The girls aren't old enough to be taught about Harriet Beecher Stowe so we skipped the Birthday of the Day today, but Stowe is definitely worth acknowledging for us older folks! Born June 14, 1811, Stowe grew up mostly in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father moved the entire family to Cincinnati in 1832, where Stowe got a first-hand look at the effects of slavery, and at the Underground Railroad. She became an abolitionist and was the author of 10 books, the most prominent of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852. Stowe died in 1896.
Thoughts about teaching about slavery/race/racism to young children: Madison and Ella attach no additional ideas to skin color other than the scientific fact of melanin concentration and the way kids tend to blend their parents' skin tone. The very idea of race is something that is alien to them, as I wish it were in the rest of society, and I plan to keep it from them as long as possible. The girls have lots of friends who have varying skin tones, and eye colors, and hair colors, and they attach the appropriate amount of importance to this: none. I only recently introduced even the idea of this to Madison, because we were reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and I couldn't escape the red man/white man thing for too much longer. (I could substitute "Europeans" and "Indians" when I was reading to her, but she was reading on her own and I felt she should know that some people used (inaccurate) colors as a shorthand for the different groups of people. I was gratified to see that she hadn't heard this before.
Anyway, this aspect of our nation's past is one of the uglier ones, and one reason I'm glad to be home schooling is that I can gauge the exact right moment to reveal it appropriately. I've already mentioned that most of the slaves were brought over originally from Africa, and suppose I won't be able to avoid it when we discuss the Civil War. But the issue of race in contemporary times is so stupid and ugly and SHOULD be so irrelevant that I'd really prefer not to expose them to it now. I'm assuming I'll present it in the context of other kinds of stupidity, like environmentalism or fundamentalism. But I'm really not looking forward to it. Comments would be more than welcome here, I'd be very interested in others' thoughts.
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