3rd grade students in DC school psychologically abused by librarian
A staff member at a Washington DC school has been suspended after making third-grade children reenact scenes from the Holocaust, including getting them to pretend to dig mass graves and shoot victims, and telling them the Germans were angry “because the Jews ruined Christmas,” parents and officials said Sunday…
“There was a lot of sobbing and crying and distress and then momentarily we got an email to say that the children had reenacted the Holocaust,” one parent told the Fox5DC TV station. “This included the trains, dying in gas chambers, playing Hitler and mass graves.”
Some children were given specific roles, including one Jewish child who was told to portray Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and then to pretend to commit suicide at the end of the exercise, as Hitler did, the parent of the child told the Post.
The instructor told the children not to tell anyone, but they did. She has been suspended, pending an investigation.
This does seem to have been the idiosyncratic decision of one person rather than any approved official pedagogical device. The sad thing, though is that some of the actual programs one hears about these days are not far behind in terms of damage done to children.
It turns out this woman had quite a history. You might say she never should have been hired in the first place. For example:
The librarian — identified as Kimberlynn Jurkowski — was accused in a tutoring scam in New Jersey that defrauded the Atlantic City school district of thousands of dollars and had her teaching licenses suspended for three years by the state Department of Education in 2017…
A former Hamilton, Atlantic County resident, Jurkowski faced charges of theft by deception and fraud for allegedly billing the Hamilton school district for tutoring services for her two children that was never performed, according to the state’s order of suspension…
In December 2013, Jurkowski and Spencer were accepted into a pretrial intervention program for first-time offenders for six months, and Jurkowski was forced to forfeit her employment in the school district, according to the Department of Education ruling.
Does the DC school system check on these things before hiring someone? Or are they that desperate?
[ADDENDUM: More information and a photo of Jurkowski can be found here.]
It says they were in a library session. I’m not saying where it says the librarian was the instigator.
Does the DC school system check on these things before hiring someone? Or are they that desperate?
Here’s a suggestion: the point of the personnel system in DC is to provide salaried employment and benefits for preferred clientele. It’s only vaguely related to hiring people to do tasks a reasonable observer would think need being done. In Marion Berry’s time, the imperative was jobs for blacks with connections. Adrian Fenty was shoveled out of office because the superintendant of schools threatened the job security of a lot of clots.
See Marva Collins on pedagogy. Her observation was that phonics was discarded by elementary school teachers in spite of its effectiveness because it was boring to teach. Even in my time, the elementary school day was chock a block with activities that seemed designed to give teachers a rest or to provide amusement for them. Hence skits, plays and role-playing; group projects; lessons in extraneous matter, &c. The culture of elementary schools is averse to operational measures of competence, averse to focus, and given to succoring mediocrity by faculty and students alike.
Just when I thought that Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH, even has its own Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour) was as low as librarians could go– “In 2017 the New York chapter [of DQSH] incorporated as a non-profit and has received funds from the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and two city council members”– this fresh hell comes along. What’s next? Teaching kids to identify and burn “canceled” books? Heine’s warning is apropos, given what Jurkowski told her third-graders to re-enact: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”
It’s not unusual for non-violent crimes to end with a plea deal where the guilty verdict gets expunged as long as the convicted successfully completes their probation. That wouldn’t explain not just Googling this woman’s name but it wouldn’t surprise me if the DC school district has an actual policy AGAINST that sort of casual background check.
In fact, I just Googled it myself.
https://ohr.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/ohr/publication/attachments/OHRGuidance16-02_FCRSA_FINAL.pdf
Mike
A terrible story indeed! What is curious is that the NYT, in its brief coverage, neglected to mention that the woman is black, no doubt on the assumption that anyone reading the story would assume that a person bearing her surname (Jurkowski) was white. The mendacious MSM will neglect no technique whatsoever in attempting to mislead the public into ignorance of the truth and into adherence to a false narrative.
What’s the deal with “reenacting scenes” from history? In California, the new social studies curriculum calls for role-playing and recitation of prayers to Aztec gods. There are also lots of cases where study of Islam calls for students to recite the shahada. In this case, asking any child, Jewish or not, to pretend to be Hitler or to pretend to dig mass graves is horrible.
