Cultivating an Open Mind by Teaching Forgotten Histories

The other day, in Social Studies, the J-Rex and I were reading about the beginnings of civilization.  As we read, I found myself objecting to the anti-indigenous bent to the way our book addressed the issue, as if all hunter-gatherer cultures were inherently savage and "lesser" than the civilizations that were forming at the time. 

 This was the reason I had studied history and sociology in undergrad: I had always known that the histories I had been taught in my K-12 education were both biased and incomplete.  Where was the perspective of the Native Americans who lived in harmony with our Earth but were slaughtered and had their cultures destroyed simply because some foreigners have moved in and thought they knew better because of this belief in modern society that "civilization" is somehow inherently better than any other culture or way of life out there?  What about the great wisdom that has been lost to this world about how to live like in harmony with even the harshest of environments, like that of the Aborigines in the Australian Bush? It took a liberal-minded student passionate enough to choose what was, essentially, a philosophy major in terms of its job-ready skills and to do her own research while in that major to even begin uncovering some of the long-forgotten histories of our world. The history most of us know was written by the victors and the victims, well, most of society seems to forget how much we have to learn from them.

Well, I knew when I found out I was pregnant with the J-Rex that I was going to make the same tough decision that my own parents had made in raising me: I will never let her be satisfied with the surface offerings of knowledge that society presents to her.  Yes, this will lead to a harder life.  Yes, it will cause her to have conflict with dogmatic teachers just as I did during my school career.  Yes, she might find it more difficult to understand and accept the general ignorance of the majority of her own culture because, to her, the truths will be too obvious.  In the end, though, she will grow to be a catalyst for change, if only in the way that I am in being her mother, but still... I want to raise her with the tools to be able to imagine a different kind of life, a different way of being - I want to raise a child who, if she has nothing else to call her own, has an open mind.

So, as I was reading about the start of civilization with my child, I found myself having a difficult time knowing how to put my objections to the way it was being explained into words.  Then, as if by providence, a gentleman that I have always admired and respected for his biocentric viewpoints, posted an incredible article that appeared on my Facebook feed: Have You Heard of the Great Forgetting?.  As soon as I began reading the piece, I realized it put what I had wanted to explain to my child into an excellent (if mildly hyperbolic...though no more so than her "official" history text) set of words.  I immediately bookmarked it and put it on our lesson plans for the next school day.

Today was that next school day.  I reminded the J-Rex about what we learned in our last Social Studies lesson about civilization and asked her opinion about how the tone of the text we had read related to her own feelings on Native American cultures (our topic of study this past Fall).  True to the open nature of children, she replied that it did seem to imply they weren't as good as the European settlers that put them on reservations and that didn't settle well with her.  With this in mind, we began reading about the Great Forgetting. 

I had to alter several of the big words in the article in order to make it easier for my second-grader to understand, but, conceptually, the subject matter was not in any way above her intellectual or developmental level (an excuse often given for teaching children half-truths in the early elementary years).  In fact, she was more into this article, written for adults interested in the deep ecology movement, than she was interested in her online Georgia Social Studies textbook (abandoned earlier in the year due to being far too boring and leaving too many questions unanswered). 

She understood the wisdom of history better than any adult I know, perhaps because, with a child's innocence, she has yet to be molded into the unnatural anthrocentrism that is used to explain and justify the oppressive nature of our modern society.  To her, biocentrism is the natural way - why would anyone think otherwise?  To her, a closed mind is inconceivable and an open mind was nothing to be taught, merely something to encourage her to keep as she moves forward in this too-tame, too-settled, too-civilized world.

My Child, Wild and Free, as We All Should Be