The Effects of
Hiding With Black Cats
By Jill Jenkins
Over
60 years ago at the height of the Cold War, I was born in a town nestled in the
Rocky Mountains to over protective parents and nervous aunts and uncles. Attempting to protect my siblings and
me from a dangerous world, they taught us many useful lessons and some not so
useful lessons based on superstitious beliefs and fear. Since the fear of the
Cold War was ever present, they told us to escape into the mountains and hide
if the Soviet Union ever invaded.
They taught us to follow the rivers downstream if we were ever
lost. They taught us to snare
rabbits, birds and catch a fish using our shoelaces and readily available to
willows. They taught us to carve whistles or create bows and arrows from those same willows. They taught us which berries and
insects were safe to eat and which water was safe to drink. They taught us how to construct a bed
and a lean-to from branches and logs.
They taught us to create fires and knives from bits of flint. They also taught us a ritual chant with
appropriate hand gestures if a black cat ever crossed our path: “Ring around
the cats ass, dot, dot, dot.”
Likewise the knowledge we obtained in schools
was both useful and nonsense. We learned to read, write and decipher math, but, also, to duck and cover under
our desks to protect us from nuclear proliferation. Surprisingly, our generation to the shock and dismay of our
parents’ generation eventually rejected the ideas they had tried to instill in
us about women’s rights, racial prejudice and economic equality. We had learned
the power of nuclear warfield and the lack of power of the black cat. (That is lucky for me and my black cat,
Lenny, who has lived with me for 15 years.)
The
lunacy of teaching children lies and half-truths to keep them safe only leads
to resentment and anger. The world
is a safer place when everyone is presented with facts to make rational
decisions. Still I hear my more
conservative friends complain that the public schools are teaching their
grandchildren about global warming, encouraging recycling and promoting the
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, all of which they believed are liberal ideas created to brainwash their children and to make the population feel good about their attempts to solve problems. To them I say, "Poppycock." Factual based education will help students develop rational thinking
skills to solve problems that are yet unknown. Teaching students religious based and politically motivated
hogwash will dilute their ability to think just like my dear aunt’s ritual of
protecting us from evil black cats.
While I was teaching, there was a push from some parent groups to prevent teachers from assigning research papers and projects. Parents felt that all knowledge should be memorized and regurgitated on tests, but learning involves examining facts and differing arguments and drawing conclusions from them. The world needs a generation of
rational problem solvers, not robots. There is no hiding in the mountains or using black cat
rituals to protect the world from global warming or the annihilation of
endangered plants and animals.
Hiding under our desks never protected us from a nuclear holocaust and neither
will it protect our children and grandchildren from lead polluted drinking
water or air filled with polluted plumes pumped from oil refineries and
factories. Finding solutions can only happen if the next generation is armed
with the ability to make rational decisions.