And thanks, Neo, for the local news link. Names can be misleading.
This does seem to have been the idiosyncratic decision of one person rather than any approved official pedagogical device.
–neo
Idiosyncratic and how! Bizarre.
I can’t figure Jurkowski ‘s angle. Is she crazy, cruel, anti-Semitic, anti-Nazi or pro-CRT with a twist I haven’t heard yet?
j e:
Indeed.
When I first read the story I thought she might be black: the DC school system, as well as the anti-Semitism. The first stories didn’t have her name. But then I saw the name and figured she’s white. After all, that was definitely possible, too. Then I saw the photo. But it had to be searched for. Otherwise, the stories did not say.
Art Deco:
There are many stories about it that state it was the librarian. Here’s one, for example.
Funny she didn’t stage a mock book burning.
(Maybe she just ran out of time…Or perhaps it was too close to home for a librarian…?
Most likely, it just wasn’t practical—not the easiest thing to conceal since the smoke, cinders and activated sprinkler system might have raised a few question…though not necessarily…it is, after all, DC….)
As for “idiosyncratic”, well…um, actually…
There are many stories about it that state it was the librarian.
The job of the librarian is to acquire the content and equipment, see to it that the equipment is in working order, keep the content properly catalogued, and give one on one instruction and occasional workshops on the use of the materials. In my time, librarians were often ill-used by administrators (and accepted that because it was the style of the times). Some of them also had an addled conception of what their job was (quite common in the education industry). They’re an underdeveloped resource in both primary and secondary schooling.
This is just clownish behavior, and it would be no matter who was doing it.
In California, the new social studies curriculum calls for role-playing and recitation of prayers to Aztec gods.
I think that was at the high school level. And there should be no role-playing at any level. While we’re at it, pre-Columbian civilizations are worth a set of lectures in a world history course and not a whole lot more.
When I was in high school, what fun we would have had with a name like Jurkowski!
She forgot that you’re only supposed to traumatise early adolescent students with this material. And only via the approved canonical texts — whether they be book, comic book, or film.
That being said, Western Civ has come to a pretty pass when at least 70% of the time Burn the Librarian is really the right course of action.
She was evidently born Kimberlynn Jenkins in February of 1960 and lived in Chicago for a run of years. It appears at some point she married Orion Lech Jurkowski, who is 11 years her junior and also has history around Chicago. The marriage would appear to have taken place after 1994. Evidently, he caught her early enough to have children. Her embezzlement conviction in 2014 was evidently consequent to filing false invoices with the school district and the invoices were for tutoring her own children.
By some accounts, her husband is a librarian as well. He attended a high school in Maywood, Cook County, Illinois that serves an area with a large black population and did then as well. I’m wondering if she was a school employee when he was a student there. Given his name, I’m guessing he’s an immigrant.
When I was in high school, what fun we would have had with a name like Jurkowski!
In 1981, Michael Kinsley published a parody of a transcript of the PBS show Agronsky & Company. The program was an earlier and more genteel version of The McLaughlin Group. The cast included Martin Agronsky, Hugh Sidey, Haynes Johnson, George Will, Elizabeth Drew, and Carl Rowan, whose names were rendered Carl Rolypoly, Ms. Shrew, George III, Haynes Underwear, Hugh Sidewall, and Marvin Jerkofsky. It was passably funny, but he got a letter from one Jonathan Z. Agronsky, son of Martin, informing him he was due to be punched in the face for turning the family name into an obscenity.
Orion Lech Jurkowski
Going by the favourable vowel to consonant ratio in his first name, I’m guessing he’s the offspring of multiple generations of immigrant slivovitz slurpers.
No self-respecting Real Pole would be baptised with such a gay name.
The story gets worse. Jurkowski also has animal cruelty charges:
___________________________________
A Mays Landing property owner has been arrested on animal cruelty charges after one of her Rottweiler dogs died in the freezing cold this winter. But activists are criticizing police for not taking action when they had the chance to possibly save the animal.
