“Here’s the thing,” Robinson said. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”
This is the Lieutenant Governor of a state (North Carolina) saying we can get gems from the quotes of genocidal maniacs. This is where we are now.
It’s functionally impossible to assign whole books to middle schoolers. And don’t confuse what you learn in primary education with real study.
First of all, middle schoolers read whole books all the time. You clearly don’t have any kids who are or have been through middle school. Secondly, there’s also a thing called high school and they study WW2 during it.
Thirdly, this was what you said initially:
We should be reading them though
I thought we were the party of “banning books is bad”?
Read them with historical context.
You didn’t say anything about real study. You just said we should be reading Mein Kampf within historical context. So I’m now confused as to why you don’t think school children should be reading Mein Kampf.
History books are secondary sources. Which are sufficient for the average person studying history. Perhaps even preferable, since they are written with historical context already supplied, although you do also get the inherent bias of the author.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for primary sources like Mein Kampf. Primary sources are the only thing that tells scholars what was happening in history at any given time, and history books can’t be written without scholars studying primary sources. So should Mein Kampf be required reading for middle schoolers? Of course not, no one is saying that. But it may absolutely be required for, say, a graduate level course in WWII history.
Blacklisting or stigmatizing a text serves no one except those that want others to remain ignorant.
