News Herald – Juliann Talkington
The fear of offending others has created many challenges for America’s youth.
Unfortunately, no person, race, organization or government is perfect. As a result, it is imperative to have open discussion for society to progress. When our main focus is to avoid offending someone or some group, we can discuss and teach little. And without open and honest dialog we not only risk repeating mistakes, but also stifle our children’s ability to learn, think and grow.
Interestingly, many ideas that were ridiculed in the past are now well accepted. Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Giordani Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for theorizing that the universe extends outward infinitely, containing suns, each moving through space with its own family of planets. Today Bruno’s assertion is well accepted in the scientific community.
Nancy Yaw Davis was forced out of a PhD program, because her research suggested that the Zuni Indians have Japanese descendants that arrived in North American in the 1300s by sea. It took 20 years before she was again admitted to a PhD program and allowed to publish her findings. Now there are a number of scholars who support the view that the Japanese and other Asians could have populated pre-European North America by land and sea.
And more recently, there have been many highly educated and credentialed medical doctors who have been run out of the health care profession, because they have high success rates using “alternative” approaches to treat disease.
In many school systems, history curricula have been “sanitized” to the point that only bits and pieces of the story are taught. It is no wonder young people find history boring. By removing all the intrigue, history has become just a memorization exercise. This is unfortunate.
With the long list of scientific ideas that were at first condemned and later embraced and concepts that were adopted and later denounced one has to wonder how science will change over the next twenty years.
As a result, it seems wise to encourage students to speak freely, read books that have diverse viewpoints, to explore different historical accounts and to embrace different ways of viewing scientific theory.
So let’s embrace our differences and encourage dialog, even if it is uncomfortable and offensive. If we all agree that at some point we will be offended, we should be able to understand each other better and make wiser decisions.