Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
Considering child labor today, it’s worth noting how extensive it was in the past. The Library of Congress is an excellent source for public domain images, and has available the amazing photographs of child workers taken by Lewis Wickles Hine for the National Child Labor Committee.
Child labor comes up when we talk about the industrial revolution. When we discuss its modern incarnations, we usually think about sweatshops in the developing world. Human Rights Watch has a poignant video about child labor in the United States today. Their interviews with migrant farmer children, who are the same age as our middle-schoolers, are heartbreaking.
A slew of ideas and conflicts swirl around the Vietnam War: democracy, communism, dictatorship, freedom, colonialism, domino theory, chemical warfare, technology …. We’re supposed to look at wars through the lens of the “Characteristics of War”, but what do offense and defense mean in a war like Vietnam? A close examination of any of these words in the face of Vietnam leaves more questions than answers. The Boston Globe has a heartbreaking collection of images from the Vietnam War that give a remarkably multifaceted view of the conflict and its consequences. The photos are iconic and some are graphic.
The photographs in the Boston Globe were mostly taken by western photographers (some were from the U.S. military), whose journalistic culture inspired them to try to capture all aspects of the war, to tell the whole story, independent of their own allegiance. There were fewer North Vietnamese photographers and their job was to capture images that would promote their side of the war. Even so, some of their photographs are also amazing and offer another perspective.
National Geographic collected some of these photos in Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. More photos are available from SnugMug.com, and National Geographic has a documentary on North Vietnamese photographers called, Vietnam – The Unseen War (a 5 minute preview is available on VEOH).
These images help tell the story of how powerful the media can be, particularly in a democracy. What’s also interesting is the youth of many of the combatants on both sides.
[googleMap name=”Vietnam” width=”490″ height=”350″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]Vietnam[/googleMap]
I showed my class two YouTube videos from Amnesty International that promote their letter writing campaigns. The videos use spare black and white imagery and signatures, written in the air, are used by victims of human rights abuses to escape their persecutors. The video above did provoke a few giggles, because, I suspect, the character animation has a bit of humor to it despite the seriousness of the issues being portrayed. The video below is more powerful. It more frankly addresses the fact that human rights violations are taking place and some of its subjects are children (e.g. child soldiers).
Not all of the students understood at first that the signatures were meant to be their own, and the purpose of the video was to encourage the viewer to write, but they cleared that up after a short discussion. I hope the videos have some long term effect, because pretty promptly after the brief discussion they tried to convince me that I should show the YouTube video of the “Evolution of Dance“.
While looking up Speak Truth to Power I ran across the Amnesty International (USA) YouTube Channel. There are quite a number of powerful videos posted and the main focus is the campaign for human rights. But human rights issues around the world today are not trivial, and it is a challenge to raise awareness that serious issues exist without demoralizing idealistic adolescents into thinking that they can do nothing about it.
I’m somewhat conflicted about the efficacy of the first two videos posted here. The one above is extremely powerful, but the one below has a simpler, more uplifting story.
I also don’t know how students would react to the music video below. I like the international voices, like that of Emmanuel Jal, that can speak from experience about the challenge facing billions around the world today. But I wonder how much the words and the meaning will register.
One of the assignments in our discussion of the characteristics of war is to locate wars occurring around the world today. Foreign Policy magazine has a series of photos documenting 33 conflicts raging around the world today (I found the site via the Daily Dish). The focus is on the civilians who typically suffer the most in wars. From pictures of refugee camps in Pakistan to militants in Nigeria to Russian tanks in South Ossetia, the pictures are moving but not too graphic. What’s equally important though, is the brief description of the conflict beneath each picture.
Note: The image above is not from the Foreign Policy but from mknobil
My students watched the video about the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock and they were shocked. Truly shocked. They had already started reading the letters to and from President Eisenhower which are powerful in that they trace the story with the actual presidential records. Then one of the students brought up the video on a laptop and they all gathered around to watch. For 5 minutes afterward there was silence in the classroom.
The ugly, vicious hatred of the mob was powerful, and the one girl, Elizabeth Eckford, just a little older than the middleschoolers, just sitting there with the crowd all round, unable to speak, proud upright, but with a shell shocked look in her eyes. The video is moving, and it brings home the strength and courage of those nine kids in a world that must have seemed to be tipping toward destruction.
I discovered science fiction in my early teens but it was always hard to find the great stories in the midst of a lot of drivel. This list of 100 good science fiction and fantasy books seems to be a good start. Most of the books on the list are worthy, but it completely misses John Wyndham (The Chrysalids among others) and Brian Stableford (e.g. War Games). There are also a few that bored me to tears (Bradley’s Avalon) and some that I did not think were very well written (Crichton’s Sphere).
I like science fiction because it tends to deal with some of the big issues that adolescents are facing. Who am I, what’s the future going to be like, what does it mean to be human, what’s my place in society, and of course, wouldn’t it be nice it everyone just disappeared and I had the world all to myself? You also get to tie it in to the Natural World and Social World curriculum.
The Chrysalids is a great example. A post-apocalyptic novel, it looks at, among other things, institutional discrimination, the conflict between science and religion, and evolutionary theory (with it’s darker side eugenics). Wyndham addresses these issues with interesting characters and wonderful, intelligent storytelling (with a heroic journey). I’ve used this book as part of the life sciences curriculum for the tie-in to evolution, and to the history of the Cold War. But I also bring it up when we discuss human rights and discrimination.