Essay/Term paper: Flawless heroes?

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Culture

Flawless Heroes?


It is important for youth to have heroes but society cannot ignore the
facts and only report on the good side of those heroes. Everyone is human, and
they are going to make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from those mistakes, and
if those mistakes are brought to light and conveyed to the young people then
they too learn from those mistakes.
History has a duty to report on the entire story. To report anything
less would be wrong. To just simply say that Columbus was a perfect man who
never did anything wrong would paint an unrealistic picture of the past. Mr.
Gibbon, the author of this article seems to think that reality is a bad thing
and should not be taught in our classrooms. Today's youth however need to be
prepared for life in some way. They cannot be fed everything with a sugar
coated spoon. If they were given everything on a silver platter like that then
when they walked out into the real world for the first time they would not be
able to adjust and become a productive part of society.
Today's young people are in search of heroes as Mr. Gibbon suggests, but
every person is going to have some skeletons in their closet, hero or no hero.
To ask society to ignore the facts just so young people can feel that these
people are perfectly squeaky clean is wrong. Society cannot lie to them. There
is some value to teaching reality even though Mr. Gibbon doesn't seem to think
so.
Mr. Gibbon mentions that there is some sort of "tradition of exemplary
lives" in society's heroes that used to exist but no longer does. However there
never was such a tradition of wonderfully perfect people with perfect lives.
Back then people ignored the facts and decided to believe that these people were
perfect when the fact was that they were not perfect, they were just human.
You cannot shield today's young people. You can't just cover their eyes
to reality. Reality must be exposed and studied so they can try to understand
the world.
I agree with Gibbon that parents are the first and most important
educators and they must try to make their lives exemplary so their children will
try to do the same, however parents are not perfect, they are human like
everyone else and they do make mistakes.
There must be some way to teach moral and ethical education without
sacrificing the need to teach reality. Society must not ignore the facts. The
importance of moral and ethical lessons do not outweigh the importance of
reality education. Society needs to focus their efforts on teaching morals and
ethical lessons some other way besides studying "flawless" heroes.