Police have charged Kimberlynn Jurkowski, 59, with four counts of animal cruelty and four counts of abandoning a domesticated animal, the department announced Wednesday.
The charges stemmed from a March 6 visit to her property on Scranton Avenue, where an officer found four dogs in fenced outdoor areas. One of the dogs was dead.
But that had not been the first time that police had been called to the ramshackle property to check on the dogs.
https://nj1015.com/nj-woman-and-cops-left-dogs-in-freezing-cold-until-one-died/
Putting aside that she never should have been hired in the first place – why on earth isn’t she charged with child abuse or some such charge?
Having third graders re-enact history would be something like pretending that they are driving a horse-draw wagon or planting a row of corn or building a log cabin or maybe preparing a first Thanksgiving dinner.
But pretending to dig graves, shoot victims, commit suicide – what adult would think this is appropriate except one who is crazy?
If any of this is true, she has got to have a screw loose!
Of course she’s got a screw loose: she’s a female librarian FFS 😀
Bayesian Priors, Me Lads.
Start with the above.
Update: Public Education.
Update: In the District
Crank those wheels on the Difference Engine in yer head.
You don’t have to be Bernardo Gui to know what needs to be done with this Witch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Gui
Eventually all these people will need their 5 minutes in front of a Troika. Old Aunts with Bats in the Belfry are one thing. Straight out Witches another.
If librarians absolutely must do Holocaust Re-enactments, can they all please be Irving Finkel?
She must be related to Portland City Council member Jo Ann Hardesty; one scam after another, after another, after another….
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2021/12/17/portlands-cop-hating-city-commissioner-jo-ann-hardesty-in-trouble-with-creditors-again-n1542311
Portland. There’s a very desirable hand-made product produced in Portland which I really want to purchase. But I’m pretty sure that it’s made by folks very much aligned with all that we associate Portland with.
What to do? What to do?
Guess I’ll just have to get the Next Best Chinese Equivalent.
The story gets worse. Jurkowski also has animal cruelty charges:
That’s from a couple of years back. Question: why would you want five Rottweilers? And why would you want them in a suburban township? I did know someone who was a dog collector of that sort. (1) he lived out in the sticks and (2) we realized later that he had proto-Alzheimer’s.
One other thing: her neighbors don’t care for her. They grass her up to the humane society.
America’s cancerous are too widespread and depraved.
Cancerous cells must be cut out of the body.
The death penalty is the only proportional consequence for this abomination.
No other cure exists for rabid dogs.
Art Deco,
“This is just clownish behavior…”
This is so far beyond “clownish behavior” as to raise serious doubts about your discernment.
This is so far beyond “clownish behavior” as to raise serious doubts about your discernment.
Your discernment leads you to the conclusion we should execute her for being an obnoxious bint. I’ll remain complacently undiscerning.
“The death penalty is the only proportional consequence for this abomination.”
I think we’ve got our Troika. GB, DNW, and Your Humble Servant. I’ll recuse myself when any members of the Tribe are brought before us. Can’t have my 1/8th affecting my judgements, you know!
These are the sorts of people for whom tar & feathers were invented.
Geoffrey is showing restraint and discernment, didn’t call for her to be drawn and quartered.
Art Deco,
The mental harm done to those children is incalculable. Which makes her crime far, far beyond the actions of a mere “obnoxious bint”. Your complacency and cavalier dismissal in the face of that harmful mental rape to very young children speaks volumes about your moral compass.
Anonymous,
When the need to put down an animal arises, I believe in giving it a quick death. Regardless of how underserving of a mercifully quick death, cruelty has no place in an execution by the State.
A kindly librarian had a great influence on me in middle school, and set me on the road to reading.
I still remember her with fondness and gratitude.
Perhaps that is why, later on, along with training as a Historian I also trained as a Librarian.
Unfortunately, I immediately discovered that the American Library Association was intensely political, and leaned leftward.
As we have seen from an increasing number of examples over the years, librarians have often been in the forefront of pushing the most radical elements of the leftist agenda on defenseless children, and are key combatants in Gramsci’s Long March.
