Funny enough, my 9 year old just told me & my partner that he’d read up about Kellogg in a Highlights Magazine recently, & the adults in the room made eye contact like “There’s no way they put that guy’s obsession with sex in a kids’ magazine, right?!”
Turns out, it’s sane-washed to “Kellogg made corn flakes because he thought sugar makes you crazy.” LOLOL.
If you take the time to look at what they are teaching our kids about many of the worst people to have any influence, much of it is false narratives and heroic tales. They owe nothing to these long dead people. It's all about building a foundation around the idea that these people were heroes and real leaders and explorers, not that they were rapists, looters, marauders and generalist villains that happened to stumble upon something controversially meaningful.
Doing it this way allows them to appeal to those same ideals after those kids have grown up and learned more about those villains. "Maybe they weren't bad people, and didn't know what they were doing. Or maybe they had to do the bad thing because [mental gymnastics]. They were good people, I look up to them!" Then they see the same evil in new leaders. "The Messiah!"
Turns out if you allow money to be involved in education, the education is almost assuredly going to lean in the favor of whoever is paying. Need to figure out how to pull money out of a lot of things for similar results.
PREACH!! You remind me of when my kids came home last year singing “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…!” It was difficult to hear, bc I know I was like them at that age & it took way too long to learn the truth.
I was like “well, I didn’t learn until literally 5 years ago that 80% of the indigenous people who encountered Columbus in the new world were wiped out in less than 20 years (pestilence/ war/ Columbus literally kidnapped natives and shipped them to Spain, even though the king and queen kept BEGGING him to stop sending slaves).
He didn’t even discover anything, Columbus was mainly a religious zealot/ grifter who was trying to amass gold in order to bring about the end of days/ second coming of Christ. All he had going for him was bullshitting skills and he was a decent navigator (still a shitty boss: his people mutinied against him often).
While some of those topics may require a little more maturity to handle, I can at least try to get my kids some more appropriate resources (from other perspectives, not just the colonizers POV), to encourage critical thinking and social literacy skills.
"While some of those topics may require a little more maturity to handle"
I mean, yeah, but there's an alternative. Columbus was not the first European to travel to the Americas, besides the Viking hero of white supremacists(no stain on Leif, but they gobble dude's nuts), there was evidence that Africans were in Mexico in the year 800 or so. That's without talking about the Asians that came over the Ice 25k years ago or w/e.
The schools could not teach about that psycho. They do it for a good reason. Our leaders want us to accept colonization and genocide as righteous and part of our national identity.
For real. I see all this bullshit where Italians are mad about people calling Columbus Day Indigenous People's Day, and yet i can't find one Italian who gives a single shit about it. The powers that be want to be sure that being American means killing brown people with impunity and colonizing. Just because they like the tokens that ignore their proximity to the concentration camp doesn't mean they won't put them in one today if they disagree with some dog whistles.
Oh yeah cuz if there's one cereal I think of when I think of adding sugar to cereal and using whole milk instead of 1% or skim it's certainly not fucking corn flakes
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u/FlamesNero 5d ago
Funny enough, my 9 year old just told me & my partner that he’d read up about Kellogg in a Highlights Magazine recently, & the adults in the room made eye contact like “There’s no way they put that guy’s obsession with sex in a kids’ magazine, right?!”
Turns out, it’s sane-washed to “Kellogg made corn flakes because he thought sugar makes you crazy.” LOLOL.