At the dinner table last night, my 9 year-old son turned to me and said, “Hey Dad, guess what? People think that the Mothman was probably a sandhill crane or an owl that got into an electrical power plant and was changed.” I didn’t really know what to say, except for a confused mutter of “Well, I don’t think that the Mothman is real. They never found any evidence that it actually existed.” My son reassured me that it was all true.
Later on in the evening, after he went to bed, I found a book from our local elementary school library in my son’s backpack. Its title: Mothman – The Unsolved Mystery, by Lisa Wade McCormick.
My son had drawn the following, folded in its pages:
I’m familiar with the reading education idea that it doesn’t matter what kids read, so long as they’re reading something. My 9 year-old son, however, doesn’t lack for good materials. He’s happy to read just about anything, so why not supply him with quality reading materials at school instead of babbling nonsense about urban legends?
I wouldn’t be upset if my son were learning about tales of the Mothman and alien Greys, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, as examples of modern mythology, the survival of the human storytelling instinct. Yet, that’s not what Mothman: The Unsolved Mystery does. It offers the following “facts”.
“Mothman Fact: Many people said Mothman’s eyes cast a spell on them. They could not stop staring at the creature’s red eyes”
“Mothman Fact: Hundreds of people around Point Pleasant also said they saw UFOs. Some of them believed Mothman was an alien”
Strictly speaking, these are facts. People said these things. People believed these things. The way these facts are worded, however, leads a young reader to believe that the existence of Mothman is a fact.
Fact: People say and believe all kinds of weird things. Fact: I want my son to get an elementary school education that helps him to distinguish between facts and beliefs, rather than confusing the two.
Ah, you see how the “dumbing down” process works in the school system now. No one teaches the kids HOW to think, only WHAT to think and that gets fuzzy with topics like these (that are ignored by the educational establishment). It’s a good thing he’s got you to help him sort this stuff out via logic, reasoning and conversation with him on a variety of subjects. As he gets older, perhaps science will show him the way (let’s look at the evidence, see if we can reproduce this situation again, etc.) and he’ll mature into an independent thinker.
Don’t forget to introduce him to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when you think he’s ready.