With schools often portraying America negatively today, critics of this indoctrination may warn that young children just aren’t capable of properly processing such information. And now a real-life example of this has been caught on video — one in which a little white boy is seen vowing to take vengeance upon “the white” for the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.
The boy’s attitude changed when his mother pointed out that he was mostly white, with the lad then apparently dealing with guilt. But this raises an obvious question: Is this healthy — for either the kids or our civilization?
And what does it bode for the future?
The video was provided via Storyful and was featured by MSN.com, which ran the title, “Little Boy Promises to Avenge MLK, Then Is Shocked to Learn He Is Same Race as Assassin.”
Indiana mother Nicole Dodero shot the video and said she began recording upon noticing her son, Nathan, becoming highly emotional. “In the footage, the adorable boy appears to be on the verge of tears after learning about King at school, ahead of Martin Luther King Jr Day, which fell on January 16 this year,” relates Storyful. “‘The white killed him … he was a good man,’ Nathan can be heard saying, pointing at a picture of King. It was only after the little boy concluded with a fierce, ‘If I see the white again, I might give them payback!’ that his mother felt the need to inform him that he, too, was pretty white, much to the boy’s dismay.”
Dodero also stated how “she was amazed that Nathan was able to discuss segregation in his own way,” Storyful continues. “‘I continued to let him talk and did not correct him right away because he had so much passion,’ she said. ‘I told Nathan he was white because I think it is important for him to learn that a person’s race does not define them’” (video below).
King, honored with a national holiday due to politically correct pressure in the 1980s, was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray.
One could wonder how much little Nathan knows about the Founding Fathers and the United States’ creation, how much he knows about America’s triumphs and glories. When I worked with children back in the 1990s, I asked a group of them who the “father of our country” is. Not one knew the answer was George Washington.
One did guess, however, “Martin Luther King?”
So kids today know more about King than the man who refused to be king in, I could quip, a nation that isn’t supposed to have kings. But the reality is that the more time spent on things that needn’t be taught at young ages, the less there’s left for things that should be taught. The result is, studies have shown, recent generations are painfully historically ignorant.
George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history” — and this is a fait accompli. False suppositions almost universally accepted are making this worse, too. Even conservatives, for example, generally agree that “we must teach about slavery and racism”; they just disagree with liberals about how to teach it.
But note first that we do not, anywhere I know of, actually teach about “slavery and racism.”
Rather, we teach about less than one percent of slavery and racism — that which occurred in the United States.
Given that slavery and racism have ever plagued man, will this engender the “balanced view” of history woke education officials boast about wanting to inculcate? American children may swell with national pride if realizing the U.S. eliminated slavery, something previously unquestioned and which had been bequeathed to the young republic by others.
Yet they may view their country as damnable, and something to be damned, if believing slavery and racism are uniquely American problems.
In reality, though, the truth here shocks modernist ears. To wit:
We actually shouldn’t teach about slavery and racism in school at all — especially not to the very young. Explanation?
Consider an analogy I’ve used: When you have a young child, at some point he’ll want to know a bit about his parents’/family’s “history.” So you might tell him how mommy and daddy met, why they liked each other so much, a cute story relating to this, or other things of that nature. But imagine you said:
“Well, you know, kiddo, mommy was around the block a few times with a lot of guys; I have to be honest, she had a couple of abortions as well. And daddy, whoa, he got nabbed with drugs when he was 19: possession with intent to distribute. He might’ve ended up in the pokey, too, except that his dad had pull in town and knew the local prosecutor.”
Would continuing in this vein be wise? There might be a time, during a heart-to-heart when the kid is an adult, to perhaps broach family sins. But it’s inappropriate with a kid, as it could scandalize the family. With youths, it’s prudent to focus on the positive.
It’s no different with a national family. Only a small percentage of history can be taught, especially to kids, so you must pick and choose wisely, mindful of the goal: giving the students a basic understanding of their civilization’s founding and how it’s meant to function, and a sense of national pride. If you can accomplish just this, you’ve done a lot.
Note, too, that very young children lack the ability to place negative information in perspective. Coming to mind here is the young kid I knew who, when approximately Nathan’s age, saw a news story about a pizza deliveryman (or someone posing as such?) robbing a home and, consequently, was afraid to have pizza delivered to his house. Then there was the young Jewish child I met at work years ago who, as a result of Holocaust teaching, didn’t like Germans.
Focusing on the negative is never wise with the very young. For example, if endeavoring to teach a child good tennis, do you spend most of your time focusing on the life and mistakes of a poor instructor who ruined his charges with bad teaching? Or do you focus on inculcating good technique?
As for moral instruction, the goal with young children is to instill virtue. Once a youth reaches an age at which that set of objectively good moral habits is cemented within him, he can learn about the evil in the world and place it in perspective. He’ll then be most likely to judge and treat individuals and groups rightly no matter what he learns about them, as his heart and mind will instinctively be informed by the virtues of Justice, Kindness, Mercy, Charity, and Prudence.
In other words, teaching kids about the world’s vice before instilling virtue is putting the cart before the horse.
But it’s also, tragically, the hate-America-first crowd’s desired tactic. It’s outrageously successful, too: Reflecting how patriotism has long been declining, only 16 percent of Gen Zers are “proud” to live in the United States.
One can only imagine what this number will be by the time little Nathan grows up.