One would have thought Librarians would, instead, be in the forefront of pushing literacy, reading, and the study of the classics of Western civilization but, sadly, that is often not the case.
“Cruelty has no place in an execution by the State.”
Confucius Say: “Don’t just Cangue around listlessly. Do something!”
As opposed to the Legalist School of jurisprudence which held that there’s more than one way to skin a…
Geoffrey jumps the shark with a grin. Channels the Red Queen, Off With Her Head x 11. What exactly is mental rape? Is it “rapey-rape” TMI. It must be a cold comforting certainty to know a mere animal from a human.
@Om:
If you caught someone reading Maus to your 7 year old grandchildren as a bedtime story (or anytime story at all)… What would you do to the deranged scumbag?
Z:
Showing your fixation again? In the olden days when boomers were young, peers were reading Mein Kamph. Parents have their purposes. And your point is what again, Mr. Melanin?
And to Geoffrey, how do you “calculate” the damage done by this person? You seem to know more than you let on. Or not.
Telling them the “Jews ruined Christmas”…guess she missed the part where Jesus was a Jew and the word “ Christ” is “Messiah” via different language routes. Honestly, I pity her.
Well it’s good that we’re all of us equally fixated on the most important question:
“But is it good for the Children?”
😛
Unity in Diversity. It’s the national motto of the Republic of Indonesia, no less!
Selamat Natal! And kindly pass the sambal.
Anonymous,
When a human being reaches that level of depravity, they are worse than an animal. Nor can they be reformed because if they ever came to truly appreciate the harm they’d done, they couldn’t live with themselves. Those are basic principles that make knowing the specifics of the case irrelevant. Serial killers may have had a horrific childhood. That doesn’t change by even an iota what they’ve done nor absolve them of the proportionate consequence fortheir actions.
“Rapey-rape”… not even a good try at obfuscation. But I’ll credit you with the intelligence to be quite capable of what mental rape can consist. Making third graders revisit through ‘role play’ concentration camp horrors… fully qualifies. At that impressionable age, it settles deep within the psyche.
I suspect what really bothers you is my judging her actions. Judge not lest you be judged accordingly, said the Christ. But he never said that murderers should not be held accountable.
Imagine a world without judges and you posit a world without laws.
Good luck with that.
By all means let her have a fair trial. Upon conviction, the death penalty. In ripping away those children’s innocence and engaging in their mental rape, she’s fully earned that consequence.
At what point do so many people get away with blatant and obvious crimes and receive no punishment that it leads the populace to lose faith in and to repudiate the whole system?
Not sure this role playing is fit for school students of any age. Was this “teacher” putting her views onto these kids?
Bad people just get passed on to other places, not surprised this woman has had problems before.
Geoffrey;
A tome in homage to hubris and self assurance, you certainly pretend to know a lot about this case from that high horse. Bothered? Nope, just the usual
Geoffrey.
Mental rape, from the angry man, is that a thought crime, Geoffrey?
The mental harm done to those children is incalculable.
MBITRW, they’ll get over it in a couple of days.
Unfortunately, I immediately discovered that the American Library Association was intensely political, and leaned leftward.
The American Library Association is clownish. I think it has some sensible roundtables, but the organization as a whole is flagrantly silly. Library lit is also contrived and disposable. Level-headed librarians of my acquaintance take Library Trends seriously, but cannot be bothered with the rest of it.
Library schools, social work programs, and teacher-training programs are loci of pseudo-professional education that should be abolished. The schools themselves, the associated ‘professional journals’, and the practitioners who buy into the B.S. are regrettable contributors both to the kultursmog and to institutional inefficiency.
Meanwhile Back In The Real World
I may be too dumb for the commentary on this blog. Are some commentators finding humor in this report? If so then my revulsion is made tenfold. Guess I lack the sophistication to keep up.
The masking, and online “schooling” and forced vexing of our children are already appalling. The treatment of our children during this chapter of our society will be remembered, documented and judged harshly.
This is the age in which our society truly lost its innocence.
No one needs a Rottweiler … no one.
Nothing is funny about what that librarian did. I doubt that what she did constitutes a capital offense or if it would cause “incalcuable” damage. Outrage meter pegged at 11 it seems.
