This very much reminds one of the contemporary crusades against The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One of the characters, a run-away slave by the name of [pejorative] Jim, is actively railed against by much of society for being an imbecile, uneducated, and so on.
Yet throughout the story Huck runs into all sorts of people who are mostly acting like great people on the outside, yet invariably turn out to be horrible people on the inside (even including Huck himself). The one exception is Jim who actually ends up being a selfless and good person, inside out, from the start to the end.
The whole story is a reminder that what people pretend to be, and what they are - often have a rather strong disconnect. That many schools have successfully banned the book from the classroom because of the pejorative used, is perhaps one of the clearest reflections of the state of contemporary education. It'd be like if Germany had chosen to ban Schindler's List because the lead character is a Nazi.
Indeed. If you censor the past, you’re doomed to repeat it. I absolutely support mandating giving proper context, to aid understanding. That’s what school curriculums could be about. If you change the teaching of past events (or worse, the source material itself) according to contemporary tastes, consequently all of the past becomes largely meaningless and a tool to be wielded to further populist agendas.
Yet throughout the story Huck runs into all sorts of people who are mostly acting like great people on the outside, yet invariably turn out to be horrible people on the inside (even including Huck himself). The one exception is Jim who actually ends up being a selfless and good person, inside out, from the start to the end.
The whole story is a reminder that what people pretend to be, and what they are - often have a rather strong disconnect. That many schools have successfully banned the book from the classroom because of the pejorative used, is perhaps one of the clearest reflections of the state of contemporary education. It'd be like if Germany had chosen to ban Schindler's List because the lead character is a Nazi.