Matt Emerson writes, in a post by this title (The Ignatian Educator, April 14, 2013):
When I was child, at the time I was old enough to wait at a bus stop or walk to a friend’s house, my parents taught my brother and me about “stranger danger,” about the creepy and ill-fitting figure who lingers or leers. There are wicked people, said my parents, and they will try to hurt you. If an unrecognized adult stops his car near you, remain alert. If he asks questions, don’t engage. If he comes after you, yell. And run.
The evil to be avoided was kidnapping, a word which, even as a child, carried terrifying associations, much the way hearing “9/11” chills me now. Of course, kidnapping of the kind my parents warned about remains a worry, but that is not the sole version of this nightmare. As we know from television shows like Dateline NBC’s “To catch a predator,” it is now possible to speak of virtual kidnappings, Internet-based abductions that can result in severe harm.
But there is one kind of virtual kidnapping that hasn’t gained much attention. It doesn’t involve any direct human contact; it doesn’t involve any dramatic arrest captured on camera. It’s not physical theft; it is soul theft. It is the trauma to a child’s psychology, self-image and worldview that comes from browsing the Internet. It is the result of roaming online unsupervised, without warnings about whom to run from or avoid. Read more >>
[Hat tip to J.M.]
As I see it, the “kidnapping” came much much earlier. More than 200 years earlier. The kidnappers were the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who forced compulsory education onto the American scene to indoctrinate Catholic children. “….The original purpose of community schools was not to create critical thinkers but to assure that American children could read their bibles.” (GOVERNOR LADY The life and times of NELLIE TAYLOE ROSS, Teva J. Scheer)
ReplyDeleteDuring the mid 1800’s America had an influx of “horrors” mid European immigrants. The Anglos had a rather low opinion of these folks. Kindergartens began in Germany in the 1840’s and in America in “….the 1870s when they were seized upon as a tool to help acculturate lower-class and immigrant (read Catholic) children. Along with lessons on their shapes, colors, and letters, the teachers imparted liberal doses of Anglo-Saxon (read protestant) moralities and values to their small charges” (Ibid. parenthesis mine)
The quotes above are from a book written about the life of Nellie Tayloe Ross. Mrs. Ross was elected Governor of Wyoming becoming the first female Governor of the United States and very much at the forefront of the progressive movement. But earlier in her life she was a school teacher in Omaha Nebraska, the city of my birth. According to the author of Governor Lady Rudyard Kipling passed through the little city in 1889 and described it as “being populated entirely by Germans, Poles, Slaves, Hungarians, Croats, Magyars and all the scum of the Eastern European States”. (again read Catholic). The dummy didn’t even know that Hungarians and Magyars are one and the same people.
Donna