But I don’t claim to be a child psychologist/psychiatrist or have any knowledge of the children involved. Others disagree.
Regarding Rotweilers, you’re on your own IMO.
I see that my name has been mentioned – and not in vain – with regard to this malevolent flake Jurkowski, and to the proper meting out of justice to her.
Well, before I am promoted to the Supreme Tribunal of Discretionary Punishment, I should mention once again that I am opposed to the state administration of the Death Penalty in almost all cases apart from: mass murder, murder with special circumstances, and treason in a time of declared war. Oh, and the theft of a loaf of bread by anyone over 9.
Now, given the number of ghouls running loose, there would still be plenty of grist for the ultimate justice mill, I am afraid.
But in general, and as I have said before, if I had my druthers, I’d prefer to send constantly offending casual miscreants and violent repeat felons, and simple gang bangers off somewhere … remote and for practical purposes unreachable. To there be deposited on some, say, South Atlantic island shore: there, to live with other miscreants of their own kind in unsupervised but quarantined conditions …. permanently.
There, they could make a nice little hell of their own; reflecting socially the image and likenesses of their own souls … or what stands in place of that particular figure of speech with them.
A bag of seeds, a few changes of clothing, a shovel, a hoe, and enough canned goods to get them through a year or two. Maybe even a steel shed on a quarter acre plot to start.
Former penal colonies have gotten bad reputations because the authorities were reputed to behave in barbarically harsh ways toward their charges. Bad authorities and overlords!
There would be no authorities there. The expellees would not be charges. And the operatimg theory is not penal reform, or retributive justice, but simple removal, permanently.
The society they would make there would reflect the spirit within them.
Now, you want to talk about Devil’s Island?
Of course, the government would initially have some responsibilities: 1, such as ensuring that the deposited expellees survived long enough past a beach arrival to be ensconsed in their dwellings; and 2, to make sure that when Quakers or other emotionally motivated communitarian cranks tried to bring the banished back into human society, that it was prevented.
What the banished do with or to each other is a kind of Justice all its own … in a world of their own that only they could share, as the song said.
The life they would have is the life they would make.
Now probably it would instantly devolve with the first arrivals into nothing more than a constant rat fight; with predator gangs preferring to attack every subsequent new arrival for his food stores, rather than hoeing the dirt in a cold drizzle and planting kale and cabbage seeds, themselves.
So, grudgingly, I suppose that if you wanted to get fancy, you could, when technology permits, deploy some robotic means of preventing them from slaughtering each other. But no more. No health service, no maintenance. They are outside for good and always.
But even then, by interferring in their mutual destruction, you are edging toward taking responsibility for them as charges, rather than simply expelling them under conditions that make it certain they never return.
Remote and cold and damp islands we have aplenty. Miscreants to fill them and deserving of no more than a society of others just like themelves – and to whom one owes nothing – there are in abundance.
All we seem to lack as a ” society” is the will to expell.
That is not surprising. As we all know, a large portion of humankind – ostensibly normal … or at least not overtly criminal – is more terrified of being shut out, or shutting anyone else out, than of death. They see it as worse than death.
Which is probably why we have the situation we have now: Rule by craven ass sniffers, wealthy lunatics chasing vainglory, and needy perverts.
It looks like ” Felons and crack pates Ye will always have with Thee”. Whether it really needs to be that way or not.
DNW:
Yes, yes, yes…but where do you stand on Gawkery with Intent to Mope?
@ Huxley,
I’m agin it.
Anonymous,
I’ve already explained my reasoning. Subjecting those children to ‘role playing’ the horrors of the holocaust is to any person with a moral compass, mental rape of those innocent minds. That you deny it speakes volumes about you as well as Art Deco.
That you label it the hubris and false assurance of an angry man is simply deflection from an inability to demonstrate that the harm done to those children is something “they’ll get over in a couple of days”. I’d love for that to be the case but experience, common sense and a lifetime of observing children convincingly argues otherwise. Children’s resilience does not protect them from mental and emotional trauma. They do go on but damaged with deep scars healed only on the surface.
