"Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the book series "Dog Tags" is appropriate for an elementary school. My second grader came home with books one and two today. The first lines of the book are, "It was a mile back to the medevac site, and I couldn't carry my best friend anymore. I stopped and felt the limp weight slung over my shoulder, too heave to go on."
From page 2: "My shirt was covered in blood. Only some of it was mine"
From page 3: "Sweat ran down my cheeks. I told myself it was sweat. I knew it wasn't sweat."
I'm no prude, but this is just not what I expect my 7 year old to come home with from the book fair."
This was the genesis of the discussion.
It continues:
'via Blog thi
So there you have the set up.
Let me begin by saying I was born on May 7th, 1945. That is the day that WWII (World War Two) for my younger readers. The next day May 8th, 1945 the surrender was signed and that's the anniversary we celebrate. I was born, Germans quit!
So I grew up in the 40's and 50's and was out of high school in 1963. Before most of the readers of this were born.
World War Two was not the fading memory in those days that it is today. It was fresh in everyone's mind. Me and my generation didn't have Star Wars, or Spider Man, we had John Wayne, movies about Guadalcanal , D day, the Great Escape, Battle Cry, etc. We had heroes, war for freedom, fighting against the evil Adolf Hitler, etc, etc. etc.
Now we know a lot of it was a bunch of crap, but that's NOT the point. Nationalism in the USA was strong. There were NOT as many "wounded warriors" as there are today because medicine was not as evolved and transport was not as sophisticated, and so forth. If you were wounded like many of our soldiers in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afganistan you just bled out and died.
But there WERE heroes. Some alive and many dead. Again, it was an age of great national pride and optimism, and Nationalism.
As children, we played cowboys and Indians, and we played WAR. We all (Well, almost all) had our dad's steal pot helmet or his ruck sack, a real sailor hat, or some other WWII paraphernalia.
People died in our movies but the graphic blood and gore didn't evolve until the 60's and onward.
In my lifetime, there has been a sea change in social behavior. It sounds silly but all of these changes were super significant at the time. I taught in a private school where kids, girls who wore pants to school, like jeans, were expelled and boys whose hair was like the Beatles or President John F. Kennedy, were also expelled and came to our school. Women trashed their bras, only to have their tits sag to their knees by the time they were thirty and buy new ones. We passed the equal rights amendment, etc. So a lot of changes and they in turn influenced where society went.
Now back to the issue at hand. With all the changes and cultural shifts certain things did/do NOT change.
An infant's brain still develops at about the same rate it has for millennia. How the brain is influenced has not changed. Physical and mental development has remained marginally the same. The population has grown geometrically. So less and less can we act or behave totally independent of the rest of the global community (in this case global = a neighborhood or town or school). Because we are all too closely linked to one another in one way or another.
I believe there are segments, well publicized, of the population who desire that their children "mature" more quickly, and "engage" in the wider culture "earlier". Although a minority view, they vocalize it as a "superior" view, a more enlightened view. You may agree, but I assure you you are in a very small minority.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).
So, are the books appropriate? If, as a parent, you don't think so, let the kid have the dog tags, and replace the books with something you think is appropriate. Bambi is a story about a deer (written by an Austrian, Felix Salten, which contains love, death, danger and a hero. Maybe Bambi is a good start for a seen year old. The Lion King has it's moments too.
Those are just my thoughts.
s'
