When Should Kids Learn About Reality
The truth is complicated, should kids be forced to grapple with it all?
In the most recent episode of Missing Pages, I discuss the first Thanksgiving. Now, this was not the official inauguration of this holiday. It was merely a harvest celebration held by the English in Plymouth and they were joined by over 90 Indians, led by Massasoit. The two groups hunted together and had a feast of deer, fowl, maize, and other harvested vegetables. In the letter that precipitated this podcast, there was a reference to how this event is portrayed in kindergarten:
In kindergarten, I remember learning about Thanksgiving through an activity in which some kids dressed up as “pilgrims” and some dressed up as “Indians” and the group reenacted a shared meal. This depiction of Thanksgiving is whitewashed, incorrect, and offensive to Indigenous peoples who were wrongfully banished from their homes. The Thanksgiving holiday has a complicated and ugly history and it should be taught in age-appropriate ways to students from the beginning of their time in [the school district].
The holiday officially began being observed as it is today during the Civil War, but the idea of thanksgiving celebrations is far older. For the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, for instance, "days of Thanksgiving were appointed ad hoc for special occasions by civil authorities. The first Thanksgiving in the Bay Colony happened on 22 February 1630/31, after provision ships arrived just in time to prevent starvation.” They would later make it an annual holiday, celebrated on a Thursday in November or December, in 16761. It was also designated So, the idea of Thanksgiving is a bit complicated and the modern holiday is more part of American folklore than of any historical relevance.
However, I don’t know what the author means by this history as being “ugly.” Nor do I believe that the kindergarten depiction of the first Thanksgiving could be described as particularly whitewashed, incorrect, or offensive. This event did happen. The Pilgrims and Indians did eat a meal together (though with different food). This essay is not specifically about my disagreement about Thanksgiving specifically. Rather, I would like to discuss the reference to kindergarten and what the appropriate way history should be taught to children.
Now, I’m not a mind reader, so I don’t know the writer’s intentions, but, given the rest of this letter, I think it is safe to assume that the ugly, whitewashed, and offensive history cited is with regard to the treatment of the Indians as a whole in America. I will take it that way because otherwise the author is grossly misinformed about the history being expounded upon and needs to have better discernment. So let’s take a look at the argument as a whole, as I understand it:
By engaging in the kindergarten practice of re-enacting the first Thanksgiving as simply a shared meal between the Indians and the Pilgrims, the students are getting a whitewashed and incorrect version of the interactions between the English and the Natives. Ignoring the ugly history of these interactions does a disservice to Native American history and could even rise to the level of being offensive to those who are descended from Natives.
I don’t necessarily think this is a bad argument to make, but for one piece of it: the students are kindergarteners. The author of the letter states that history should be taught in “age-appropriate ways.” I agree with this, but it makes me wonder what “age-appropriate” would be in this case. When should kids learn about the idea of genocide and whether it was a genocide to begin with2. When should they learn about the differing ideas of property rights? What about war, disease, slavery, and racial prejudice? I am not an expert in history pedagogy, so I don’t know the answer to when these ideas should be taught. The author and I would probably differ on when we believe these should be taught. To me, these ideas require lots of context to provide the most clear-eyed understanding possible to students. Kindergarteners do not have this context whatsoever.
In fact, I doubt most people in America who went through 12 years of school, including a year of American history in high school, would have the proper context to discuss Thanksgiving deeply. I have read a few books that reference it and dug into it specifically for this essay and I still feel ill-equipped. This is the hardest part of being a teacher from my perspective. What is appropriate for kids to learn? What do they know already? Where is the limit of their understanding? I worked at a planetarium for a couple of years while I was working on my bachelor's degree. Let me tell you, kindergarteners are not well versed in astronomy beyond that the moon and other planets exist. Since I am not a historian, I wanted to use something I am much more comfortable with to talk about context: aerodynamics.
I have a master's degree in aerospace engineering, the same level of education that high school teachers have. Kindergarten teachers most often have a bachelor's degree, so I will only touch on the more detailed topics that I learned in graduate school briefly. But using this expertise (compared to the general populous) I would like to explore how I would teach a topic I am more familiar with. The question I ask is much more simply answered, but is indicative of the problem of context: how do airplanes fly?
The simplest answer that I could come up with that I feel kindergarteners would understand is this:
When an airplane uses its engines to move forward and starts to move very fast, the wings on each side push down on the air that it is moving through and the air pushes back hard enough to lift it off the ground. In order to keep flying, the airplane can’t be too heavy so the air can’t push hard enough upwards. It also needs the engine to be strong enough so that the wind pushing backward doesn’t slow it down.
Now this is extremely oversimplified, obviously. It isn’t a lie, but it really isn’t reality either, just as stating that the natives and the Pilgrims had a meal together isn’t a lie. But, any classmate of mine would understand that there is a lot missing in this. This experiment begs the question, when should people learn the reality?
