ABCDEFG, How I Wonder What You Are!
You’ve undoubtedly noticed that many tunes for children’s songs serve multiple lyrics. The Bear Went Over the Mountain, for example, shares the tune with For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. (I’ve just ruined your day, by the way, because you’re going to try those out and have them stuck in your head for hours. Sorry!)
Similarly, the Alphabet Song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star share the same tune. Which got me thinking that maybe an amalgam of those could serve as an anthem for the MAGA Youth movement. “ABCDEFG, how I wonder what you are!” Subtitled as “I don’t know nothin’ an’ I’m proud of it”
Think about it. As radical right-wingers burn more and more books, kids are exposed to fewer and fewer ideas. In order to stop your children from knowing anything about “others”, you can’t help but limit their exposure to a wider world. That’s because most books in the school library are about wide and diverse stories. A book about a young person coming out is also a book about any kid’s struggle to come to terms with being different, and the dear knows we all grew up different in one way or another. A book about a black youth or First Nations kid almost invariably talks about a second-class experience, and such thoughts just stir up trouble. Can’t have that.
It’s fine to say that school libraries should have a balance between books on Darwinian evolution and Biblical creationism. But how about books dealing with aboriginal stories of creation? Maybe a section on Islamic creation stories?
The problem with disemboweling the curriculum is that the process feeds on itself and accelerates, a kind of slippery slope thing, whereby we start down a path of puritanism and end up drowning witches. Ignorance breeds greater ignorance. Ultimately there’s not much to learn but rudimentary math, grammar, and spelling because literature is full of all kinds of dangerous ideas, and studying science will turn you into an atheist, and the arts are full of all kinds of wicked notions.
Education of the masses, at least for the right wing ruling classes exists only to provide enough skills in arithmetic and basic reading to them to perform the task you need them to perform, but not enough to be able to think independently. A population rendered stupid becomes a pliant, gullible mass who will believe just about anything you tell them. Education therefore becomes an exercise in instilling essential basic skills, not an exercise in expanding the mind and teaching children to question. Critical thinking just causes trouble.
ABCDEFG, how I wonder what you are.