BTW, anger and moral outrage are entirely appropriate responses to depraved attacks upon children. Even Jesus, the most loving of men, responded with anger and moral outrage when confronted with the money changers.
“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”
I think He also said something about not messing with kids or you’d be locked in a room with half a dozen fathers. Something like that.
I have two granddaughters, one ten and one fourteen. The latter knows something about “camps”. I figure that’s okay for another year or two.
They know Greatgrampa and his guys did a lot of good stuff. Later they’ll hear about Mittelbau-Dora. Won’t hurt to wait.
Geoffrey:
You often speak and write volumes and you certainly do not lack confidence in you pronouncements. However, just because you say something doesn’t make it so, or make something a reality.
“Mental rape,” maybe you can copyright that judicial flatulence. Clear enough?
Anonymous…. see “metaphor” in the dictionary. It will be to your lasting benefit, honest.
So someone surnamed, “Jurkowski” did a despicable thing to some DC schoolkids. My curiosity about this episode was piqued by the lack of hysterical commentary among the commentariat in the MSM. The arrest picture clarified everything. The kids were probably white, too, I’m betting.
Anonymous,
I do my best to say what I mean and mean what I say. Try it some time. But be prepared for some people to accuse you of arrogant hubris… since they’re unwilling to take a stand, no matter how depraved the offense.
“Son, you have to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything”.
Geoffrey Britain:
Oh, so everyone who accuses you of “arrogant hubris” is “unwilling to take a stand”? That doesn’t even make sense on the face of it – since such people are “taking a stand” on something by accusing you of “arrogant hubris.”
Actually, maybe the stands they take are merely different than yours.
Geoffrey:
You seem to get so in love with your own pronouncements that when you go too far, jump the shark, you won’t reconsider. Is psychological abuse deserving the death penalty? Such a stand may express your anger and disgust but is it excessive? Can’t consider that you might be mistaken? Consider the state of your soul before you decide the condition of anyone else.
“Subjecting those children to ‘role playing’ the horrors of the holocaust is to any person with a moral compass, mental rape of those innocent minds.”
Mental rape of innocent minds? Really?? What she did was misguided and inappropriate, but calm down. There was no rape involved.
“I have two granddaughters, one ten and one fourteen. The latter knows something about ‘camps’. I figure that’s okay for another year or two.”
Richard: You know your granddaughters better than anyone here, but consider that perhaps you’re being overly protective?
“Roots” was broadcast on network TV back in 1977, when I was eight. “Holocaust” was broadcast the following year. I, like most children my age, watched them both with my family. No one I’m aware of was scarred by either show, let alone raped by them. And of the Boomer, Gen-X, Gen-Y, and Gen-Z generations, I’ll posit that Gen-X is overall the most well-adjusted.
But perhaps we were made of sterner stuff back then. We did have to come to grips at an early age (sometime in grade school) that at any moment we and everyone we love could be instantly incinerated in a nuclear fire with no warning whatsoever.
Come to think of it, I remember my mom reading to me at the age of three or four stories from a Children’s Bible that included Christians being fed to lions, cities being incinerated in giant fireballs, and the vast majority of the world’s population drowning in a flood.
I guess we *were* made of sterner stuff. Either that or children are pretty resilient.
mkent:
Being forced to act out atrocities in school in a sort of elaborate psychodrama is extremely different, psychologically, from watching a TV show or a movie. And yes, some young children of eight or so would be extremely traumatized even by watching a movie about the Holocaust. Others wouldn’t care, or would shrug it off.
When I was around seven or eight I found a history book in a friend’s house that had real photos of the dead at European death camps in WWII. I could read, and I knew it was real and a history book. It was tremendously traumatic to me, and among other things I knew it had happened recently. Not every child would feel that way. But I was highly upset then and those photos still would upset me greatly even as an adult. I was not an especially fragile child, either. At the time, the Holocaust was not taught to children of that age in school or elsewhere. We were much older before it was touched upon.
