From: Kathy Isaacs <kisaacs>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 20:58:19 -0400

Ginny wrote:

No, it wouldn't work, even if by some extraordinary circumstance you COULD find time to teach about Tibet in a U.S. school, but it would be a splendid opener for a discussion about how we DO form our understandings about a part of the world so distant from us in both space and culture. Peter Sis's vision of Tibet is based on the understanding of a small boy, pieced together with half-remembered words and what he remembers and imagines about the objects in the box, and overlaid with some adult information. If we look honestly at what we adults know about many foreign countries, it has evolved in a quite similar fashion. We begin with exactly the kinds of vivid and probably stereotypical details Madlenka has acquired about the people she knows on her block. Many of us got that knowledge from our childhood reading, movies, and television
-- seldom from people we actually knew. Growing up, most Americans learn relatively little about much of the rest of the world from our education or our personal experience. We imagine a lot. Perhaps that's why we're uncomfortable with images that don't seem to go much beyond the stereotypes we've finally fleshed out with some deeper insight.

-Kathy Isaacs kisaacs at mindspring.com
Received on Fri 29 Jun 2001 07:58:19 PM CDT