Remember that important line between fantasy and reality?
Changing countries exposes you to different ways of thinking. Ayup.
So I'm checking through my son's homework (he's in the equivalent to 4th grade) and they're learning about the Gauls. Because it's French history and geography, and Gauls == French. And this is what they learn:
Gaul society was composed of Warriors, Druids, and Ordinary Men.
Warriors defended the Ordinary Men and used all kinds of weapons and armour - here, label a standing figure of a Gaul Warrior and identify the weapons and armour.
Druids wore different colours for the different things they did, like predicting the future and I don't even know what else. Here's a list of the colours and what they did with them.
Ordinary Men paid taxes.
(Source: Julius Caesar)
They're basically learning their historical sociology from DnD. I look forward to next term when they learn about Charlemagne and Paladins. I shall take a lively interest in how they depict the armour.
Now there's a whole discussion I don't much want to get into here about the merits of my wife's and my decision not to play or talk DnD with our son, but one of our reasons is that he's got kind of an obsessive personality for certain things (I think that's probably a "boy thing") and another one is that it's not always apparent that he really knows what reality's like, to be able to distinguish it from fantasy.* So him getting this kind of view about history from school... Maybe it's not so different from the education I got at his age, I don't actually remember. Maybe they want to engage his curiosity now in the hope that he'll get critical later (although that would be sharply at odds with the rest of French educational philosophy). Maybe there's a reason all boys grow up wanting to be cowboys and spacemen instead of accountants and packaging engineers. Maybe some of the readers here will insist that's a good thing.
But I'm kinda troubled. And it makes me wonder what the old ADnD rulebooks might have looked like to someone who went through an education like this.**
* Who can distinguish reality from fantasy? Where do we get our view of reality from anyway? On the obsessive point - yes, DnD can help and has helped a lot of people, but come on, don't pretend it's not crack for the imagination. I know it ate my adolescence and it continues to affect my judgment about how stuff in the world works. But that's another post...
**although to be honest I would probably be just as troubled by the depiction of Colonial and Revolutionary folks in a US school.
So I'm checking through my son's homework (he's in the equivalent to 4th grade) and they're learning about the Gauls. Because it's French history and geography, and Gauls == French. And this is what they learn:
Gaul society was composed of Warriors, Druids, and Ordinary Men.
Warriors defended the Ordinary Men and used all kinds of weapons and armour - here, label a standing figure of a Gaul Warrior and identify the weapons and armour.
Druids wore different colours for the different things they did, like predicting the future and I don't even know what else. Here's a list of the colours and what they did with them.
Ordinary Men paid taxes.
(Source: Julius Caesar)
They're basically learning their historical sociology from DnD. I look forward to next term when they learn about Charlemagne and Paladins. I shall take a lively interest in how they depict the armour.
Now there's a whole discussion I don't much want to get into here about the merits of my wife's and my decision not to play or talk DnD with our son, but one of our reasons is that he's got kind of an obsessive personality for certain things (I think that's probably a "boy thing") and another one is that it's not always apparent that he really knows what reality's like, to be able to distinguish it from fantasy.* So him getting this kind of view about history from school... Maybe it's not so different from the education I got at his age, I don't actually remember. Maybe they want to engage his curiosity now in the hope that he'll get critical later (although that would be sharply at odds with the rest of French educational philosophy). Maybe there's a reason all boys grow up wanting to be cowboys and spacemen instead of accountants and packaging engineers. Maybe some of the readers here will insist that's a good thing.
But I'm kinda troubled. And it makes me wonder what the old ADnD rulebooks might have looked like to someone who went through an education like this.**
* Who can distinguish reality from fantasy? Where do we get our view of reality from anyway? On the obsessive point - yes, DnD can help and has helped a lot of people, but come on, don't pretend it's not crack for the imagination. I know it ate my adolescence and it continues to affect my judgment about how stuff in the world works. But that's another post...
**although to be honest I would probably be just as troubled by the depiction of Colonial and Revolutionary folks in a US school.