And yes, we also had drills for if a nuclear weapon was dropped on us. We were issued dog tags in kindergarten during the Korean War and I was told it was in case my body was totally obliterated and there was no other way to identify me. I can assure you that I, and many – perhaps even most – of the other children I knew, were quite terrified of atomic war. I am sure some were not, but so what?
Neo:
As I said above, I think the actions of the librarian were misguided and inappropriate, but scarred for life? No, I don’t think anyone was. And I don’t think you were either. (You certainly don’t show it.)
But at that age my friends and I were playing Cowboys and Indians and “shooting” and “scalping” each other with realistic-looking toy guns and axes, so even acting out atrocities didn’t affect us. And of course at that age our little green army men often fell victim to “napalm” attacks simulated with gasoline taken from the lawn mower gas can. They emerged from those attacks quite disfigured. That was just growing up in the 70’s, at least if you were a boy. Maybe it was different for girls, I don’t know.
And it wasn’t just me. “Roots” and “Holocaust” were on primetime network TV and the most highly watched shows of the year. A sizable percentage of the population watched them, including a sizable percentage of grade-school children. We talked about them in school, though I don’t remember if the teachers led any discussions about them. Maybe it was just us kids at recess. But most of the kids my age (eight and nine for those two shows) watched at least parts of the mini-series, and I don’t recall even hearing about anyone being emotionally scarred by them. So it wasn’t just me.
Heck, my mom & I went to see “The Amityville Horror” in the theaters when I was ten. We sat through it twice. I thought it was scary in an entertaining way, but I wasn’t scarred by it, and no one at the time thought it was odd that a parent would take a ten-year-old to see it. We did talk about it a bit afterwards, because at the time we both naively believed the story was true. That was the way the book and movie were marketed at the time. But that was the two of us trying to talk through the events of the movie pondering if they really did happen the way they were depicted, not because she was afraid I’d have nightmares.
She had the book “Helter Skelter” too, which we watched on TV. I see from IMDB that that movie came out in 1976, when I was seven. I’m surprised I would have sat through a drama at that age, so maybe we watched it on re-run later, but it was definitely when I was in grade school. That didn’t scar me either, even though neither of us had any doubt that the events depicted in the movie were real.
I’m saying all this not to brag but because I don’t think my experiences were all that unusual. Kids weren’t coddled back then and were expected to be able to operate in the real world by about the age of 12 or so. Understanding history and the fallen nature of man were a part of that.
I think at worst some of the kids in the skits will need a trusted adult to talk with them for a bit to help them put the skits and the Holocaust in appropriate context. And I think the librarian should be disciplined for her inappropriate behavior. Exposing children to such content should be a parental decision, not hers. I suppose if some of the kids really are traumatized, that discipline should include being fired. But I suspect that after a few days, if the adults don’t constantly bring it up, the event will fade in the minds of the kids and be taken over by more current school events.
mkent – forcing children to act as murderers or murder victims in the classroom is profoundly deranged and quite plausibly damaging to the children. There is no comparison to playing soldiers or cowboys in your backyard.
mkent:
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.
First of all, what does “scarred for life” mean? If to you it must mean “carry such damage that you are unable to function for the rest of your life” then of course most of these children aren’t going to be “scarred for life.” But damaged in some way, and in a way that might last many years for some of them? Absolutely, and they needn’t be fragile flowers for that to happen.
To compare playing cowboys and Indians – which I spent many years of my young life doing – is a completely different thing. That is kid-generated play, and all the kids are well aware it is play, and don’t really think of any reality connected with it. I certainly didn’t. That is very very different from being instructed, in a school as part of some sort of history lesson, to act out a sickening reality that you really don’t understand but that you are told you must perform. That is more like a psychodrama, which often has a very different emotional impact. The two things are like night and day.
Those photos did scar me. I would have seen them anyway, later on. But seeing them that young was a very very bad thing, and if some adult had forced me to look at them it would have been a form of psychological child abuse. Not every child would react that way, but many would.
I would wager you did not see those death camp photos at the age of 7 or 8. If not, you can thank your lucky stars you did not.
Eisenhower wrote:
That’s a war-hardened general speaking. Obviously, seeing the real thing is worse than seeing photos. But photos were bad enough, for a child.