I don’t intend to delve into metaphysics or debate whether there is a reality to teach at all. By reality I mean the closest approximation to what happened or is happening with all of the evidence currently available to us. To explain a bit further, let’s look at gravity. For a very long time, it wasn’t understood why things fell to the earth or how the planets went around the Sun. In the 16th century, the work of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei made progress towards an answer by researching orbits. Isaac Newton was able to put it all together. His gravitational equation was able to relate the mass of two objects and the distance between them to the force felt between them by gravity. But what gravity is was still unknown. Albert Einstein was the first to make significant progress towards an answer with his theory of general relativity3. We are still not entirely sure where gravity comes from, despite more and more evidence coming in supporting this theory.
Gravity may not be the best example, since we don’t really know the reality of the situation. Regardless, at what point of that explanation would the normal person be satisfied? The kindergartener would stop at the fact that gravity is what causes things to fall to the ground. The physics student might stop at Newton’s gravitational equation or dabble in relativity. The mathematics PhD would likely be supporting the research into general relativity. It is all relative (ha) to the needs of the person involved and what they already understand.
Similarly, the explanation I gave for flight above leaves a lot, and I mean a lot, of detail out of the picture. But again, do we need all of the facts to understand what is being said? When I began thinking about how I would explain flight to a kindergartener, I also thought about how I would explain a more complex topic, like the limitations of hypersonic flight, at different levels of education. For kindergarteners, I could say, “things flying very fast get very hot, so we need to make sure they can hold up to the heat”. For those in college, “gas properties change with temperature, pressure, and density, so, after a shock, the immense temperature and pressure increases make material selection incredibly important. This problem only exacerbates with turbulence,” would be a more detailed description.
To me, these are good enough, unless someone is working on something that will actually fly. Throughout my education, there were certain assumptions that were made to simplify the problem. We started in high school physics with just gravity and Newton’s Laws. Then we added friction and talked about energy. Then we learned the basics of thermodynamics but assumed all gases were perfect. Then we learned about fluid mechanics and aerodynamics, but viscosity was ignored, density did not change, and gases did not slip on boundaries. Each step of the way, we increased our level of truthiness. This leaves out compressibility effects, viscosity, turbulence, and unsteady aerodynamics, generally. More advanced topics like heat transfer and high-temperature gas dynamics are completely untouched except for higher-speed vehicles. Each successive step lowered the error compared to reality, but we never reached it. If there is an “it” at all to reach.
It is probably wise to admit that I have been keeping a little secret (except from those who are knowledgeable about aerodynamics). We don’t know if we will ever know the reality of aerodynamics. The fundamental equations used by all aerodynamicists, the Navier-Stokes equations, is an unclosed system of equations with no singular solution. Furthermore, as my turbulence professor told us: to truly understand turbulence, one would have to track each molecule, as that is where viscosity is created, but to do so would require a domain the size of the Milky Way galaxy. So, maybe there is no singular reality to find when it comes to aerodynamics.
The same could be said of history. Our understanding of history only comes from the facts we can find. The further back in time one goes, the harder it is to find these facts. Many letters, speeches, conversations, paintings, etc. are lost to history forever. So historians are left with large gaps that need to be filled with conjecture based on third-party accounts, or other less reliable evidence. This leaves the door open to narratives and, far too often, they are used to simplify historical events to the detriment of reality. Narratives themselves run counter to the entire basis of history. The amalgamation of historical facts into tight, neat narrative structures automatically leaves out facts and stories that contradict the agreed-upon narrative.
This is why I understand the qualms with the Thanksgiving story that is taught to kindergarteners. They are given a story that is not entirely truthful. Throughout the making of Missing Pages, I have tried my hardest to make it known that this period of history (from 1492 to 1680) was violent, oppressive, and hostile for almost everyone. Due to disease, this was especially true for the American Indian population. Despite that, there were some moments of levity. The meal of Thanksgiving between the English Pilgrims and the Indians was one of those. Ignoring all of the other violence and subterfuge between these two groups was a massive mistake, and likely immoral. But, ignoring the possibility of peace that shone during this meal is just as much of a mistake. Both facts are relevant to the story of the English colonies. By ignoring either one of these truths the plane won’t fly.
But, when teaching kindergarteners, the kids that make lists for Santa and put their teeth under their pillows, is it not just as important to instill hope and wonder into their education as it is to be truthful? By all means, teach the high schoolers of today all about the murders, rapes, massacres, broken promises, land theft, and disease spreading. Slowly bringing those ideas into the fold by middle school is also worth it. But when talking to five-year-olds, can we at the very least let them believe that it is possible for disparate communities to live in harmony; settle major differences, and sit for a meal together? Even if it is but a fleeting moment. In a time with divisions seemingly growing by the day, can’t we try to instill a more positive future in their minds? Let the unfortunate truth that this pipe dream may never arrive come later.
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America - David Hackett Fischer.
I find it difficult to find intent in the deaths of the vast majority of the native population. I discuss this in more detail in my essay “On Inevitability.”