A funny thing happened as I was putting together my lesson plan for this week. Since Thanksgiving was around the corner, and the writing topic for the week was debate, I thought it would be both interesting and topical to use Thanksgiving as a topic for a sample debate.
It's not too difficult to find Thanksgiving subjects, and a little time on Google yielded paydirt: Nicki Heskin wrote about a pair of California elementary schools that stumbled into a Thanksgiving controversy when, due to a letter-writing campaign begun by a Native American mother, changed its traditional Thanksgiving celebration.
The celebration seemed harmless enough – the kindergarten students dress up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes, and recreate the traditional “First Thanksgiving.” However, when the mother of one of the students complained, compelling the school to alter (but not abandon) their celebration, she became the target of angry mail and phone calls.
Heskin discusses the ordeal in detail here: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art39029.asp
Now, I already knew enough of the history to know that the traditional “First Thanksgiving” is more good storytelling than history, but the author of this article decided to dig a little deeper, and get to some of the facts behind the myth. What she found surprised her, and what she decided was that schoolchildren (at least Kindergarten kids) shouldn't be taught to celebrate the myth, as she details in this article: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art30719.asp
It looked like I had enough material to make a good lesson – using these two articles as a guide, I could introduce students to the elements of argumentation and debate by having them present an argument either for or against ending “traditional” Thanksgiving celebrations, showing them how to use claims, reasons, and evidence to construct such an argument, how to prepare a rebuttal, and how to avoid logical fallacies.
What I got was silence.
It turned out that none of the students – not a single one – were aware of the history behind Thanksgiving – not the myth or the truth. They literally had no idea why the holiday was celebrated. If my class was entirely ESL students, I'd have accepted it as a case of them not being familiar with American culture. But the fact of it was that The majority of my class are native speakers, having come up in the US school system. And yet, the issue of Thanksgiving had never been brought up, to the point that these students – college level students – only knew that Thanksgiving was about family and eating turkey.
I've always been interested in historical myths and the truth behind them, and Thanksgiving is loaded with American mythology. Is this, I wondered, how our school system is dealing with the myth: by ignoring it entirely? In the effort to avoid controversy, have our schools avoided the history completely?
If so, I can't stress enough how detrimental this is not only to education, but to the cultural awareness of our students. Our students need to know about their history – its facts as well as its fables – so that they can better appreciate the nuances of their culture; this, I believe, is true of ESL students as well as native speakers. We all have a duty to be aware of the history and stories that have contributed to our past, so that we all can better understand the present. Hiding unpleasant truths behind comforting myths is not the answer, but neither is forgetting the history in the name of debunking the myth.
I can understand why such controversies should be kept away from Kindergarteners, but there's no excuse to keep them away from college students.
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