only to learn his mother, wife and child had all died of the great flu while he was gone. There was no medicine for colored folks at the time.

He walked off his army base in France and surfaced in Ireland a year later. Not that anybody looked for him. He married a local girl and became a cattle rancher on her father’s farm. The Irish may have known he was black but if they did they didn't care. My grandmother was born a few years later.

I’m a white man everywhere I go but like many white men I have both slave and slave holding ancestors.

So should Schools allow children to do their family tree warts and all?





PS. I am glad to vote for Obama for he is truly a man like me and a man like most Americans.
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DarkTirade Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:02 PM
Response to Original message
1. Truth is truth.
Edited on Sun Jun-22-08 12:02 PM by DarkTirade
It isn't always pretty.

I prefer to teach kids truth myself. :)

As to that marrying at 13 bit... hell, they let kids read Romeo and Juliet in school.
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Carnea Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:08 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. Actually they sometimes don't.
Many schools drama departments used a different version of Romeo and Juliet that is weapons free ages the protagonists and has a happy ending rather than suicide. Believe it or not it is liberal school districts doing this to help prevent violence and teenage pregnancy.

I think the no weapons or murder or underage sex in plays rule is fucking nuts.
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Commie Pinko Dirtbag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:13 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. "I think the no weapons or murder or underage sex in plays rule is fucking nuts."
No, that's sad and idiotic. What's nuts is CHANGING THE FUCKING ENDING!

Offtopic: is that Alex Ross art in your sig? Where's it from?
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DarkTirade Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:15 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. Wow. Anyone who thinks they have a right to change Shakespeare should not be teaching our children.
That's all I have to say about that.
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Taverner Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:17 PM
Response to Original message
5. Yes - perhaps context won't be so foreign to the American mind then
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Rabrrrrrr Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-22-08 12:17 PM
Response to Original message
6. Of course schools should let them do their genealogies - shit like this pisses me off.
Edited on Sun Jun-22-08 12:18 PM by Rabrrrrrr
And sadly, as much of the fucking nonsense is being initiated by asshole do-good nanny-state liberals as they are being done by fascist fuckwit fundy Christians.
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