For the past couple of days, I have been showing the film, ‘The Pianist’ to my students. I am a high school religion teacher and my classes are made up of mainly Sophomores and Freshmen. As a religion teacher, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to illustrate the fact that the Jewish people’s struggles didn’t end after the Babylonian exile or the Roman occupation of Judea. I wanted them to see a film with gritty realism which was faithful to the actual story of one man’s survival. I wanted them to remember to never forget the Holocaust. Most importantly; I wanted them to understand that as human beings they have a sacred obligation to stand against evil whenever and wherever they see it.
It is not an easy movie to watch by any means. You do not need to be a Jew or even a student of history in order to be gut-punched by the film. Regardless, they seemed to truly enjoy it. Or enjoy it as much as a film like that can be enjoyed. In fact, my Freshmen clapped at the roll of the closing credits. Lots of questions followed. The question which was the most disturbing was asked a few times by a few different students. “Why did they do that?” They, being the Nazis and do that meaning something horrible. It dawned on me by the third time I was asked the question that they didn’t know who the Nazis were. Only a person who does not understand the depth of evil and visceral racism which permeated National Socialism would ask a question as innocently naive.
So I asked them; how many of you don’t know what the Holocaust was? To my shock and horror a number of hands came up. The rest seemed to have a hazy idea of what it was about. Only a handful of students out of all of my classes understood it sufficiently to be able to relate the horror of what they had learned to their fellow classmates. Absolutely unacceptable.
I spoke with one of our history teachers the following day and was told that the Holocaust was covered during our student’s Junior and Senior years. Well that’s good. But, what the hell is going on in our public schools? Most of our students come from the public school system. They find the transition to the Catholic school system to be challenging at first and then they adapt quickly. That is of course, after they are forced to catch up on core subjects such as English, math and science. I have had sophomores whose writing is essentially on par with a fifth or sixth grader’s. What the hell is happening?
Our school system is nothing more than a liberal proving ground. We care more about having all of our children learn in the exact same manner than what they are actually learning. We care more about possibly offending the sensibilities of students who see an American flag in the classroom than we do about the sensibilities of students in the same classroom who may have lost family defending that same flag. In the end I suppose it doesn’t matter. I, along with the history department at my school, can teach about the horrors of the Holocaust until the proverbial cows come home. The minute they get to college, their professors will tell them how Israel is an evil country. Their idea of the Jewish people will be so politicized that the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost in a broken jigsaw puzzle of progressive claptrap to the point where they no longer exist in the minds of the students at all.
But enough about what students know or what they should know or what they need to know. Lets talk about where they can shit.
The Yankee Privateer 