On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 12:23:04 EST, Donna Metler wrote:

"H Schinske" wrote in message
...
wrote:

Many of the folk songs we learned in
elementary school came out of the folk music revival of the 1950s and
1960s,
such as: Michael Row The Boat Ashore, If I Had A Hammer, Tom Dooley,
Drill
Ye Tarriers, man, a little walk down memory lane -- I could go on and on.

Your list made me recall that one of the songs I came home from
kindergarten
singing was "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." I don't know if I learned it from
the
teacher or another child, though! Probably the latter.

Tom Dooley is in my Guitar book for my 3rd-5th graders, but given today's
zero-tolerance for mention of violence, I rather figure I should skip that
one! Same with some of the other folk songs.

Interesting that you should mention that... I'm taking my DS, who
will be 3-1/2 at the time, on a weekend trip to Fort Klock
( http://www.fortklock.com ) for, interspersed with some genealogy research,
their Colonial camp life re-enactment. I mentioned this to one
friend, who thought I was absolutely nuts to take a child that
small to an event where people would be "pretending to kill each other".

I then mentioned it to another friend who is in the midst of
teaching a unit on the Revolutionary War period to her combined
5th/6th grade class, and she told me that the curriculum skips
entirely over *any* facts relating to casualties. if she stuck
entirely to the approved lesson material, the kids would only
know that a battle occurred on such-and-such a date, and that
it's generally accepted that side X won.

Particularly when it comes to the Revolution, where "major"
battles in Upstate NY often involved only a few dozen or hundred
combatants with very few casualties, it seems like the students
are missing out on both the facts and the context - it would
be too easy for them to imagine that the battles involved
tens or hundreds of thousands of soldiers as in the Civil War
or later engagements.

Anyhow, I'm curious about how sanitized current Elementary and
Middle/High school texts have become, in regards to history.
I have distinct recollections of seeing many graphic Matthew
Brady photographs in my texts from the early 1980's, and was
wondering if that was still the case.